Newsletter
– 4th August 2016
Mystery
Scottish records coming soon
Explore
the world for a month – under £10 ENDS SUNDAY
AncestryDNA
links with Quest Diagnostics
Family
Matching Tool makes it easier to identify matches
Are
these the cheapest autosomal DNA tests ever? ENDS
SOON
Please
update your My Details page ACTION REQUIRED
Nottinghamshire
parish records on the SoG website
Free UK
Genealogy plans for the future
Findmypast
add 2.5 million crime records
New Home
Secretary is a descendant of King Charles II
Church
of Ireland parish registers
Over
250,000 images of London online
Who
was the oldest person to be photographed?
6th
Jefferson Tayte thriller is close to completion
Do
you believe in coincidence?
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 23rd July)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it only searches these newsletters, so you
won't get spurious results):
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 - you need to make the LostCousins site
an exception (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!
Mystery Scottish records coming soon
Last Friday there was a 'teaser' in
Findmypast's regular email to subscribers which read "Do you have Scottish
ancestors? Brand new Scottish registers and records to be released soon."
Up to now Findmypast haven't added many
Scottish records to their vast collection – possibly because they have also
been operating the ScotlandsPeople site on behalf of the Scottish government.
Now that their contract is coming to an end they’re probably in a better
position to compete without there being a conflict of interest.
Although I don’t have Scottish ancestors
myself (or at least, none that I’ve found so far!) I’ll be watching very
closely on your behalf.
Explore the world for a
month – under £10 ENDS
SUNDAY
For the next few days you can buy a 1
Month World subscription to Findmypast for the cost of a Britain subscription
(or the equivalent ‘local’ subscription at Findmypast’s sites around the
world).
It’s a handy opportunity to access
almost all of the 8 billion records and newspaper articles in the Findmypast
collection (the one record set excluded is the 1939 Register, which is only
ever available to 12 Month subscribers).
This offer isn’t exclusive to
LostCousins, but you’ll only be supporting LostCousins when you use the
appropriate link below:
Tip:
if you live outside the UK it’s worth noting that subscriptions to the UK site
are significantly cheaper in terms of your local currency following the June
referendum – you can check the latest exchange rates at xe.com
You need to be aware that your
subscription will renew automatically at the end of the month unless you un-tick
the ‘auto-renew my subscription’ box in the My Account section of the site.
However you can do this at any time – there’s no need to leave it until the
last minute.
AncestryDNA links with
Quest Diagnostics
Yesterday AncestryDNA
and Quest Diagnostics announced that they will be collaborating to expand the
market for consumer DNA tests; to quote the press
release “The new collaboration will allow AncestryDNA to scale its testing
services and pave the way for new wellness offerings.”
Since AncestryDNA have now sold over 2
million autosomal DNA tests, most of them in the past couple of years, it’s
clear that DNA testing is becoming ever more important to genealogists.
But is AncestryDNA
the best choice? For researchers in the UK and many other countries outside the
USA their tests are relatively expensive to purchase - and you need to subscribe
to Ancestry to view the family trees of the people you’ve been matched with, so
that’s something else to take into account. (After all, you may be an Ancestry
subscriber now, but will you always be able to justify the expense?)
It’s a complex decision: Ancestry have
the biggest DNA database, but it’s dominated by people who live in the USA –
which is clearly a problem if you’re trying to solve ‘brick walls’ in Europe. My
inclination has always been to purchase the cheapest tests (since they’re all using
similar technology), and to use sites like GEDmatch
to connect with cousins who have tested with other providers.
Family Matching
Tool makes it easier to identify matches
Ancestry use a phasing algorithm known
as Underdog
to separate segments of DNA that you inherited from your mother from those that
came from your father (although the workings are hidden from the user);
currently they’re the only major testing company to attempt this process, so
it’s hard to know how successful it is.
Recently, however, Family Tree DNA came
up with a slightly different approach when they added a Family Matching Tool to
sort matches into paternal and maternal. When this new tool first launched it
required users to have tested a close relative from at least one side of their
family – a parent, an aunt or uncle, or a 1st cousin – but it has just been
extended to include more distant relatives, including 2nd and 3rd cousins.
For the new feature to work you need to
have uploaded or created a family tree which includes the relatives who have
tested – and you’ll need to confirm that it’s the same person. This page
at the FTDNA site explains how it all works, but as I’ve only just discovered
this feature I’m still waiting to find out how well it works.
