Newsletter
- 15th November 2014
LATEST
NEWS: Devon parish registers go online
Illegitimate
soldier finally honoured after a century
Save
90% on a 1 month Findmypast Local subscription ENDS
WEDNESDAY
Getting
the most out of Ancestry & Findmypast
How to
search a website using Google
Essex
Ancestors doubles online wills
Check
your Irish entries with My AncestorsBETA
Britain
From Above completes historic collection
Save
20% on photo restoration/repair
Genealogy in the Sunshine - March 2015
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 6th November) 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. Or use a Google search prefixed by 'site:lostcousins.com'
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). If one of the
links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're using adblocking software - try disabling it temporarily (or else
use a different browser, such as Chrome).
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!
LATEST NEWS: Devon parish
registers go online
Findmypast have added well over a
million records to their collection of Devon parish registers - there are now baptisms
from over 500 parishes, banns
from over 400 parishes, marriages
from over 500 parishes, and burials
from well over 500 parishes. You'll full details of the coverage, parish by
parish, here.
Most of the records include images of
the parish registers - and as a result of these new additions I now have a
colour digital copy of my great-great-great-great grandparents' marriage in
1805 (previously all I had was a black and white photocopy from my visit to the
Exeter Record Office 10 years ago).
© image courtesy
of South West Heritage Trust and Parochial Church Council
I've also discovered the baptisms of 5
of their children that I didn't know about before, so a busy weekend is in
prospect! It's now obvious that at some point between 1815-17 my 4G grandparents
moved to a different parish on the other side of the Salcombe
estuary, but that's something that's really tough to pick up when you're at the
record office and have only got a limited time to search (there are 10 other
parishes that are just as close as the one they moved to).
As most of you will already know, it's
possible to achieve so much more when the records are online and indexed - in
less than 2 minutes I found records that I could have spent 2 days or 2 weeks searching
for (and possibly still not found).
Also added to Findmypast this week was
the Devon
Wills Index, which lists around 300,000 wills from 1163-1999 (I believe it
is the same index that was previously available exclusively at Origins). Sadly
many Devon wills were lost when the Probate Registry was destroyed World War 2,
but in some cases the index will direct you to surviving copies or abstracts.
Illegitimate soldier
finally honoured after a century
According to an article posted
on the BBC on Sunday, 19 year-old WW1 soldier Ben Cobey,
one of the first casualties of the Great War, was left off the War Memorial in
his home town because he was illegitimate.
A free search of the military records at
Findmypast
revealed 4 records in respect of young Ben - follow this link.
In the February article
Was your ancestor a war hero? I mentioned
the records of the Middlesex military Service Appeal Tribunal which have been
made available online at the National Archives.
There's more information on this topic
in an article
posted on the BBC website last weekend, which points out that, contrary to
common perception, very few of the men who applied for exemption from military
service did so because they were conscientious objectors.
Save 90% on a 1 month
Findmypast Local subscription ENDS WEDNESDAY
Findmypast have recently started talking
about Local subscriptions - they're the subscriptions which are unique to each
of their sites around the world (whereas a World subscription covers every
country).
Until
midnight (local time) on Wednesday 19th November you can buy a 1 month Local
subscription for just £1, $1, or 1€ - that's a saving of about 90% on the usual
price! You don't need a discount code - just click the appropriate link below
to jump to the relevant offer page:
After the initial 30 day period, your
subscription will be automatically renewed at the normal price of
£9.95/$9.95/9.95€ unless you un-tick the 'auto-renew my subscription'
box in the My Account section of the site.
Note:
if you already have a Local subscription at another Findmypast site you won't
be able to take advantage of this offer as Findmypast users cannot have two
subscriptions concurrently.
If you're one of those who struggled to
navigate the new Findmypast site when it launched in March, or have been put
off by comments you've read, now's a great time to discover just how much
better the new site is now, especially compared with the clunky old site. But
please read the next article, to make sure you don't apply old search
techniques to the new site....
