Newsletter
- 27 February 2014
Who Do You Think You Are? Live photos now online
There
IS such a thing as a free lunch ENDS TUESDAY
When
at first you don't succeed....
Newspaper
articles turn up in the strangest places
Using the
Freedom of Information Act
Better
information means better care
Whole genome sequencing for $1000?
London
photos and musicals about maps
English
expressions from the Great War
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 17
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
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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!
Who Do You Think You Are? Live photos now online
The photos I took at the show last
Saturday are online here.
Surrey Registration Service were at the
show promoting their services, but more importantly they were displaying
something I thought I might never see - two historic death registers from their
vaults.
One was open at the page which recorded
the death of Emily Davison, the suffragette who was killed when she jumped in
front of King George V's horse at the Epsom Derby in June 1913; the other
showed the death registration for Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in 1898.
I spoke at length with one of the
representatives of Surrey Registration Services - it seems that unlike the
General Register Office they have no problem with people seeing their historic
registers (ie those over 100 years old).
Also at the show were representatives
from the General Register Office for Northern Ireland, which from April will be
offering online access to their registers. Unfortunately I didn't have to talk
to them, but fortunately blogger Claire Santry did,
and she posted a very informative report
on her blog: many researchers will be content with an 'enhanced transcription'
which costs just 1 credit (40p), especially if they're researching collateral
lines - but a digital copy of the full entry will only cost 5 credits (£2),
which is much cheaper than the £15 it currently costs for a certificate.
Comment:
isn't it ironic that that England & Wales, the first countries in the UK to establish a system of civil registration, will
soon be the only countries in the UK which force family historians to buy
expensive certificates? Perhaps it's natural justice
that Mark Harper, the Home Office Minister who in December simply parroted the
GRO's line in response to the questions my MP raised with him, was forced to
resign earlier this month.
Some of you may have wondered what I was
talking about when I used the term 'collateral lines' earlier - indeed it was
only a few years ago that I came across it myself, in correspondence with a
LostCousins member.
I'm not usually one for jargon, but it
seems to me a very useful term because the word 'collateral' emphasises how
valuable it can be to research not only our direct line, but also the branches
that spring from it.
There are two key reasons for this: one
is that by researching our collateral lines we're likely to uncover information
that is relevant to our direct ancestors - for example, they may have been
witnesses at a sibling's marriage, or been mentioned in their will. Indeed, it
was only by following up on my great-great-great grandmother's presumed
siblings that I was able to prove that she was indeed their sister.
The other reason is that our cousins are
ALL descended from collateral lines - that's what makes them cousins! If we
ignore our direct ancestors' brothers and sisters (and their progeny) who are
recorded in publicly available records such as censuses, BMD indexes, and
parish registers it greatly reduces the chances that we'll be able find their
modern descendants - our 'lost cousins'.
From time to time I come across
researchers who profess to be only interested in their direct line, and who
"don't have time" for the branches, but it's a very short-sighted
approach. Very often it's only by researching the branches, or by discovering a
'lost cousin' that we can break down our 'brick walls'.
For example, I have dozens of living
cousins who share my great-great-great-great grandparents but who, had they
never connected with me, would probably never have discovered who their great-great-great grandmother was.
The evidence was there, but scattered across disparate records that spanned 35
years - and only someone looking at it from a different angle could possibly
piece the information together.
On another branch of my tree it was my
turn to be helped - by someone who wasn't even a cousin, although she was
related to me through a marriage that took place two centuries ago. She'd
researched both sides of the marriage on the off-chance that there was some
other connection to be found (marriages between cousins were quite common in
those days) and this enabled her to provide me with lots of information about
my ancestors that would have been hard to track down unaided.
There IS such a thing
as a free lunch
I realised only afterwards that with the
show intervening the deadline I had set for the competition
in my last newsletter was rather tight, so I'm going to extend the closing date
until Tuesday 4th March.