Note:
the process of sorting in maternal and paternal matches doesn’t take place
instantly – so don’t expect immediate results. Precisely how long it will take
depends on how many other researchers are using the site – it could be hours or
days – so the sooner you start, the better.
I’ll be writing again about the Family
Matching Tool when I have more personal experience of using it – so please don’t
write in asking for my help just yet. (Many thanks to DNA expert Debbie Kennett
for telling me about this new tool.)
Are these the cheapest autosomal
DNA tests ever? ENDS SOON
Family Tree DNA are having a Summer
Sale – offering Family Finder tests at the amazingly low price of $69, a
$30 saving compared to their usual price of $99 (and the usual sale price of
$89).
This means that, despite the fall in the
pound following the recent referendum, researchers in Britain can buy an
autosomal test more cheaply than ever before – about £63 after allowing for
shipping and the commission that your bank is likely to add on a foreign
currency transaction. And, other than return postage when you send back your
sample, there are no further costs – there are no subscriptions or one-off
charges, even though Family Tree DNA are continually improving the features
they offer (see the previous article).
Of course, it’s not just those of us in
Britain who will benefit – the saving is even greater if you live outside the
UK. But wherever you live, please use this link
(or the one above) to ensure that LostCousins will benefit from your purchase.
Who should test? In most cases you are the
best person to test - the main exception is if both of your parents are still alive,
in which case they should both test instead of you. Remember that with autosomal DNA
it makes no difference whether you are male or female - you can take the test.
Autosomal DNA tests are rather like chocolates
- you always want another one. If both of your parents are deceased consider asking an
aunt, uncle, or first cousin to test (ideally one from each side of your tree). Whilst
paying for multiple DNA tests might sound extravagant, at $69 you'd be paying only
a third of the $199 they cost when I tested in 2012.
Note:
no end date for the offer has been published, so I suggest you make your decision as soon as
possible. I’ll update this article when I discover the closing date.
Please update your My Details page ACTION REQUIRED
I recently added a new section to the My Details page so that members could
indicate whether or not they had taken an autosomal DNA test (such as Family
Finder, or Ancestry DNA) – or if they were considering doing so. Like it or
not, DNA is starting to become just as important as traditional records when it
comes to knocking down ‘brick walls.
Whether or not you’re interested in
taking a DNA test yourself I do hope you’ll spare the 60 seconds it will take
to compete this new section – in due course this information will be shared
with other members you’ve been matched with, making it easier for those who do
want to use DNA to develop an effective strategy.
Whilst you’re updating your My Details page I hope you’ll also take
a moment to check that the other information shown there is correct and
complete – thank you!
Note:
to access your My Details page you’ll need to know your password – to get a
reminder just follow the link in the website menu. The email which told you about
this newsletter gives the email address under which your account is registered.
Nottinghamshire parish
records on the SoG website
There are now transcribed records for over
90 Nottinghamshire parishes included in the Society of Genealogists collection,
SoG Data Online – but they represent just a small
fraction of the data that SoG members have at their
fingertips. Some of the record sets in the collection are also available at
Findmypast, but many others aren’t.
This PDF
document lists all of the record sets available online as at the end of May –
it’s an impressive list, and they’re all free to members!
Findmypast
claim to have 4.6 million records from Norfolk parish registers, Ancestry
have about 8 million, and The
Genealogist have around 10 million.
Well, if you have Norfolk ancestors it’s
a no-brainer – you use the site that has the most records. Or do you? I’m
reliably informed that in reality the three sites all have the same records, they
just count them differently! I guess it’s ‘normal for Norfolk’……
Tip:
the Findmypast link above leads to a list of their Norfolk records by event and
by parish, so if you want to compare one site with another it’s a good place to
start.
Free UK Genealogy plans
for the future
Since 1998 the charity FreeBMD - now
known as Free UK Genealogy - has been marshalling the resources of thousands of
volunteer transcribers for the benefit of the genealogical community.
There are three key projects: FreeBMD (GRO
indexes for England & Wales), FreeCEN (censuses covering the whole of Britain), and FreeREG (parish
registers covering the whole of Britain). The only project of the three that is
close to completion is FreeBMD, where the coverage is virtually 100% for the
period 1837-1975, but the site that I find most useful is FreeREG, because many
of the parish register entries that have been transcribed aren't available
online at any other site.
