Newsletter
- 20th August 2017
Win the
Queen's granny's autograph ENDS SOON
Royal Air
Force index at Ancestry
Buckinghamshire
transcriptions at Findmypast
Upgrade
offers faster access to free census information
MASTERCLASS:
What to do with your autosomal DNA results
Downloading
your DNA results - and uploading them to other sites
Finding
an unknown close relative
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous newsletter (dated 28th July)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it searches ALL of the
newsletters since February 2009, so you don't need to keep copies):
Whenever possible links are included to the websites or articles
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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!
The old proverb "blood is thicker
than water " emphasises the importance of family relationships and, not
surprisingly, they're crucially important at LostCousins - because the site
exists for one reason, and one reason only, to connect cousins who are
researching the same ancestors, wherever they live - a third
of all matches made involve members on different continents!
LostCousins is the only site where,
having found someone whose tree connects to your own, you can see instantly
whether the other person is a cousin of yours (ie
someone who shares one of your bloodlines), or only related by marriage. Anyone
who has used sites like Ancestry and Genes Reunited will know that the vast majority of people whose trees overlap with yours
aren't cousins (even assuming that they've got their research right, which
sadly isn't always the case), so it's difficult to know which connections to
focus on and which to leave for another day.
To find out how you're connected to the
contacts you make at LostCousins simply click their name (or initials) on your My Cousins page. This displays the My Contact page for the relationship,
showing all the relatives you've both entered, and how each of you are related
to each of them.
Of course, the output of any computer
system is only as good as the data going in (you may be familiar with the term
GIGO, or "garbage in, garbage out") so it's dependent on you
specifying the correct relationships for the relatives you enter on your My Ancestors page, ie:
·
Direct ancestor
Someone from whom you are directly descended, ie a
parent, grandparent, great-grandparent etc
It's a good idea to print out the blank Ancestor
Chart and fill it in - it shows who your direct ancestors are going
back 5 generations, and also gives their Ancestor
Numbers (entering these not only helps me to help you, it makes it easier
for your own cousins to work out precisely how they are connected to you,
without needing access to your tree)
·
Blood relative
A person who shares a direct ancestor with you, ie a
cousin (no matter how distant); most people on your tree are blood relatives
·
Marriage
Someone who is connected to your tree only by one or more marriages or
relationships; a typical example is someone who marries a cousin (though it
isn't necessary for them to have been legally married, or even to have lived
together)
·
Adoption
If you were adopted this category applies to ALL of
the members of your adoptive family, past, present, and future; it is also used
for other family members who were adopted, whether or not it was legally sanctioned.
·
Possible relative
You can use this category (sparingly) to enter someone who you believe could be
a relative of yours, but where there is too little information to identify whether or not it is the correct census entry (for example,
when someone is in domestic service and the name/birthplace combination is a common
one); the aim is to connect with someone who can either confirm your hypothesis
or disprove it
·
Other categories (employment, lodger, One-Name Study,
One-Place Study etc)
These should only be used when you enter people who
are not connected to your tree in any way; only enter someone who is not
related to you if there is some meaningful purpose in doing so (otherwise
you'll be wasting your time and that of other members who are related to
those individuals); do not enter people simply because they were living in the
same household as your relatives
·
Unknown
NEVER use this category - it is there
for historical reasons; if you already have 'unknown' entries on your My Ancestors page please choose a more
meaningful category or delete them altogether
These relationships are shown in order
of importance; if someone qualifies under more than one heading (for example,
all direct ancestors are also blood relatives) you should give priority to the relationship
which is highest up the list. But always remember, it's about how the people
you enter are related to YOU, and not how they are related to somebody else. This is why, rather than entering someone else's relatives
on your own My Ancestors page you
must open a separate account for them (even if the other person is your spouse
or partner).
If you have inadvertently entered
someone else's relatives on your own My Ancestors page you can quickly and
easily copy them to a new account using the Refer a Relative option on your My
Referrals page (don't open the new account until you have the referral code,
and don't delete the relatives from your own page until you have logged into
the new account and checked that they are listed). You can use the same email
address for the new account just so long as the password is different.