Tickets for the lunch in London with
Princess Michael on 11th March cost £62 each and sold out last November, within
days of going on sale - so it really is worth putting pen to paper in order to
get a free ticket (the only disadvantage is that if you win, you'll have to sit
opposite me!).
Remember, all you need to do is tell me,
in no more than 250 words, why finding 'lost cousins' is important to you, and
how the LostCousins system is better. For example, is it the accuracy and the
privacy? Or the fact I'll chase down your cousins if they don't reply, even if
their email address has changed?
For more details of the speakers at the
lunch see the article
in the last newsletter. And to whet your appetite, just take a look at this
menu:
Duck liver parfait with grape chutney, brioche &
mixed leaves
~ ~ ~
Seared salmon fillet, crushed new potatoes, grilled
courgette, bisque
~ ~ ~
Chocolate and apricot pudding with ice cream
~ ~ ~
Coffee or tea
Wine and water are also included - it
really is a FREE lunch for the lucky prize-winner!
And talking of free lunches, LostCousins
member Jeannie Elgar was the winner of the competition I mentioned recently
where the prize was tea with TV presenter Dan Snow at Who Do You Think You Are? Live. I gather he asked her about her
favourite websites - and of course, she mentioned LostCousins!
When at first you don't succeed....
Jeannie probably wasn't overwhelmed by
Dan Snow because she's got some TV experience - 3 years ago she featured in the
first programme of the ITV series Long
Lost Family, which told of her quest to find her brother Geoffrey, who had
been adopted when she was a little girl. Sadly, whilst the programme makers did manage
to track down what had happened to Geoffrey, it turned out that he had died in
1979 - so Jeannie never got to meet her brother again.
At that point many people would have
given up - but not Jeannie. During her research she had spotted a birth in the
indexes where the child had the same forename and middle initial as her father
- and the mother's surname shown was her mother's maiden name.
To cut a long story short, it turned out
that there was another brother, one whose existence Jeannie had been totally
unaware of - and he had also been adopted. This time the story had a happy
ending - she traced her brother and they've been in regular contact ever since!
Newspaper articles
turn up in the strangest places
In the last newsletter I mentioned that
the free collection at Welsh
Newspapers Online had grown to over 630,000 pages. What I didn't do,
however, was to remind you that just because you don't have Welsh ancestry, this
doesn't mean that you won't find articles about your relatives.
For example, when I searched for my
surname I found an article in the Aberdare
Times about a James Calver from Colchester (in
Essex) who had fallen off a train a few miles from his home town and was suing
the Great Eastern Railway Company. Why this was thought relevant to the
population of Aberdare (in Glamorgan) is anyone's guess, but I certainly felt
it worthy of further investigation.
As it turned out, this James Calver wasn't a relative of mine, but I couldn't help
chuckling when I discovered that by profession he was a carver - because I'd
mentioned in the same newsletter that my surname was pronounced 'Carver' in
Suffolk, and often spelled that way by unsuspecting members of the clergy.
This month more new members have
registered at LostCousins than in any month since 2011 - and, not surprisingly,
there have also been many more cousins found this month as a result.
With just 2 months to go before our 10th
Anniversary it's getting quite exciting, especially since in just 2 weeks I'll
be heading off to Portugal for Genealogy
in the Sunshine, where I'll have the pleasure of meeting just over 40
LostCousins members for the very first time (and listening to some very
experienced speakers).
Note:
there are still 2 places available for latecomers, so if you fancy some winter
sunshine get in touch right away!
Are you taking part in the LostCousins
project to link cousins all over the world? Spend just one hour entering
relatives from the 1881 Census on your My
Ancestors page and the odds are that you'll find at least one living
relative that you didn't know about - IMMEDIATELY!
You probably know that when you're
entering relatives on your My Ancestors
page it's important to identify those who are your 'direct ancestors' - but
what exactly is a 'direct ancestor'?