Some years ago Ancestry licensed the
FreeBMD data from 1837-1915, but otherwise the records that the volunteers have
transcribed are only available at the three free sites. As things stand there
are two key risks: one is that the money required to keep the free sites going
runs out - this is always a risk for sites that rely on donations and
advertising. The other, arguably more significant, risk is that researchers won't
find parish records relating to their ancestors - maybe because they're unaware
of the existence of FreeREG, or perhaps because they find different records at
other sites which are plausible matches.
Of course, experienced researchers with
an unlimited amount of time will leave no stone unturned in the search for the
truth - but the reality is that few of us have as much time as we need to painstakingly
research our ancestors, and even fewer are immune from making mistakes.
The solution that the trustees of Free
UK Genealogy came up with is simple - rather than put the transcribed data
behind a paywall (as commercial sites do), or restrict access by confining it
to the three existing sites, they propose to make the data available to anyone
under an Open Data licence. A blog posting by David
Mayall, one of the trustees, on the Free UK Genealogy
site explains what they are planning to do, and how everyone will benefit:
What we ARE proposing is to make our data available as
“open data”, which will mean that anybody can re-use that data. That could
include people who re-use it commercially, but we will still have it online,
free of charge.
Should you be worried about this? Well, rest assured
that I and the other trustees have worried about it for several years. Of course,
we are concerned that we should do the right thing, and that we shouldn’t leave
people thinking we are doing the wrong thing.
So, why open data? Well, whilst we have achieved much,
in bringing all that data to people free of charge, we have come to realise
that something was happening that we never really considered back in 1999 (yes,
that is how long FreeBMD has been with us). Basically, the data set that we
have transcribed is so huge that it seems very unlikely that anybody else would
do it again, but WE own that data, and that means that it is only as useful as
WE let it be.
If somebody else has a good idea about using that data
to make it even more useful to genealogists, then they can’t do it, and unless
we negotiate an agreement with them (or we develop the idea ourselves) that
good idea will never happen.
Now that isn’t what we are about!
So, we want to say to all those people out there who
think they can do something clever with that data “Go, do something clever”.
Some of them will do something clever and make some
money from it. Others will do clever things for free, and still others will see
people making money from the data and decide to do something similar for free. Basically,
unless what somebody wants to do with the data is HUGELY clever, somebody else
will do the same thing for free, so there will be little incentive for the pay
sites to do simple stuff here, because if they do, somebody else will pull the
rug from under them.
So, there you have it. People will be able to use our
data. They can even charge people for their end product, but we are sure that
there will be plenty of new FREE content created, and that anybody who created
a paid-for version of FreeBMD, FreeCEN or FreeREG
would make no money!
Above all, the existing FREE sites (or rather new,
revamped, FREE sites in some cases) will still be there.
This isn't something that has been
decided overnight - in December I reported
that Free UK Genealogy would be holding a conference in London on 30th January,
and included a key paragraph from the invitation I received:
The main reason to hold this conference is to begin a
consultation process with our volunteer transcribers, past and present. We are
inviting comments on a proposed Transcriber's Agreement. The agreements will
secure the future of your transcriptions as resources free to access and use by
all, forever, by making them open data. Open data is data that people are free
to use, re-use and redistribute - without any legal, technological or social
restriction - subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and
openness. On 30th January we will also be launching a consultation on the
wording of the agreement, and also on the way we will make the change to being
an open data organisation.
What some transcribers didn't realise is
that making the transcriptions Open Data would allow anyone to make use of them,
including commercial websites such as Ancestry and Findmypast. However, as
David Mayall's post makes clear, nobody is going to
make very much money simply by charging for data that is available free elsewhere
- they'll need to add value in some way.
Of course, this isn't the first time
something like this has happened: the 1881 England & Wales census was
transcribed by volunteers in a project co-ordinated by FamilySearch, and even
today the transcriptions of that census at Ancestry and Findmypast are based on
those efforts. That's why you can access the 1881 transcriptions free at
FamilySearch, Ancestry, and Findmypast (and why I chose it as the key census
that we use at LostCousins).
I sincerely hope that all volunteer
transcribers will realise that by making their transcriptions more widely
available they’ll be doing an even greater service to the genealogical
community.
Findmypast add 2.5 million
crime records
Last week Findmypast added 2,518,039 new
records to their England & Wales,
Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770-1935 collection – you can search them
here.
New Home Secretary is a
descendant of King Charles II
The new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, will
ultimately decide what changes are made in access to historic birth, marriage,
and death records, since the General Register Office is within her purview – so
I was interested to discover that she is directly descended from Charles II and
his mistress Barbara Palmer.
