Newsletter
- 12th March 2014
National
Archives reduce online charges again
Could
Australian records help you trace your English ancestors?
Ancestry finally kill off Old Search
ScotlandsPlaces
add Inhabited House Tax Rolls 1778-98
More
Irish Will Calendars online THURSDAY
Ancestry
add Irish Catholic registers
Railway
employees and the Great War
WW1 on TV
this week THURSDAY & FRIDAY
Modern
times: three-parent children on the horizon
Mother
gives birth using false identity
Resurgence
of scarlet fever hits the headlines
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 27
February) click here, for an index to articles
from 2009-10 click here, for
a list of articles from 2011 click here and for a
list of articles from 2012-13 click here.
Whenever possible links are
included to the websites or articles mentioned in the newsletter (they are
highlighted in blue or purple and underlined,
so you can't miss them).For your convenience, when you click on a link a new
browser window or tab will open (so that you don’t lose your place in the
newsletter) - if nothing seems to happen then you need to enable pop-ups in
your browser or change the settings in your security software.
To go to the main LostCousins
website click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a
member, do join - it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you whenever
there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
National Archives
reduce online charges again
It's only a small reduction, but at a
time when so many other things are going up it's good to know that from 1st
April it will only cost £3.30 to download digital images from the National
Archives (until then it costs £3.36). The cost of self-service copies remains
at 25p for black and white copies up to A3, but the cost of other copies is
going up.
You can see a full list of the new
charges here
(for comparison the current price list is here).
Could Australian
records help you trace your English ancestors?
I mentioned recently that it was worth
searching the free Welsh
Newspapers Online site even if you don't have any connections with Wales
(because stories were often copied or syndicated), and subsequently a number of members have
mentioned finding stories about their British relatives in the Australian
newspapers which are free online at TROVE.
But an email from Judy in Australia
reminded me that newspapers aren't the only useful documents you might find in
Australia - birth, marriage, and death certificates there generally include
more information than in Britain (more even than in Scotland) so it's possible
you might discover vital information about a British ancestor in an Australian
certificate relating to a sibling.
As many as 1 in 6 of the readers of this
newsletter live in Australia or New Zealand, and there are just as many in the
US & Canada, so it's very important that they're able to connect with their
'lost cousins' in Britain even though their direct ancestors may have left long
before the 1881 Census.
But before explaining how those
connections can be made, let's look at some statistics: suppose that your
great-great grandparents left England for Australia in the 1840s - where are
most of your cousins likely to be living now?
Most people would conclude that because
their ancestors left so long ago, most of their living cousins must be in
Australia. That would certainly true if you only consider 1st cousins (who
share the same grandparents), 2nd cousins (who share the same
great-grandparents), or 3rd cousins (who share the same great-great
grandparents), but as an analysis by DNA testing company 23andme has
demonstrated, we typically have 4 times as many 4th cousins as we do 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd cousins combined, and 5 times as many 5th cousins as we have 4th
cousins.
This means that of your living relatives
who are 5th cousins or closer, 96% are 4th or 5th cousins, and only 4% are 1st,
2nd, and 3rd cousins.
If your great-great grandparents
emigrated from England to Australia then your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd cousins are
probably in Australia - but your 4th and 5th cousins are likely to be in
England, which is good news, because they'll be thousands of miles closer to
the record offices where your mutual ancestors records are held!
Of
course, the same argument applies if your ancestors migrated to the US, Canada,
New Zealand or anywhere else - the vast majority of your living cousins are
still in your ancestors' country of origin!
How
to make use of this amazing fact
The one thing you know about your
cousins in the old country is that they're descended from relatives who didn't
emigrate. Yes, they share your ancestors up to a certain point, but then your
lines of descent diverge - your ancestors emigrated, theirs didn't.
All you need to do is what you're
probably doing already - tracing your collateral lines. For example, if an
ancestor who emigrated was one of 6 siblings you would trace what happened to
the other 5 - with a particular focus on the ones who married and had children.
Track as many of them as possible through the censuses until you get to 1881, then add them to your My
Ancestors page.
Tip:
the 1881 Census is the one that most of your cousins will have used - for the
best results enter as many blood relatives as you can from this census (even if
they seem quite distant) before turning your attention to other censuses.