Tip:
to amend or delete an entry on your My Ancestors page simply click the person's
name; always edit an existing entry rather than creating a new one.
Win the Queen's
granny's autograph ENDS
SOON
You've just got time to enter my
Summer Competition, which ends at midnight on 31st August - and the top prize
is an autograph of Queen Mary, the grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II (there
are also 30 LostCousins subscriptions, worth up to £12.50 each, still to be won).
It costs nothing to enter and search for
your 'lost cousins' at the same time. People write to me sometimes saying
things like "I've got quite enough cousins already", "I know all
my cousins", or "My cousins don't have any useful information".
Well, 'lost cousins' are very, very different
- for a start they all they know things you don't about your family tree. And
they're keen family historians like yourself, otherwise they wouldn't have
joined in the first place. Do you realise that, if your ancestry is mostly
British, there are around 200 LostCousins members who are your 6th cousin or
closer, ALL of them researching the ancestors you share?
You'll find full details of the
competition and how you can enter here.
In the last
newsletter I asked whether the records held centrally by the Royal Navy
contain information that isn't included in the documents handed to sailors when
they left the service. There were many responses from readers who had inherited
their father's records, but most hadn't sought a copy of the records retained
by the navy.
However Tony, got back to me with some very useful
information. First he advised me that the Victualing and Pay records can
include details of postings which aren't shown in the Service Record itself -
and commented that "Often in my research I have found small side notes on
the Victualing & Pay Records which point to other aspects associated with
their service eg 'Identified as suitable for ASW
(Anti-Submarine Warfare) training or posting', 'Re-assignment
to secret bases for participation in development and testing of new devices' -
e.g. Hedgehog (Forward throwing depth-charges) etc."
He also pointed me in the direction of
an amazing website which
includes histories for around 1000 Royal Navy vessels from the WW2 period,
including most of those that my father-in-law served on:
I was particularly interested in
following up on a story that my father-in-law recounted a few months before he
died. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's for some years, but he had a
particularly lucid spell one evening when we were all dining at the house of
some friends in the village - he told us about a time during his WW2 service when
he had to work his way across America because he'd missed his ship in New York,
and needed to catch up with it in California.
There was no sign on his Service Records
of any disciplinary action, so at first sight the story seemed quite unlikely to
be true - but when I looked at the itineraries of the vessels he had served on
it all became clear. Between May and December 1941 he
was serving with HMS Phoebe, but on 27th August the ship was on support duty
off the coast of Libya when it was struck by a torpedo in an Italian air
attack, causing major underwater damage. The vessel made it to Alexandria where
emergency repairs were carried out, then the Phoebe sailed to the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, New York for the job to be done properly, arriving on 21st November 1941
(the ship didn't leave until April of the following year).
My father-in-law's service record shows
that in December 1941 he transferred to HMS Orion, which had been under repair
at the Mare Island US Navy Yard (just north of San Francisco) since early
September (the Orion eventually sailed to Plymouth in March 1942). So the story Arthur told us seems to have been half-true after
all - he may not have missed his ship, but he clearly travelled across the US
from coast to coast to get from one ship to the other.
Tip:
the naval history website that I linked to above also has information from
other periods, and even for other navies - it's well worth a look.
Royal Air Force index at
Ancestry
Ancestry recently added an index to RAF
records that have been digitised at their Fold3
website - it covers the period 1918-1940. You can search the index at Ancestry
if you follow this link.
Buckinghamshire
transcriptions at Findmypast
This week Findmypast added around 2
million transcribed register entries for parishes in the county of
Buckinghamshire. I don't know of any ancestors of mine from the county, but I
have ancestors from adjacent counties, so I'll certainly be having a close look
in case I can break down any of my 'brick walls'.
Buckinghamshire
Marriage Index
Upgrade offers faster
access to free census information
Some years ago
I suggested that FreeBMD (now Free UK Genealogy) should invest some of their
accumulated funds upgrading the FreeREG and FreeCEN sites. FreeREG was indeed
upgraded a couple of years ago, and now it is FreeCEN's
turn for an upgrade - you can try out the new site here.
Note:
although the census information at FreeCEN is free, it
isn't complete. You can see the coverage here.