Getting the most out of
Ancestry & Findmypast
Sites like Findmypast and Ancestry face
a difficult challenge - how can they make their site appealing to beginners
without reducing the utility for more experienced users (as most LostCousins
members are)?
Both came up with a similar solution:
provide a simple and easily-accessible search of all their records, so that
beginners can be sure to get some results from their first search, but offer
more advanced searches of specific collections and record sets:
At either site beginners tend to go for the first option in the Search menu (or use the very basic
Search form on the home page), whilst more experienced users who are trying to
fill a particular gap in their knowledge generally choose one of the
collections.
When you search one of the collections you can filter the search results
in order to focus in on a particular record set - so on the face of it, there's
no reason to go straight to the record set using the Card
Catalogue (at Ancestry) or the A-Z
of record sets (at Findmypast).
But if you thought that, you couldn't have been more wrong. Because whilst
you can search the same records whichever route you choose, the Search forms
are very, very different. Take a look at these examples from Findmypast:
The Search form above is the one you'd get if you started with the Census, land & surveys option from
the Search menu - it might look
pretty comprehensive at first sight, but just look at what you get if you go
straight to the 1881 Census from the A-Z
of record sets (sorry it's so small but I had to reduce the scale to fit it
all in!):
As you can see, there are LOTS more boxes on the form, which means that
you've got a much wider range of search options.
Of course, as any experienced user of thise sites will tell you, filling
in more boxes on the Search form is usually a big mistake - it's something you
only do when you get more search results than you can handle. Beginners usually
assume that the more information they enter, the more likely they are to find
the records they're looking for - but in reality it works the other way round.
The smart approach is to only fill in the information that is most likely
to lead you to the right records. So, for example, if you've got an ancestor
with an unusual first name that might be the only piece of information you
enter.
Always try to avoid entering birthplaces when searching the census -
because even if your ancestor knew where he was born (and many didn't) there
can be many different ways of writing it down. For example, I've seen
birthplaces for people born in London which are as imprecise as 'London', or
'Middlesex' - or as precise as the name of the street.
At Ancestry the difference between the Search forms is not quite as
pronounced, but that's only because Ancestry offers less options (for example,
you generally can't search by address or occupation).
Trying to find a record set in the Card
Catalogue at Ancestry is rather more difficult than searching the A-Z of record sets at Findmypast, but
fortunately Ancestry offers a neat feature to make it easy to jump to the
records you use most frequently using user-definable Quick Links. This article
from my January newsletter describes how to set up your own links, and to get
you started, here are the links that I have on my Ancestry home page:
Birth Marriage and Death Indexes
London School Admissions and Discharges
I'm hoping that Findmypast will offer a similar feature at some point in
the future - as the wealth of records on these key websites grows we'll need
all the help we can get!
How to search a website
using Google
Sometimes it can be difficult to find what you're looking for on a
website, so it's good to know that Google can usually help. To tailor a Google
search so that it only looks at one site, just prefix the search with 'site:'
and the address of the website. For example, I used the search:
site:lostcousins.com essex ancestors
when I was researching the next article, to find out when I'd last written
about Essex Ancestors, and what I'd said. It's a great way to find an article
in an online newsletter or blog.
You can even use Google to search sites like Ancestry and findmypast in
order to find a particular record set. For example:
site:ancestry.co.uk national probate calendar
site:findmypast.co.uk national burial index
Tip: you may get different results
depending whether or not you precede the website address with 'www'.
Essex Ancestors doubles
online wills
The Essex Record Office has approximately 70,000 wills in its collection
from the 15th century to 1858, and 22,500 of those wills have recently been
added to the 20,000 already line (you can read more in their blog).
Essex Ancestors
isn't cheap - the price of an annual subscription is now £85 - but the images
are very high quality. Whilst the parish registers haven't been indexed you can
search for wills in the SEAX catalogue - wills which have been digitised are
marked with this symbol: 
Check your Irish entries
with My AncestorsBETA
You can now check the validity of the references for relatives you've
entered from the Ireland 1911 Census - simply click the 
button alongside the head of household, and if
you've entered the correct NAI reference the census page will be displayed in a
new tab.