Of course you don't have to stop with
siblings - you might also be able to trace some of your ancestors' cousins and
track their descendants on the 1881 Census. No matter how distant those cousins
may seem, they share your ancestors, and so will their living descendants - and
the more relatives you can find in 1881, the more cousins you'll find in 2014!
Ancestry finally kill off Old Search
After several years of double-running
Ancestry have abandoned the Old Search that so many of
us have learned to love in favour of a New Search that is designed to be
friendlier for beginners.
If LostCousins members were a
cross-section of Ancestry's subscriber base most of you would be wondering what
I'm talking about - the typical Ancestry user has never used the Old Search,
and would probably find it hard to imagine why anyone would want to go
backwards. What next, they might be wondering - names in card indexes? But the
average LostCousins member has been researching longer than me - and I've been
an Ancestry subscriber for 11 years.
Fortunately, over the past year or so
Ancestry have been listening to subscribers like you and me, and they've
incorporated into the New Search some of the most important features of its predecessor.
Furthermore, it's still possible to search datasets individually or in groups,
and the search form still adapts according to the type of record (so that if
you're searching birth records you're not asked for irrelevant information such
as the date of death).
Advanced users can still carry out
searches using census references, and search for the baptism records of
siblings using the parents' names alone (you can even omit their surname).
But they haven't taken the opportunity
to introduce census searching by address (although you can sometimes achieve
this by using appropriate key words), or by occupation. And, somewhat
confusingly, when you search baptism records it's the date of birth that you
specify, not the date of the ceremony - even though most historic baptism
registers don't record the child's date of birth.
But overall, the changes are ones that I
can live with - and, best of all, I can still jump straight to the record sets
I use most often using the Quick Links on the home page (see my January article
for a how-to guide).
Note:
I understand that findmypast are currently trialling a new search system - it
will be interesting to see how they balance the needs of experienced users
against those of beginners.
ScotlandsPlaces adds
Inhabited House Tax Rolls 1778-98
The mostly subscription-based website ScotlandsPlaces has added about
10,000 pages from the rolls held by National Records of Scotland in respect of
the Inhabited House Tax, covering the period from 1778-1798 (though there are
gaps). To be included properties needed to be worth at least £5 per annum in
actual or notional rent, which means that most rural properties aren't covered
- but I'd still encourage you to take a look at the two sample
pages at the ScotlandsPeople website, where you'll also find a more
detailed description of the records.
More Irish Will
Calendars online
The Public Record Office Northern
Ireland will tomorrow be greatly expanding their collection of Will Calendars. Some
170,000 entries have been fully searchable online for the last few years, but
this final upload will mean researchers can search all 400,000-odd entries in
the Will Calendars of wills proved in Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry District
Registries from 1858 to 1965. These Registries cover the six counties now in
Northern Ireland, plus Counties Louth, Monaghan and Donegal, which are in the
Republic of Ireland.
To search the collection click here and select Will Calendars under the Online Records
menu on the right hand side of the screen.
Many
thanks to Claire Santry of Irish Genealogy News for
this information
Ancestry add
Irish Catholic registers
Ancestry.co.uk have
today added over 700,000 entries from Irish Catholic registers: the largest collection
is of baptism register entries from 73 parishes. If you follow the links below
you'll see which parishes are included in each record set, however the dates
vary from parish to parish:
Tip:
Ancestry.co.uk are offering free access to many of their Irish records from
13th-17th March (St Patrick's Day). Click here to find out more, or here for the same offer at Ancestry.com.
After last month's article
about the Surrey death registers that were on display
at Who Do You Think You Are? Live I
had an email from Carol, who reminded me that Register (also Regester) is a surname.
That alone wouldn't justify a follow-up
article in the newsletter, but then she told me that her great-great
grandfather, Larman Register, was the Fen Skating
Champion until December 1854, when he was beaten by the appropriately named
Turkey Smart (see Wikipedia
if this winter sport has previously passed you by). I did wonder at first
whether I was the victim of an elaborate hoax, but the discovery of an
announcement in the Stamford Mercury
of 23rd May 1856 "Married, on the 15th, Mr. Larman Register, of Southery, (of
skating notoriety), to Miss Kirchin, of Downham Market" put my mind at rest.
Note:
it is said that Larman Register once raced against a
train, although I can't find any contemporary evidence.
Railway employees and
the Great War
Alan wrote to tell me about two
documents which list employees of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway who fought in the Great War - they are available free online
here.