MASTERCLASS: What to
do with your autosomal DNA results
Introduction
No matter how much experience you might
have as a family historian, it would be understandable if, when the results of
your DNA test came through, you were completely flummoxed about what to do
next. There's a simple reason for this - we're used to working backwards from
what we already know, so there's a clearly defined path, ie:
find our ancestor's baptism in order to discover (or
confirm) who their parents were, then find the parents' marriage, then find the
baptisms of the parents and so on, working back a generation at a time.
The
challenge
But when we're matched with a genetic
cousin, someone who appears to have inherited an identical segment of DNA, we're
faced with a very different challenge. Most of the matches we make with DNA
cousins will be many generations back, since we have many more distant cousins than
we do close cousins. The final column of the table below indicates roughly how
many cousins you might expect to find if you and they all took the Ancestry DNA
test:
Based on Table 2 from: Henn BM, Hon L,
Macpherson JM, Eriksson N, Saxonov S, Pe'er I, et al. (2012) Cryptic
Distant Relatives Are Common in Both Isolated and Cosmopolitan Genetic Samples.
PLoS ONE 7(4): e34267. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034267
Revised using Ancestry DNA estimates for
the chances of detecting cousins and the expected number of 1st to 6th cousins
for those of British ancestry; the numbers for 7th to 10th cousins are my own
guesstimates
Of course, in practice only a small
fraction of your cousins will have tested - even Ancestry, the biggest providers
of autosomal tests, have only sold 5 million tests - but you can nevertheless reckon
that the cousins you're matched with will be distributed roughly in proportion
to the figures shown above. In other words, over 99% of your matches will be
with relatives who are at best 5th cousins, and could well be 8th cousins or
even more distant.
Tip:
Ancestry won't show any of your DNA matches as more distant than '5th to 8th
cousin', but it's very likely that amongst them there are many who are more
distant - possibly as many as half of them. Once you get beyond 3rd cousins the
length of the shared segment(s) is only a very rough guide to how closely you
are related - you could share a 7cM segment with a 10th cousin, but no
detectable DNA with a 5th cousin.
You and your 5th cousin shares the same
great-great-great-great grandparents. Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly
can't say who all of my 4G grandparents were - indeed,
I don't even know for sure who all my 3G grandparents were. I've got several
'brick walls' in the last 5 generations - and most researchers, including my
DNA cousins, are probably in the same situation. Go back another generation and
there are even more gaps - and it just gets worse from then on.
In other words, most of the ancestors that
link us to our DNA cousins are on the other side of a 'brick wall' - and this
could be a 'brick wall' in your own tree, in your cousin's tree, or even in
both trees. What a challenge!
The
reward
At this stage
it's important to remind ourselves why
we took a DNA test! Surely the primary reason we tested was to knock down
'brick walls' that conventional research couldn't breach? If our 'brick walls'
have resisted our efforts for years (or even decades), the opportunity to knock
them down using DNA is surely well worth grasping - even though it will mean
that we have to adopt a new and unfamiliar strategy,
and utilise somewhat different techniques?
How
to process your DNA matches
I'm going to assume for
the purpose of this article that you tested with Ancestry - but don't
stop reading if you tested elsewhere because the general principles are the same
wherever you tested.
At Ancestry
you'll typically have 5000 to 15000 matches with cousins, and of those all but
about 1% will be with 'distant' cousins, ie where the
estimated relationship is 5th cousin or more distant. So
the obvious strategy is to focus on the 1% on the basis that if you can't make
head or tail of those matches, your chance of resolving the more distant
matches is negligible.
Strategy
1: search by surname
However, that 'obvious' strategy would
be wrong - my experience has shown that a much better approach is to search the
trees of your matches by surname, in the hope of identifying cousins who have
the same surname in their tree as one of your 'brick wall' ancestors. Here's
how to go about it:
- Starting from
your DNA home page, click the green button
- At the top
right of the next page you'll see a blue button; click it
- Now you
have the option of searching by surname or birth location - or a
combination of the two
Tip: if the surname is a rare one I don't enter the birth location - and even when I do enter a birthplace, I usually only enter the country
Enter the surname of one of your 'brick wall' ancestors and click SEARCH to filter out the matches who haven't provided a family tree as well as those who have, but where there nobody has the relevant surname.