On the Add Ancestor form there's a brief description of each relationship -
for example, if you select 'direct ancestor' the description reads "a
parent, grandparent, great-grandparent etc" - in
other words, a direct ancestor is somebody you are directly descended from.
To make sure you don’t forget any of
them, why not print out the blank Ancestor Chart I provide here and
fill it in. Everyone on that chart is a direct ancestor of yours, and whilst
there's only room for 5 generations it should include everyone you're likely to
find on the 1881 Census.
You'll see that there's a number against
each entry on the chart - what we call at LostCousins an Ancestor Number (though
the proper name is Ahnentafel). If you enter the
Ancestor Numbers on your My Ancestors
page it enables me to give you better help and advice.
Tip:
you can easily amend entries on your My Ancestors page - simply click the
person's name. The Ancestor Number box only appears on the form when you select
'direct ancestor' as the relationship.
Using the Freedom of
Information Act
Ann wrote to me recently explaining that
she'd run into problems trying to get information from the BBC relating to her
grandfather, who had been newsreader broadcasting to occupied Europe during
World War 2. I suggested that she made a Freedom of Information Act request,
and instantly they became much more helpful.
Although there's typically a charge when
you request information under the Data Protection Act, there's usually no
charge for information supplied under the Freedom of Information Act - so it's
well worth considering when you're trying to discover whether or not records vital
to your research still exist.
Of course, it's better to ask politely
first - but often it's hard to discover who to ask, and if someone tells you that
the records don't exist, it's hard to know whether they are telling the truth,
or simply fobbing you off.
Recently there has been criticism of the
failure of the Foreign Office to pass an enormous hoard of documents to the
National Archives once they were 30 years old - as many as 1.2 million
documents could be involved. According to a spreadsheet that you can download here
the hoard includes 860 registers of births, marriages, and deaths reported by
overseas outposts between 1846-1990.
Better information
means better care
The NHS in England is aiming to improve
the quality of patient care by making anonymised information from patient
medical records available to researchers - you can read all about it here.
Unfortunately the introduction of this
life-saving scheme has been delayed for 6 months because some people feel that
the leaflets distributed to each household may not have been read. I imagine
many people do
what I do, and put advertising leaflets that arrive with the post in the
recycling box without reading them (although I retrieved this one and put it on
one side). Mind you, there's subsequently been so much in the press about the
new system that surely anyone who is capable of making a reasoned decision
already knows about the plans, even if they didn't read the leaflet?
It's a bit of a conundrum: at one end of
the spectrum there are people who care so little for their privacy that they
post highly personal information on sites like Facebook (or publish family
trees online without regard to the impact this may have on their own
relatives); at the other there are conspiracy theorists who believe that
anything the government does is contrary to their interests.
Personally I'm delighted if my records
can in some way help to improve medical care, particularly since other people
will be contributing data that may help me at some crucial point in the future.
Opting out of a scheme like this is surely rather like refusing to vaccinate a
child - gambling with the lives of others?
Whole genome sequencing for $1000?
The good news is that last month Illumina, a manufacturer of DNA sequencing machines
announced that from March it will be selling sequencers capable of sequencing
an entire human genome for less than $1000 - just one of these $1 million
machines can sequence 16 genomes in 3 days, whereas sequencing the first human
genome took 13 years and cost $1 billion.
The bad news is that according to Technology
Review these machines are designed to run in banks of 10, which means that
not only is it a major investment for a DNA testing laboratory, they're also
going to need tens of thousands of customers each year to keep the price down
to the $1000 level.
It's likely to be quite a while before
whole genome sequencing makes an impact in the world of genealogy - but it will,
one day....
London photos and
musicals about maps
The Museum of London has an app called
Street Museum which allows you to see old photos of London as you're travelling
around the city (the BBC website has some examples here of composite
images that merge old black and white photos with modern colour shots).
The story of Phyllis Pearsall, who
reportedly researched the first London A-Z map by walking 3000 miles around the
city's streets is being turned into a musical -
according to this BBC article.
