LostCousins 2012 Christmas Newsletter
Remember
to claim your free LostCousins subscription
Finding
a Box of Family Letters
Woman
to marry twin sister's murderer
Scottish
site offers scanned images
High
speed scanner - a book a minute!
Northern
Ireland BMD prices rise
Essex
completes online register collection
Last
chance to save on DNA tests
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 19
December 2012) please click here; for an index to articles from 2009-10 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,
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Tip:
if you have friends or relatives who need a nudge to get them interested in
family history, why not send them a link to this newsletter (http://lostcousins.com/newsletters/xmas12news.htm)
so that they can take advantage of the offer? It might be just the incentive
they need to get started.
Incidentally, there's nothing to stop
you claiming your free credits AND getting a discount on a findmypast subscription
under the offer
I wrote about in my last newsletter. Both findmypast offers expire at the end
of December, so DON'T MISS OUT.
Note:
whilst the discount offer doesn't apply to existing findmypast subscribers, the
free credits should be available to everyone. I've certainly claimed mine, and am
using them for Living Relatives searches (these are the only searches that aren't
included in any of the findmypast subscriptions). But, if you have a Foundation
or Full subscription, it's also a chance to see what you will gain when you
upgrade to a Full or World subscription.
Remember to claim your
free LostCousins subscription
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discount I've arranged at findmypast.co.uk (click here for full
details) don't forget to claim your free LostCousins subscription, worth up to
£12.50.
And make sure you follow the
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during through the process, please start again from step 1 (otherwise you won't
qualify for your free subscription).
Finding a Box of Family
Letters
My
wife pointed out this wonderful poem.
Reading it I couldn't help but be reminded of the correspondence I found when
going through my father's papers after his death in 2011, and you won't be
surprised to hear that it brought tears to my eyes.
The book from which the poem was taken
won't be available at Amazon.co.uk
until Friday, but all 8 of the reviews at Amazon.com give it 5 stars, which -
when you consider how personal poetry is - seems amazing.
Talking of family letters, my wife and I
spent our first Christmas together going through a trunk full of correspondence
- yet the family the letters related to wasn't hers or mine! Intrigued? You'll
probably see some examples from this correspondence in my newsletter next
year....
In the summer I published two challenges
that proved incredibly popular, and whilst it's too late to win one of the prizes
on offer, feel free to submit an entry if you haven't already done so - it's an
amazing way to sharpen up your research skills. You'll find the challenges here
and here
(each is preceded by an article on how to knock down 'brick walls' and these
are well worth re-reading).
In my Christmas challenge you'll have to use all the
resources at your disposal to piece the clues together in order to work out who
owned this Illustrated Birthday Book, which I acquired some years ago as part
of an auction lot. As you may be able to see from the scan it is leatherbound with an embossed silver (?) front cover - and
on the title page it is referred to as "The Illustrated Shakespeare
Birthday Book".
The publisher is Ernest Nister of London, who lived from 1842-1909, and the Preface
is dated 1890 - so that provides us with some idea of when the book might first
have been bought.
Most entries are written in an adult
hand, and some seem to be the autograph signatures of individuals concerned. A few
have clearly been written by someone much younger - so was it passed from
father to son, or mother to daughter? Perhaps you'll be able to tell me as part
of your solution.
Although I bought this book many years
ago, it was only on Christmas Eve that I started to wonder about its origins,
and realised what a wonderful challenge it would be for members. I've scanned
several pages from the book, each of which has at least one name and birthday.
Many of the surnames are unusual, which will surely help you figure out who is
referred to - but you may find some of the handwriting hard to decipher.
What links all these people together?
Who owned the book? If you think you can answer those questions email me with
your solution (please send a plain text email: no pasted graphics, no
attachments).
If nobody has come up with a convincing
solution before my next newsletter - which I'm hoping to publish on New Year's
Eve - I'll show you some more pages from the book, including an entry from
February 29th.
Co-habiting couples conundrum
Like
me, you may have been surprised to see that so many Victorian couples gave the
same address when they married - it certainly doesn't fit with the conventional
vision of Victorian England. I have often wondered whether in some cases they
might have given the same address to avoid the expense of banns being read in
two different parishes - but that couldn't possibly account for all of them.