Tip: this search will examine the trees of all of your matches, whether they are public or private - though if they don't have an Ancestry tree, or the tree they've uploaded hasn't been linked to their DNA test they're not going to show in the results
- The next
step is to look at the remaining matches - sometimes there won't be any at
all, sometimes there will be a handful. To examine a match
click the green button at the right:
- Here's an
example taken from my own tree - I've obscured information that might
identify my cousin:
Ancestry automatically identify the surnames of direct ancestors which appear in both trees - but they won't tell you about other surnames which occur in both trees, even though these matches can be equally important, so it's well worth glancing through the complete list of your cousin's ancestral surnames.
- Most of the
time there won't be an obvious connection between you and the other
member, but that doesn't mean that you should give up - there are still
two more things you can try.
- first, click the SHARED MATCHES button: much of the time there won't be any shared matches, since Ancestry ignore distant matches, but now and again you'll be lucky - and when you are, it's worth following up, even if the other person doesn't have an online tree
- second, click MAP AND LOCATIONS to see whether any of your cousin's ancestors come from the same places as some of your ancestors
- If you're
able to identify a potential link send a message to your cousin telling
them what you have managed to figure out - they may have additional
information that isn't on their tree. You'll also need to contact your
cousin if their tree is private.
- But if
you're unable to figure out how you and this particular
cousin might be related, first make a note of this fact (click the Add note link), then move on to the
next person in the list.
- When there
are no more matches with cousins who share this particular
ancestral surname move on to the next surname, remembering that
whilst we tend to focus our attentions on a small number of particularly
frustrating 'brick walls', every
ancestral line in our tree terminates with a 'brick wall'.
- When you
have worked through ALL of your 'brick wall' surnames it's time to move on
to the next strategy…..
Strategy
2: search by birthplace
As you will have discovered when working
through your list of surnames, most of the time the surname of the ancestors
you share with a DNA cousin doesn't appear in both trees - indeed, it's quite
possible that the surname of your common ancestor doesn't appear in either
tree!
The problem is, when your female
ancestors married they generally took their husband's surname. This makes it
more difficult to research female ancestors whose children were born before the
commencement of civil registration, since baptism registers don't usually give
the mother's maiden surname - usually the only solution is to find the
marriage. (By contrast you can continue researching your male ancestors even if
you can't their marriage.)
Of course, this problem doesn't simply
affect you and your research - it affects your cousins too; most researchers'
tree become increasingly sparse with each generation. If you've only identified
10% of your 256 6G grandparents and your cousins have only identified 10% of
theirs, the odds of finding out how you're related to a 7th cousin simply by comparing
the names in your trees are pretty remote.
Another way to figure out how you are
related to your DNA cousins is to look for geographical overlaps - and here's
how to go about it:
- Search for
cousins whose ancestors were born in the same villages, towns, or counties
as your ancestors - note that your search term must be selected from one
of the options that Ancestry display as you type
Ancestry's focus on the US means that Essex, England isn't shown until you type a little more, ie:
It's important to include the comma - simply typing 'Essex England' doesn't work.
Tip: abbreviations such as 'Gt' for 'Great' usually don't work (though there are some exceptions); also, entering the name of the parish church only works when it is part of the name of the village, eg Fornham St Martin
- When you
find a DNA cousin who has ancestors from the same area the next step is to
evaluate how likely it is that finding the connection could knock down one
of your 'brick walls. For example, if your cousin's most recent ancestors
from that location were born in the 1600s, but your most distant ancestors
from the same location weren't born until the 1800s, the chances of being
able to knock down your 'brick wall' are minimal, since there are many
generations separating you. On the other hand, if you both have 'brick
walls' around the same time, there's a chance that going back just one
generation would knock down both 'brick walls'.
- Once you've
worked through all the places that your ancestors came from, it's once
again time to move on to the next strategy……
Strategy
3: look for overlaps with the more unusual components of your ethnicity
Most readers of this newsletter have
mostly British, Irish, or western European ancestry. But some of you will have
Jewish ancestors, or ancestors from outside Europe, and whilst ethnicity
estimates can be quite misleading, they do provide another way of analysing
your matches.