I was one of those who pressed for the
publishers to release a facsimile of the original A-Z, and whilst the historical
edition they released is a little later (1938-39) I find it incredibly
useful when I'm trying to identify where my many London ancestors lived.
Tip:
there are lots of books with old photos of London here.
One of my earliest memories is of asking
my mother why I so often had boiled egg for breakfast - since food rationing
ended in July 1954, a few months before my 4th birthday, I can reasonably
assume that I was only 3 years old when I made my enquiry.
It's hard to imagine now that rationing
continued for a decade after D-Day, but it did - and bread, which hadn't been
rationed during the war, was rationed between 1946-48, whilst
allowances of some already rationed foods were cut.
During the war it wasn't just about
rationing, but also about producing more - the Dig for Victory poster that you can see here
is a reminder of the drive to produce more food, on allotments, in back
gardens, and even in public parks. This wasn't a novel experience for older
Britons - during the Great War there had been food shortages when the U-Boat
blockade was imposed by the German navy.
Of course, exotic fruits like bananas
couldn't be grown in Britain, which meant that many youngsters were teenagers
by the time they first laid eyes on the yellow fruit. In 1943 a single green
banana was auctioned in London, and fetched £5 - more than a week's wages for
most people.
English expressions from
the Great War
There's an interesting article on the BBC
website which examines some of the slang words which came into use, or became
more popular, during World War 1, such as blighty, skive, cushy, and jerry.
Tip:
for a more comprehensive guide to slang from the Great War see the Dictionary
of Tommies Songs and Slang by John Brophy & Eric Partridge.
I know that a lot of you are helping to
track down living relatives of the men whose names are given on your town or
village memorial in advance of the centenary of the outbreak of war in 1914.
But did you know that you can use
LostCousins to help find them? The Historical
Research category is designed for projects like this - it enables you to
enter on your My Ancestors page
people who aren't your relatives, but are relevant to a historical research
project that you're involved in.
The simplest approach would be to find
the person who gave their life on the 1911 Census, but you'll be nearly 5 times
more likely to make a connection if you can identify them or (more likely) their
parents on the 1881 Census.
I can't remember precisely how I came upon this
leaflet from Scottish Friendly - it might have fallen out of a magazine - but
being of a suspicious nature when it comes to financial services of any kind I
decided to take a closer look.
It sounds wonderful - a guaranteed sum
after 10 years, and all for as little as £10 per month! And tax-free too! Could
it possibly be too good to be true? It could. When I looked at the figures on
their website I discovered that the 'guaranteed sum' is actually less than you
would have invested, and that you'd lose money even if the fund returned 2% per
annum for 10 years.
Indeed, whilst you would make a small
profit if the fund went up by 5% each year, the charges that Scottish Friendly
levy would reduce the return to just 2.3% per annum - so in effect they'd be
taking over half the profits.
Personally I find it incredible that a
friendly society could be so unfriendly towards its customers - after all, like
any mutual it doesn't have shareholders, which means that it's run for the
benefit of its customers. At least, that's the theory - although when I look at
the £400,000 package that each of the two top executives receives it does make me
wonder....
Earlier this month I received this email
from Michael, who has been a LostCousins member for exactly a year:
"I
am a fairly new subscriber to the Lost Cousins Newsletter. It is, by far, the
best regular genealogical correspondence that I receive. I read virtually everything.
It's a bit like having a friend who is also dead keen on genealogy and from
whom one learns also sorts of new and interesting things about this fascinating
and wide-ranging subject. The articles are well-written and intelligent. I
cannot recommend it highly enough."
I know from other correspondence I've
received that Michael isn't the only person who enjoys my newsletter. If you
too enjoy reading the newsletter please invite other researchers to join
LostCousins so that they can get their own copy - after all, it's free!
This is where I'll post any last minute
news, updates, or offers.
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.