Palmer bore 5 of the King’s bastards
before she was displaced in his affections by Nell Gwynn. Will Ms Rudd’s family
history make her more sympathetic to our interests? I hope so.
Note:
you can read more about the descendants of King Charles II in this Daily Mail article.
I'm very much in favour of family
historians testing their autosomal DNA - it's wonderful to know that we can use
the results to verify our research, find new cousins we might never otherwise
have connected with, and knock down 'brick walls', especially in the case of
illegitimacy or adoption.
What I'm against is the way that most
companies that offer DNA tests oversell their ability to determine ethnic
origins - and when I received an email from one of them headed "Where do I
come from?", I knew what it was going to say.
Don’t fall for it: take DNA tests in
order to extend your family tree and fill in the gaps where written records are
unavailable, or hard to find. Don’t take a test because you want to know whether
you have Viking ancestors – because we all do!
I have two German lines - but no real
idea where in Germany they came from, which makes it very difficult to
investigate any further. I recently wrote an article about the historic
distribution of Irish surnames (you'll find it here)
and I've recently discovered the Geogen
site, which maps the distribution of surnames in modern Germany, though it's
most helpful for the former West Germany.
If you're struggling to find places in
Germany there's a gazetteer that has recently been indexed and linked to
historic maps - you'll find it here.
At the moment there's no Help information on the website, so I've uploaded a
PDF copy of the press release, which explains how to get the most out of the
site - you'll find it here. (Thanks
to Jenny from the Anglo German Family History Society - and a longstanding
LostCousins member - for this tip.)
In 2014 I wrote about the Archion website
which is making available online parish registers for the Evangelical Church of
Germany - there are 13 partner archives covering a large part of the country,
as you can see from the map here.
It's a subscription site, but there are lots of different options - a 1 month
pass costs just under 20 Euros (about £17 at the current exchange rate). The
site is in English as well as German, though obviously the records are in
German.
Church of Ireland parish
registers
Last year the National Archive of
Ireland made available online Catholic parish registers for the whole of
Ireland, and earlier this year indexed transcriptions of these registers went
online at Findmypast and other sites (you'll find my March article here).
Now the Church of Ireland has made
available a detailed list of parish registers showing which have survived, and
- most importantly - where they are held. You'll find the list here.
In addition, a small number of registers
have been transcribed and indexed as part of the Anglian Record Project.
Note:
the Church of Ireland website is in the process of being updated, and the
information can currently only be found on their beta site - I will alter the
links in this article if necessary.
Over 250,000 images of
London online
Collage, an online
collaboration between the London Metropolitan Archives and the Guildhall Art
Gallery, showcases over a quarter of a million photographs and other images of
London. They can be searched by street, thematically, or by using keywords such
as ‘workhouse’ or ‘laundry’ – use the Advanced Search if you’re not getting the
results you want from a simple keyword search.
These photos
chosen by the Guardian newspaper will
help whet your appetite….
Who was the oldest person to be photographed?
Seven years ago I published a series of
articles in which I featured photographs of members’ ancestors – the challenge
was to find the oldest person to have been photographed, that is to say the
person who was born first. The articles ended in September 2009 with this article, in
which I reported that Jeremiah Powell, born in 1750, was the earliest that
LostCousins members had found.
I’ve recently come across a photograph (said
to have been taken in 1840) of Hannah Stilley Gorby, who was reputedly born in 1746, which would make it
even older. But to the best of my knowledge she isn’t the ancestor of a
LostCousins member – unlike Jeremiah Powell – and furthermore there are some
who would dispute whether this photograph really is of her.
This interesting web page
has numerous examples of photographic firsts – but equally interesting is this
YouTube video about a
much more recent invention, the digital camera.
6th Jefferson Tayte
thriller is close to completion
Steve Robinson, the author who got me
hooked on genealogical mysteries, is close to completing the 6th book
in the Jefferson Tayte series – so now’s the time to catch up if you’ve missed
one of the earlier books.
You can find them all instantly (and
support LostCousins) by following the appropriate link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Do you believe in
coincidence?
On Tuesday my wife and I attended a Literary Lunch
that was organised as part of the Holt Festival – it was held at the Wiverton Hall Café, which some of you will know from the
fascinating BBC2 documentary series ‘Normal for Norfolk’ (if you’re in the UK
you can still view all 4 episodes here).
The strange thing was, we had made the
booking long before watching the documentary – so we had absolutely no idea
that Desmond MacCarthy and his family were about to
become famous. In fact, we only decided to attend because we were planning a
short holiday in Norfolk, so would be in the area.