This article
on the Help & Advice page includes
an illustrated guide to this census - follow the example and you won't get the
reference wrong.
Note: you can also use the button to check entries from the England &
Wales censuses - 1841, 1881, & 1911
Britain From Above
completes historic collection
The amazing collection of aerial photographs from 1919-53 is now complete
- more than 95,000 photographs are online.
Diana wrote to me on Tuesday, and kindly
allowed me to share her comments with you:
"In March I made contact with another lost
cousin. We have been in contact almost every day since by e-mail, working
together by using different sites to take our family further back and sharing
in lots of interesting information, such as Wills that we both worked on to
decipher. Brilliant! and tonight I got an e-mail from
LostCousins to say another cousin wants to contact me. I look forward to
sharing even more information with them. Thank you
LostCousins.
"I have already recommended this site to all my Family
History Group and they have all signed on too. It's a wonderful site - and such
interesting Newsletters too."
It's amazing what can happen when you
complete your My Ancestors page - why
not take part in this amazing project to link cousins across the world?
Tip:
you can use your My Referrals page to send out emails to friends and relatives
- or simply get a referral code if you don't have their email address.
This week I received an email about the
launch of the Surname Society, which
appears to be in competition with the Guild of One-Name Studies (which was
founded in 1979). It will be interesting to see what the new society offers.
In the meantime the Guild held a seminar
last Saturday entitled "One-Name Studies: The Next Stage". You can
view several of the presentations online by following this link.
You may recall that I recently wrote about
how much I'd enjoyed reading George Redmond's book Names and History: People, Places and Things.
In
fact, I found it so interesting that I've just bought Surnames,
DNA, & Family History by George Redmonds,
Turi King, and David Hey - all experts in their
respective fields.
In
England surnames originated with the Norman barons and knights - before the
Norman Conquest nobody in England had a surname, not even the Kings. Even during
the 12th and 13th centuries the nobility didn't always follow the rules that
we're used to - sons didn't necessarily adopt their father's surname, wives
didn't always take their husband's name. In the late 14th century there were
many people in the north of England who still didn't have surnames - and many of
the surnames which did exist in the earlier part of the century were completely
wiped out by the Black Death.
I'm
already finding the book fascinating - yet I'm only on the first chapter! I
shall report back again once I've made more progress - I suspect there's a lot
that we think we know about surnames that will need re-evaluating.
Beverley wrote to me a few weeks ago
asking for my opinion on a photograph in her family album. I'll let her take up
the story:
"I have a photo of my great-grandfather with King
George V, a Mayor, and a policeman. The photo was sent to my great aunt by her
sister many years ago, with a letter that said she'd explain when/how the photo
of their father came to be in her next letter.
"Unfortunately she died and no one ever found
out. My Auntie doesn't think it's real
and I wanted to know if there is any way of finding out. Is there an expert on Royal photos. Did they do
fake photos in the 1920's or perhaps 'Photoshop' photos in the 1950's?"
What you
make of the photo? The dapper chap on the right is definitely Beverley's
great-grandfather, Thomas Ernest Miller, and the gentleman in
the bowler hat is King George V - but were they really in the same place
at the same time?
Beverley subsequently managed to solve
the riddle - to her satisfaction and mine - by making use of her subscription
to the British Newspaper Archive and searching for the visit of King George and
Queen Mary to Lancashire in 1913. If you've got a subscription to the BNA (or a
subscription to Findmypast which includes their British Newspaper collection)
you might like to see whether you too can find the evidence - it's certainly an
interesting challenge!
Save 20% on photo
restoration/repair
Although Repixl won't add somebody to a
photo, they will remove people or objects from photos - and all for just £4.99!
Follow this link
to find out more.
Until Christmas you can save 20% on ALL
photo editing and restoration - so instead of paying £8.99 for the amazing restoration
like the one above, you'll only pay £7.19. What a great way to honour your ancestors!