Here's what Ancestry show for one of my
DNA cousins:
If Ancestry had detected a Jewish
component in my own ethnicity this would be one of the matches I'd be looking
at very closely.
Strategy
4: look for the 'elephant in the room'
Because we all have 'brick walls' in our
trees there are parts of our ancestry that are a closed book - yet there will
inevitably be clues amongst our matches, if only we look for them. For example,
if - like me - you don't know of any Irish ancestors, but have lots of matches
with cousins who do, you might begin to wonder whether one of your 'brick
walls' is concealing a connection to Ireland.
I can't provide you with a step-by-step guide - it's all about
awareness (Louis Pasteur said that "chance favours the prepared
mind").
More
tips
- When you
look at your matches many of them will be shown as having no tree - but
that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have an Ancestry tree,
simply that their tree hasn't been attached to their DNA results
Downloading your DNA
results - and uploading them to other sites
Although more people have tested their
autosomal DNA with Ancestry than all of the other companies
added together, everyone can find more matches by uploading their results to
the free GEDmatch site, and those who tested with Ancestry can also upload them
to Family Tree DNA.
Downloading your results from one site
and uploading them to another is a remarkably simple process - just so long as
you know where to start. Ancestry users seem to have the most problems, though
I can never figure out why - all you need to do is log-in, go to your DNA home
page, then click SETTINGS at the top right. On the next page
you'll see DOWNLOAD RAW DNA DATA at the right - click this button, then enter
your password on the pop-up and tick the box below, and then click CONFIRM.
Within the next couple of minutes you'll receive an email with a link 'Confirm Data
Download' - click this link and you'll be taken back to the Ancestry site.
Finally click DOWNLOAD RAW DATA to download the Zip file. Where this file ends
up depends on your browser settings, but mine can be found in the Downloads
folder, so I'd suggest looking there first.
Tip:
if your email from Ancestry doesn't arrive check your spam folder; the address
it is sent from is AncestryDNA@ancestrydna.com so you could try adding that
address to your address book.
Uploading your data to GEDmatch is very
easy - simply log-in (or register if you haven't already done so) then click
the Generic Upload link on their home
page:
The only difficult part is waiting for
them to process your data - it could take a day or two before you are able to
search for matches. However if your initial aim is to
look more closely at a match you've found at Ancestry, you don't have to wait -
just so long as your DNA cousin has uploaded their results and told you their
kit number (this is allocated by GEDmatch).
I'll be writing more about GEDmatch in
future newsletters, but there's lots of guidance on the GEDmatch site, and
you’re not going to break anything if you experiment. One word of warning: not
all GEDmatch pages have a link to take you back to the home page, so you might
need to use the browser back button (or else you could open GEDmatch in other
tab).
Tip:
GEDmatch are currently working on GEDmatch Genesis, which is in the beta
testing stage (so you can try it out); currently GEDmatch Genesis offers the
only way for those who tested at Living DNA to search for cousins.
Finding an unknown close
relative
I was recently contacted by a
LostCousins member who, having taken a DNA test, found a previously unknown
half-brother who had been adopted. I can't go into more details for reasons of
privacy, but what a wonderful discovery!
I'm hoping that one of these days I'm
going to find a previously unknown 1st cousin. Soon after I began researching
my family tree I was informed by my aunt, then in her late 80s, that her mother
- my maternal grandmother - had told her a story which suggested that my
grandfather had fathered a child in between his two wives. It certainly seems
quite feasible, since there was an 8-year gap between the death of his first
wife and his marriage to my grandmother, but trying to track down that child in
the records is nigh on impossible.
This story
in the Toronto Tree - published by
the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society - is also fascinating. The
wonderful thing about DNA is that in some cases we're able to answer questions
about parentage that even our ancestors couldn't!
Family
Tree DNA are currently offering
discounts on Y-DNA, mtDNA, and autosomal (Family
Finder) tests. They're the only major company offering Y-DNA and mtDNA tests for genealogists, but when it comes to atDNA they have strong competition from Ancestry, who have
a much larger user base.