Knowing from the TV series that Desmond
had an interest in his own ancestry I asked him if he would be prepared to
write a short article for this newsletter – and the photograph on the left
shows him just after I popped the question!
Desmond is not only interested in his
ancestry, he has just taken a DNA test in order to find out more – and whilst
he couldn’t remember the name of the company, he told me that they were in
Houston (which is where Family Tree DNA are based).
But the real coincidence came when I
discovered that, not only does Desmond share my birthday, one of his cousins used
to live in my house!
However, that wasn’t the only
coincidence this week - yesterday my brother phoned: “I’m in your area at the
moment”. “Do you want to stop by?”, I asked. “I think I already have”, came the
response.
It turned out that my brother, who works
for the Imperial War Museum, had been making the 70 mile journey from his home to
Duxford, one of the IWM’s major sites, when his car broke down on the M11
motorway. Before calling the AA for assistance he used Google Maps to find his
precise location, only to discover to his amazement (and subsequently mine) that
he was right outside my house!
Coincidences are a fascinating psychological
phenomenon – we seize on the few that actually happen, whilst disregarding the
millions (or even billions) of events that weren’t juxtaposed. For example, my
brother must have driven up and down the M11 on scores of occasions when he didn’t break down opposite my house –
indeed, if I include my wider family there must have been hundreds or thousands
of opportunities for one of them to break down nearby!
So, whilst coincidences like these make
an interesting talking point, they don’t necessarily indicate that there’s
something spooky going on…..
I often receive emails from members who
ask me where they can find an article from a previous newsletter. Fortunately
such questions are very easy to answer – there’s a Google search built into
each newsletter which will allow you to quickly and easily search all of my online newsletters (which go
back to February 2009).
It might seem a bit discourteous to
suggest that enquirers carry out the search themselves, but I believe that
sharing knowledge is more important than sharing information. Knowing how to do
something is more valuable than having someone else do it for you – which is
why I always encourage people to do their own research rather than employing a
professional genealogist (except in those rare cases where specialist knowledge
or location makes it the only feasible option).
I’d like to think that LostCousins
members not only share information with the living relatives they find, but pass
on techniques and useful tips that will help their cousins in their future
research. As the Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for
a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
‘Social media’ is a term that fills many
of us with horror – indeed, I often think that it would be more aptly-named ‘social
terrorism’ given the verbal onslaughts that Facebook, Twitter, and other sites
frequently unleash. But let us not forget that it’s also possible to connect
with people online in an entirely positive way, especially at a site like
LostCousins where we only connect with those who share common interests.
It’s now just over 12 years since the
very first cousins met at the fledgling LostCousins site, yet in all that time
not one LostCousins member has complained about something that another member
has said. I believe that’s an incredible (and possibly unique) record!
But there are sins of omission as well
as sins of commission. There are still people reading this newsletter who haven’t
entered a single relative on their My
Ancestors page, or who have only entered a handful of relatives. Some
people say “I don’t have the time”, but it’s an excuse that wears a bit thin
after a few months, and after 5 or even 10 years of membership it is positively
threadbare. Everyone can find half an hour to enter a few dozen relatives from
the 1881 Census (or one of the other censuses we use at LostCousins).
Another saying that resonates with me is
“If you want something done, ask a busy person”. In other words, there are some
people who are doers, and there are others who will spend more time arguing
that they don’t have the time to do something than it would have taken them to
do it in the first place! Nobody succeeds by doing nothing – so to anyone who
is still dilly-dallying I would say, “be a doer, not a doubter!”
It wouldn’t be Peter’s Tips without a
money-saving offer. Between Friday 5th and Sunday 7th August you can make extra
savings at AllBeauty, the website that
ships discounted perfumes, aftershave, and other cosmetics all over the world.
Simply follow the link above - so that LostCousins benefits - and use the code SAVER1 (to save £3 on a £30 order), SAVER2 (to save £5 on a £50 order) and SAVER3 (to save a massive £10 on an £80
order).
Finally, the news item that most
interested me this week was the one about blackberries ripening late this year
(you can read it here).
Last year I made Blackberry & Elderberry jam for the first time, and I’m
looking forward to making it again this year – probably with a hint of orange
to add extra fragrance. Will you be picking blackberries, and if so what will you be making?
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
That's all for now - I'll be back soon
with more news from the world of family history.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives without
asking for permission in advance - though why not invite them to join
LostCousins instead as standard membership, which includes this newsletter, is
FREE?