I was, therefore, interested to read an analysis
in Rebecca Probert's excellent Marriage
Law for Genealogists of 99 marriages that took place in Bethnal Green
in the three months after the 1891 Census. Whilst 42 gave the same address in
the marriage register, only 8 were living together according to the census; of
the 57 who gave different addresses, 3 were together on the census.
Professor Probert
then looked more closely at the 11 couples who were living together on the
census: in 5 cases they were actually living with the parents of either the
bride or groom, with the future spouse shown as a visitor or lodger; in a
further 5 cases the couple were shown as married on the census, which is precisely
what you'd expect - they'd hardly admit to the enumerator that they weren't
married. And in the final instance the groom was shown twice on the census,
once with his parents and once with the bride he married a week later.
The author also comes up with a very
plausible reason why couples might say they were living together when -
according to the census, at least - they weren't. Apparently the Victorians so
hated the idea of unmarried couples living together that some clergymen and
registrars offered to marry cohabiting couples free of charge - so perhaps the modern-day
politicians who argue that married couples should have tax-breaks really are arguing for a return to 'Victorian
values'!
Marriage
Law for Genealogists may sound like
a rather dry title, but I found it to be a real page-turner - it turned out
that much of what I thought I knew about the legality of marriages was
completely wrong (or only applied for part of the time). Highly recommended!
Woman marries twin
sister's murderer
The BBC recently reported that
in Argentina a woman was proposing to marry the convicted killer of her twin
sister - which immediately raised the question in my mind as to whether such a
marriage would be lawful in England.
Although it was (until 1907) illegal for
a man to marry his dead wife's sister, in this case the alleged murderer was
not married to the victim. I wonder whether there has ever been a similar case here?
In the Christmas
edition of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine there was a letter
from a reader which referred to parish records that tend to be under-utilised.
One was the Register of Banns, which I've mentioned in this newsletter on a
number of occasions, and is a great way to find a marriage that didn't take
place in the anticipated parish - the other was the Register of Services, a
resource I'd never previously thought to check.
It seems the Register of Services can
include useful background information such as the number of people attending a
funeral, and even the amount of money put in the plate. Church of England
Canons include the following provisions:
1. A register
book of services shall be provided in all churches and chapels.
2. In the said
register book shall be recorded every service of public worship, together with
the name of the officiating minister and of the preacher (if he be other than
the officiating minister), the number of communicants, and the amount of any
alms or other collection and, if desired, notes of significant events.
A Google search turned up an interesting
website which has digitised copies of these registers for some Scottish
parishes.....
Scottish site offers
scanned images
The Scran Trust exists to provide educational access to
digital materials representing Scottish culture and history.
A search for 'Register of Services'
produced several results for Scottish parishes, and when I searched more
generally for 'register' there were more wide-ranging results, such as "Berwickshire
Register of Juveniles Sentenced to Whipping", registers of employees, hospital
admissions registers, registers of the poor etc.
It looks as if the images provided are
sample pages, rather than complete registers - access to the digitised images
requires the purchase of a subscription, otherwise I'd know more - but it could
well be a useful site for anyone with Scottish ancestry who wants to get a
better feeling for the sort of documents that are available. A 6 month
subscription for personal use costs just £10, but if you live in Scotland you
may be able to get free access through your local library.
High speed
scanner - a book a minute!
According to a recent New Scientist article researchers at the
University of Tokyo have developed a prototype scanner that can digitise a book
at the rate of 250 pages a minute, many times faster than a conventional
scanner (and about 1000 times quicker than me scanning pages from the Birthday
Book that features in my latest challenge!).
Watching QI recently I was interested to
learn of William Jennens of Acton Suffolk, sometimes called the Acton
Miser, who when he died in 1798 is reputed to have left a fortune worth over £2
million (the equivalent of a multi-billionaire today).
Although Jennens
prepared a will, he died before he could sign it - and as a result his estate
became the subject of a High Court battle which lasted 117 years, and only
ended when the entire estate had been swallowed up by legal costs.
Stephen Fry, the QI presenter suggested
that it was this real-life case which inspired the fictional case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce
in Bleak
House, and since the Jennens case had already
been in the Chancery Court for 55 years by the time that Charles Dickens' book
was published it seems quite likely.
However, I couldn't help wondering
whether William Jennens might also have been the inspiration
for Ebenezer Scrooge, the repentant miser of A
Christmas Carol?
Note:
as a Christmas treat I bought 1,227
QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off for my Kindle.