A year ago the National Railway Museum
made available a list, compiled from numerous sources, of over 20,000 railway
workers who died in World War 1 - you can search them here (the same
page of their website also has links to other similar resources).
There are two programmes on BBC this
week which I'm definitely going to be watching/recording
- at 9pm on BBC4 tomorrow there's a programme which features photographs taken
by soldiers, many of them never seen in public until now. And at 9pm on Friday,
on BBC2, there are extracts from interviews carried out in the 1960s with
almost 300 people who were involved I the Great War - and again, much of the
footage is previously unseen.
There's also an article on the BBC website
which has some interesting stories and photos relating to WW1.
After reading the article
on rationing in the last newsletter Grant wrote in with a wonderful story from
his childhood:
"Your
piece on rationing brought back one of my earliest memories: it was c1950, I
was about 3 years old, and eggs were still rationed. My mother had saved coupons for half a dozen
eggs which she placed on the cover of my pram - just as I decided to practice
football. Eggs, in
carton, on pavement - broken. But
what was memorable was the way several other shoppers rallied round to recover
as much of the broken eggs as was possible - yolks in half shells, cracked
leaky eggs carefully wrapped in paper bags - so my mother could at least still
use what was left to bake a cake. No
boiled eggs and soldiers for me that fortnight!"
Norman (one of the 45 members who'll me
joining me in Portugal next week) remembered that neither fish nor potatoes
were rationed during the war - which probably explains the British liking for
fish and chips. He wrote that:
"....my
mother and I used to buy some to take down to my father who was on Home Guard
duty on the banks of the River Thames."
Sian had yet another perspective on
rationing:
"I
was born in 1944 and so was a child of rationing - still have our old ration
books. Just after the war ended my
mother obtained a banana - goodness knows how - and decided to give me a slice as a very precious treat. Apparently I spat it out
in disgust - she was horrified! To this
day I hate bananas. This story was still being told when I was an adult. My mother
also managed to obtain a lemon and kept it so long it went bad before she could
bring herself to use it! She also told me that she had cooked so long with
powdered eggs that she could not cook with fresh ones when they eventually
became available."
I never knew I was a velologist
- so perhaps, without knowing it, you're one too? About 25 years ago I decided
to start keeping the expired road tax discs from my car, little realising that
in so doing I was becoming a velologist!
But very soon it'll no longer be
necessary to display tax discs - in the information age it's easier for the
police, traffic wardens, and others to check whether road tax has been paid by
checking the records held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea
(you can read the DVLA's announcement here).
Do you have any tax discs or other
ephemera relating to the vehicles that your ancestors owned (or that you owned
when younger)? If you follow this link you'll find some
examples dating back to 1921, the year that tax discs were first introduced.
Modern times:
three-parent children on the horizon
In September 2012 I reported on the
start of a public consultation into a technique for eliminating certain
hereditary diseases by replacing the mother's mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) with a mtDNA from a third
party - in effect a third parent. Just as I was finalising the last newsletter
the Government announced a new consultation
on draft regulations to permit this procedure, which could eventually benefit
as many as 1 child in 200, although initially the number of children helped
will be as few as 10 per year.
mtDNA is not thought to have any influence on personal
characteristics and traits (it provides only 37 of the 20,000 to 30,000 genes
in human DNA), but the debilitating diseases caused by defects have no cure,
and are sometimes fatal.
Why is there a need for three parents -
on the face of it you would think that the father could provide mtDNA for his child?
Unfortunately the nature of mtDNA makes this
extremely complicated, and the techniques that have been developed so far rely
on donated eggs from which the nuclear DNA is removed.
Mother gives
birth using false identity
According to a BBC News article a
mother who gave birth in a Walsall hospital last August gave a false identity
in order to prevent social services from taking her child into care (as had
happened with previous children). It is believed that she got hold of the
details from a social-networking site: according to a 2012 survey by the
Department of Health almost half - 44% - of the women surveyed saw Facebook as
a place to share advice and seek help.
Jo Walker, from the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which campaigns on the subject of personal
safety, told the BBC: "It's easy to think you know people you have met
online and that they are your friends and and you can
end up sharing a lot of information with them. But you have no idea if what
they are saying is true and how they are going to use that information."
In the US a 27 year-old woman recently tried
to find her mother through Facebook - according to the Huffington
Post she was abandoned hours after birth in the restroom of a Burger King
restaurant - whilst last week the Guardian
told the story of a 74 year-old man who was one of the last babies to be admitted
to the Foundling
Hospital, which by then had relocated from London to Berkhamsted
in Hertfordshire. Tom Mackenzie's tale The
Last Foundling, the tale of his life in care and his quest to find his mother,
has just been released in Kindle format.
Resurgence of
scarlet fever hits the headlines
Instances of scarlet fever, an infection
that I thought had been consigned the case notes of history, have hit a 24-year
high in England, with 868 notified cases in the first 8 weeks of 2014.
Thankfully modern antibiotics mean that the disease is no longer the killer
that it once was - whilst I was away from school for several months in 1956,
this BBC article
suggests that the main symptoms clear up in just a week.
There are many diseases that were once
killers that have now been largely eliminated in the developed world, including
TB - which confined my father to a sanatorium for 6 months in the early 1930s,
and killed his elder brother Horace. But TB is also on the rise, with the
number of cases in Britain at its highest level for decades. And at this time
last year measles was also on the rise, although the latest report
from the Health Protection Agency showed a dramatic fall towards the end of
2013.
When we buy death certificates for
relatives from earlier generations we often discover that they died from
diseases that have been largely eradicated, thanks to vaccination programmes,
or can easily be cured, thanks to antibiotics - so it’s hardly surprising that
most of us can hope to live longer and healthier lives.
I've just finished reading a book called
Happy
Money, which explains how by spending our money more wisely we can be
happier, no matter how little money we have - it certainly all made sense to me.
Now that I've finished that book I can
get back to some more serious reading - Emily Aulicino's
Genetic Genealogy: The Basics and Beyond, which gives an in-depth
explanation of DNA tests and their application to genealogy. I started reading
it last month, but it's one of those books that is crammed full of so much information
that it's impossible to read it straight through like one might a novel.
Next
on my list is Peter Lewis's A
Rogue's Gallery, which the author kindly signed for me yesterday at 'The
Oldie' Literary Lunch. It is also available on Kindle, but as far as I know
they haven't yet come up with a way for authors to sign dedications in electronic
books. If the rest of the book is half as good as the excerpts he read out then
I shall enjoy it very much!
Sadly
one guest missing from the lunch was Princess Michael of Kent, the supposed star
attraction - but her late replacement, Alison Weir, gave a very good account of
the life of Elizabeth
of York - daughter of Edward IV, brother of Edward V, admirer of Richard
III, wife of Henry VII, mother of Henry VIII, and grandmother of Edward VI,
Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth I.
Alison
didn't think much of my theory that the Princes in the Tower died of natural
causes, despite childhood diseases and deaths being very common and frequently fatal in earlier centuries -
but time will tell which of us is right, because whilst Queen Elizabeth II
won't allow the bodies to be re-examined, I gather there's an excellent chance
that King Charles III will.
Note: another guest at
the lunch was LostCousins member Sheridan, who came down from the Midlands after
winning the competition in my last newsletter, with an excellent entry. She tells
me she had a very enjoyable time!
Stamps
are going up again
Postage costs are going up again - and
by more than the rate of inflation. From Monday 31st March a 1st Class stamp
will cost 62p (that's 12 shillings and 5 pence for anyone of my generation), an
increase of 3.3%, whilst a 2nd Class stamp will cost 53p, an increase of 6%.
These increases won't affect me, because I followed my own advice and bought lots of
stamps before the last increase in April 2012 (any newsletter readers who did
the same will have paid just 46p for 1st Class and 36p for 2nd Class stamps).
But if you missed that tip, or your supply has run out, it's definitely worth
buying stamps at the old prices while you can (remember to buy stamps that
don't show the price, otherwise you won't be saving anything).
Postage to Europe is also going up, by
over 10% from 88p to 97p for a 20g letter, so if there's a post office near you
with a machine that dispenses Post-and-Go stamps they're the best 'investment'
of all (provided you can use them, of course!).
Savings
At this time of the year those of us in
the UK are being reminded to use our ISA allowance. Being careful I only put my
money into Cash ISAs but this year the rates are so low that you might wonder
whether it's worth it.
I'd suggest looking at it this way - you
might not earn much money over the next 12 months, but when interest rates
start to go up again you'll be glad your money is in an ISA where it is
sheltered from tax. Sometimes investing cash can be a long term decision, even
if you're putting it into an instant access account!