When you go to the online shopping
basket type the code LOSTCOUSINSXMAS14 to claim your discount (and remember
that LostCousins will also benefit so long as you use one of the links in this
article).
Genealogy in the Sunshine - March 2015
If you've already reserved your place
I'll be writing to you shortly with booking instructions for the accommodation
and the end of course dinner, but if you haven't get in touch right away - there
are only a few places left, and I'd rather they went to LostCousins members.
There's a 24 hour sale coming up at My
Favourite Magazines, publishers of Your
Family Tree, numerous computer magazines, and many other titles.
Subscriptions always provide substantial saving compared to the cover price,
but between mid-day on Monday and mid-day on Tuesday you will be able to save
an extra 24% using the code 24HOURS
(provided you spend at least £24).
By my calculation this brings the cost
of a 2-year subscription to Your
Family Tree (26 issues) down to £56.99, which is less than you'd pay at
the newsagents for a mere 11 issues, and a lot less than I'm paying for my own subscription.
And providing you use the link above, LostCousins will also benefit!
Just over a quarter of a century ago,
when I was still running my software publishing company, I found myself sitting
next to a chap I didn't know at an industry dinner. Dressed in a snazzy striped
blazer (the rest of us were in conventional dinner jackets), but otherwise
unassuming, he introduced himself as Chris
Anderson, the founder of Future Publishing (the company that publishes all the
magazines you'll find at the My Favourite Magazines site).
He's better known now as the curator of
the TED conferences,
which he acquired through his non-profit foundation in 2001 after selling
Future for the second time. TED's 1900+ free talks have been viewed well over 1
billion times - I suppose it's like YouTube for people with a brain. There are
even some that touch on genealogy....
Isn't it amazing who
we bump into as meander through life? Two weeks ago I wrote about Findmypast's
John Lewis offer (now ended), and mentioned
the book that LostCousins member Peter Cox (who spoke at this year's Genealogy in the Sunshine) had written
about Spedan Lewis, who turned the company his father
founded into an employee partnership. Little did I know at the time that on
Tuesday I'd be chatting with Sir Charlie Mayfield, who has been Chairman of the
John Lewis Partnership since 2007 - what a coincidence!
(Mind you, having purchased
The
Improbability Principle: Why coincidences, miracles and rare events happen all
the time for my Kindle a few days earlier I really shouldn't have been
surprised.)
An interesting fact I learned from Sir
Charlie's presentation is that as many as 22% of the jobs in the UK only
require the standard of education expected of an 11 year-old! On the other hand,
when I was that age I had already worked delivering leaflets and newspapers -
these days a lot of youngsters don't earn until they finish university. If that
statistic is correct - and I've no reason to doubt it - it's perhaps not
surprising that average wages have been struggling to keep up with prices.
Though after reading
about the 5 year-old boy who qualified as a Microsoft Certified Professional,
who knows what an 11 year-old might be capable of....
Since writing
last week about the family trees that Derek Hardwick researches in order to
brighten up the last days of patients at St Catherine's Hospice in Scarborough,
I've been contacted by several other members who are planning something similar
in their own local area. Isn't that wonderful!
Finally, if you're a LostCousins
subscriber it's worth taking a look at the Subscribers
Only page - from time to time there are special
offers posted there that aren't available to everyone. A LostCousins
subscription only costs £10 a year (£12.50 for a joint subscription covering
two accounts) and whilst the main benefit is the warm feeling you get from helping
to support LostCousins, and keep this newsletters coming, it does also allow
you to contact the 'lost cousins' you find without waiting for the next free
weekend.
Tip:
unlike many other sites LostCousins subscriptions are NEVER renewed
automatically - it isn't even an option!
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions - with so much going on in the genealogy world it's always worth checking
back after a couple of days.
Thanks for taking the time to read my
newsletter - I hope you find it useful.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2014 Peter Calver
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MAY link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
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