Whilst it wasn't free - as many Kindle books are - it only cost me 20p! Now
who's the miser?
Northern Ireland BMD
prices rise
The price of copy certificates from the
General Register Office Northern Ireland went up from £14 to £15 on 17th
December. When you consider they're only charging couples £36 to marry in a
Register Office (a price which includes the provision of a certificate) it does
seem as if researchers are being exploited.
However, it was revealed some time ago
that GRONI were planning to put their registers online, as ScotlandsPeople have
already done - so there is hope that researchers will be paying much less in
future. For more information see Chris Paton's excellent blog.
Essex completes online
register collection
The online collection of parish
registers at Essex Ancestors now includes virtually all of the registers held
by the Essex Record Office. See the Essex Record Office blog for more information.
Last chance to save on DNA
tests
On 31st December the Family Tree DNA offer
ends: until then you can save about one-third on most tests. For example, a
37-marker Y-DNA test - the same one that I took earlier this year - costs just
$119 (plus $6 postage if you are in the UK), which is less than £80.
I've taken advantage of the offer to
order a full-sequence mtDNA test, and I've also
persuaded a male cousin from my mother's side of the family to take a Y-DNA
test. Click here
to see the full range of tests available.
To find out more about DNA and how it
can help knock down 'brick walls' see the special DNA edition of my newsletter,
which you'll find here.
Based on the many thank-you notes I've
received from grateful members during 2012 I reckon that, in aggregate, my tips
this year have already saved LostCousins members hundreds of thousands of
pounds - and that's before the free credits from findmypast, which are worth as
much again.
That's a fantastic saving for these
troubled times, and whilst I can't guarantee that I'll be able to save you as much
money in 2013, I'll certainly do my best.
But it's not just about saving money -
I've also introduced thousands of members to the wonderful genealogical
mysteries written by Steve Robinson (which reminds me, I got a great idea for a
plotline whilst reading Rebecca Probert's book on
marriage law!). If you've yet to discover Steve Robinson's books, which feature
over-weight and under-loved genealogist Jefferson Tayte,
you'll find them here
on Amazon UK, and here
on Amazon.com. Highly recommended!
I know too, that many members have
managed to break down 'brick walls' in their trees after reading my articles on
'brick walls' during the summer, and honing their skills on the challenges I
set in June and July. The Masterclass articles and
other tutorials have also proved popular, and I'm very grateful to the members
who have contributed articles this year.
Of course, no newsletter could exist without news - so I'm constantly on the
lookout for items of interest to members. And whereas some genealogy
newsletters simply reprint press releases, I do my best to try sites out myself
before recommending them to members (the bonus for me is that I sometimes make
discoveries in my own tree during those investigations!). Naturally this means
that there are some sites you'll never read about in my newsletter....
I can't always be first with the news -
daily blogs clearly have an innate advantage over a newsletter that's published
less than 30 times a year - but thanks to the tips I get from members I am
often first to break news about major developments, such as the arrival of a
major collection of British newspapers at findmypast.co.uk (which have provided
so many of us with unexpected insights into the lives of our ancestors and
their extended families), and the launch of the World subscription at the same
site.
But the reason I came up with the idea
for LostCousins in 2003 wasn't to do any of these things: my aim was to link
together researchers with other researchers who shared their ancestors - their
'lost cousins'.
For
me, this has been a 9-year mission to help members explore new resources, seek
out new cousins and new branches of their family trees, and boldly go where no
researchers have gone before.
So I'd like to thank all of those
members who have completed their My
Ancestors page so that their cousins can link up with them - and mildly (it
is Christmas, after all) rebuke those of you who keep coming up with excuses
for not playing your part in this great project.
I do hope that those of you who can
contribute more data will do so. Almost 5% of all the inhabitants recorded on
the England & Wales 1881 census have now been entered by one or more
members, so when you enter a household from that census there's about 1 chance
in 20 that you'll be linked with a relative of yours. When you consider that it
costs nothing to enter the data, and takes less than 2 minutes to enter an
entire household, it's hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want to take part
in the project!
Let's all do what we can to find MORE
cousins in 2013!
This where any late
updates will be posted, so it's worth checking back after a few days.
All the best for Christmas and the New
Year,
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2012 Peter Calver
You
may link to this newsletter, and I have included bookmarks so you can - if you
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However, please email me first if you would like to re-publish any part of the
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