I really wish I could invest in ZOPA through my Cash ISA -
I'm going to earn 5% on most of the money I've put in this year. And currently
you can earn a one-off bonus of £25 if you click here and subsequently invest
a total of £2000 or more before the end of this year (by my
calculations that's the equivalent of an additional 1.25% annual interest on
£2000).
Nuisance
calls - how to turn the tables
A topic I've mentioned many times before
is that of nuisance calls. There are no perfect ways of avoiding them, so I've
developed my own system for dealing with them, which is to record the calls and
wind the person on the other end up by acting dumb or asking silly questions.
For example, the other day I was once
again subjected to one of the most common (and most dangerous) scams, the
person who claims to be from "Microsoft", or from
"Windows". I managed to keep this fellow and his female accomplice on
the phone for over 6 minutes, time when I was enjoying myself at their expense
and preventing them from phoning someone else more gullible than me.
Here are some of the tricks I use:
Another strategy is to say "I'm
sorry, I can't understand you - is there anyone there who speaks English".
The usual reaction is to say "I am speaking English" - so I just
repeat what I said the first time.
Recording the call not only makes it
more enjoyable, it potentially provides evidence in the event that the
authorities ever take action against these criminal enterprises, which can only
survive because supposedly honest telecoms companies look the other way, and
telecoms regulators stare at their navels.
The newest scam is the "Kitchen scrappage scheme". It was a real struggle not to burst
out laughing - but I managed. After all, I can laugh as loud as I Iike when I'm listening to the recording!
Recording
phone calls is legal
Most people think it's illegal to record
phone calls without consent, but in the UK it's actually perfectly legal so
long as the recordings are for your own use. It IS illegal to record a call
with the intention of making it available to a third party, but it's only a
civil offence - so it would be up to the villain to take you to court, which
somehow I don't see happening.
But how can you record phone calls?
Because these calls come in on my landline I use a very simple free app for my
Android phone called Smart Voice Recorder
(there's a review here).
All I have to do is start up the app, press the record button, and make sure
that my cordless phone is on loudspeaker.
Note:
this app is also great for recording meetings - just put your phone in the
middle of the table.
Only
believe half of what you read
Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have
said "Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see" -
or was it Edgar Allen Poe? It really depends which website you believe - and
they could all be wrong!
In researching our family history we
soon learn to treat information sceptically - but we're not always so careful
in the rest of our daily lives, and this can allow unscrupulous people to
manipulate the way we think. Whatever I say in this newsletter there will usually
be a scare-mongering website or a circulation-hungry tabloid newspaper that
will tell you the opposite, but don't assume - as readers sometimes do - that
I'm the one who has got it wrong.
Of course, when we read something that
we happen to agree with there's a natural tendency to assume that it must be
correct - and confirmation
bias (the tendency to seek out information that supports our viewpoint,
while discarding evidence that refutes it) is something we must continually
struggle with as we research our family history. Sometimes we have to make a
leap of faith in order to move on, but we mustn't forget that we don't yet have
sufficient evidence to prove our hypothesis.
My advice is to apply challenging
standards to your own research (I suspect Else Churchill will have something to
say about this at Genealogy in the
Sunshine next week) but also to apply the same critical thinking to other
decisions in your daily lives. I'm not talking about whether you buy this
washing powder or that instant coffee, but big decisions such as when to draw
your pension or where to invest your savings.
Cheese
before pudding
According to this article on
the BBC website Mary Berry "has caused consternation among the dinner
party-giving classes by suggesting that cheese should come before dessert".
It may have been a shock for some
people, but as a red wine lover serving the cheese first has always seemed
obvious to me - and finishing a meal with something sweet seems equally
natural. We're going to be having quite a few dinner parties in Portugal next
week (perhaps it should have been called Gastronomy
in the Sunshine) so it will be a chance to see what the assembled
LostCousins members think of Mary Berry's statement.
This is where I'll post any last minute
news, updates, or offers. I may also post news from Genealogy in the Sunshine - if only to make the rest of you
envious!
Thanks for taking the time to read this
newsletter - I hope you found some of the articles useful and others
thought-provoking!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2014 Peter Calver
You
MAY link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
without asking for permission in advance. I have included bookmarks so you can
link to a specific article: right-click on the relevant entry in the table of
contents at the beginning of this newsletter to copy the link.