Follow this link
to support LostCousins and save $30 on a 37-marker Y-DNA test, $40 on a
full-sequence mtDNA test, or $20 on the Family Finder
atDNA test. You can save even more if you purchase
more than one test for the same person (since they can use a single sample),
but bear in mind that Y-DNA and mtDNA tests only tell
you about a single line, so are not for everyone. Family Tree DNA sell
worldwide at the same US dollar price - only the delivery charge varies - and
no ongoing subscription is required.
Tip:
if you test your autosomal DNA with Ancestry you can transfer your raw data to
Family Tree DNA to search for more cousins, but it you test with FTDNA you
can't transfer your results to Ancestry - this is one of the key reasons I
re-tested with Ancestry earlier this year.
Ancestry
Canada are currently offering a $30
discount on autosomal DNA tests - please follow this link to support LostCousins.
Ancestry
UK are offering discounts to some customers - try
this link (if it doesn't
work first time log-out from your Ancestry account, then click the link again).
Living
DNA are still discounting their
prices in many territories (see the links below), and they're also giving a 15%
discount on personalised ancestry books when you use the code LDNAUKBOOK17 (in the UK) or LDNAUSBOOK17 (in the
US).
Living DNA offer a more detailed analysis
of your ethnicity and one that is more relevant. One LostCousins member has
been able to confirm a family story about the exotic origins of his great-great
grandfather thanks to Living DNA identifying DNA from Sindh, now in Pakistan.
Perhaps DNA testing could also prove
whether the tartan-wearing villagers of Gurro, in the
Italian Alps, are really descended from Scottish migrants (see this BBC article for more
details)?
There was a big fuss this week about the
plans to silence the chimes of Big Ben, probably the world's most famous bell,
for several years in order to protect the hearing of
workers who are repairing the tower. As someone who grew up hearing
the sound of Big Ben just before the start of the news on the Home
Service it got me thinking…. and I realised that it was only because of the
invention of radio that most people, even Londoners, were
able to hear the bell striking.
A century ago our ancestors could have
gone through their entire lives without once hearing Big Ben strike the hour. So is it really worth risking the health of the maintenance
staff just so that we can keep up a modern tradition? I don’t think so. Big Ben
will be back - that's all we need to know!
I took some holiday earlier this month -
hence the late publication of this newsletter - but I did manage to reply to
most emails promptly. Mobile phone coverage is improving on the Norfolk Broads,
where we were staying, though there are still many places where I have to put
my SIM card in a MiFi dongle and connect a
4G aerial in order to get a usable data
connection. I only wish it was possible to buy a smartphone which supported the
use of an external aerial!
But even with an aerial I can’t always
get data coverage on the O2 network, so I keep on hand an EE SIM (my latest EE SIM
cost just £7.48 for 2GB of data valid for 30 days from activation - I bought it
here). I like to travel, but I can't bear
to be out of touch for very long.
Whilst I did pick blackberries from the
hedgerows, as usual at this time of year, I was delighted
to discover damsons, mirabelles, and cherry plums
growing wild - so as soon as I've sent out this newsletter I'll be putting on
my pinny and cooking them up! Have you found any special treats this
summer? It amazes me how few people seem to be interested in foraging these days
- is it a generational thing?
In 10 days' time I'll be meeting with
Findmypast - do you have any suggestions that you would like me to pass on to them?
Not about new record sets (since you can be sure that they're already doing
what they can), but the way the site works. This is my one chance in the year
to talk to the people who can really make a difference, and I'd like to make
the most of it.
Finally I'd like to send my best wishes to a very special
LostCousins member - my 1st cousin once removed, Karen, who has just had an
operation to remove a brain tumour.
I've just heard that Ancestry are
offering free access to their UK & Ireland records this weekend, from Friday through
to Monday. This link
will list the records that are included in the offer. UPDATE: earlier in the weekend
it was impossible to access parish registers under the offer, but Ancestry have now
fixed the problem.
Until next time,
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2017 Peter
Calver
Please do NOT copy or
republish any part of this newsletter without permission - which is only
granted in the most exceptional circumstances. However,
you MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for
permission - though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins
instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE