Newsletter
- 2014 Show Special
A fantastic show - once again
As ever Who Do You Think You Are? Live has not only attracted a lot of
exhibitors but many thousands of visitors from all over the world. It was great
to meet so many LostCousins members - some of whom had come all the way from
Australia and New Zealand to be at the show.
Ancestry is FREE this weekend!
Ancestry.co.uk are
the main sponsors of Who Do You Think You
Are? Live and to celebrate they are offering FREE access to their UK &
Ireland record collection including censuses, parish registers, workhouse
records, military records and much, much more.
Click here to find out more
details, or here
to see an alphabetical list of the records in the collection. You don't need an
offer code or a password, and I'm told you won't even need to provide your
credit card details - but you must click on the link or the advert above.
The offer runs from 0.01(London time) on
Saturday 22nd February to 23.59 on Sunday 23rd February - please bear in mind
that if you're in a different timezone the start and
end times will be different.
Note:
I'm writing this special newsletter before the offer begins - if there are any
updates I'll post them here, so should you run into any unexpected problems
please check this page first.
LostCousins is also FREE this weekend!
Ancestry's generous offer means that
it's a great time to add some more entries to your My Ancestors page - and find some 'lost cousins'.
As you probably know, it's the people
you enter from the 1881 England & Wales Census (which is always free) who
are most likely to link you to your cousins, but to research your collateral
lines (the branches of your tree) properly requires access to all of the
censuses. What I generally do is start in 1841 and trace each relative I can
find through the 1851, 1861, and 1871 censuses so that I can enter them, their
children, and their grandchildren who were recorded on the 1881 Census.
This 'sideways' research is absolutely
crucial if you want to find other people who are researching your ancestors -
because your cousins' ancestral lines branched off the trunk of your ancestral
tree some number generations ago:
1st cousins
share your ancestors from TWO
generations ago (your grandparents)
2nd cousins
share your ancestors from THREE
generations ago (your great-grandparents)
3rd cousins
share your ancestors from FOUR
generations ago (your great-great-grandparents)
4th cousins
share your ancestors from FIVE
generations ago (your great-great-great-grandparents) and so on.....
The most useful contacts I've found in the
time I've been researching have been 3rd and 4th cousins - they're close enough
that we have a lot of ancestors in common, but sufficiently distant that our
families lost contact a long time ago. And that means that when we find each
other there's an awful lot of catching up to do!
This
weekend LostCousins will be completely FREE on Saturday and Sunday, but also -
so that you have time to enter the data you've found over the weekend - Monday
and Tuesday.
This means you can contact the new
cousins you find without paying a subscription, and it's also a great time to
contact anyone who's already shown in the 'New contacts' section of your My Cousins page (so why not log-in now
and check to see if there's anyone waiting?).
Here are the photos....
Sorry for the delay - here are the photos
I took on Saturday, the last day of the Show (note: the slideshow may not work
with old versions of Internet Explorer)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44How about YOU coming along next year?
Peter