3/8/2023 LostCousins Newsletter

The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 24^th July) click here; to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this paragraph and the next (it searches ALL of the newsletters since February 2009, so you don't need to keep copies):

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Findmypast CEO steps down BREAKING NEWS

Tamsin Todd, who joined Findmypast as Chief Executive Officer in September 2017, announced on Tuesday that she is stepping down. During her tenure Findmypast secured the contract to digitise the 1921 England & Wales census, and launched it to great acclaim in January 2022.

A genealogist’s nightmare: Smiths in London

At 2pm (London time) on Thursday 10^th August the genealogist and author Dr Janet Few will be giving a one-hour Zoom presentation on the problems of tracking ancestors with common names in towns and cities – you can find out more details and book a place here. If it provides some clues that enable you to knock down a ‘brick wall’ then I’m sure you’ll consider it well worth the modest £10 cost (Society of Genealogists members pay a reduced rate of £6.50).

Note: even if you can’t make the date or time, provided you book in advance you will have access to the recording for 14 days afterwards.

Like many of you, I suspect, I have Smith ancestors who were in London in the 19^th century. I couldn’t find them in the 1841 Census even though I knew (from baptism register entries) where they were living – it was one of the London streets that is missing from that census. In any case, the 1841 Census wouldn’t have told me where Edward was born – birthplaces weren’t named until 1851.

Whilst there was a family in the 1851 Census that might have been them, my ancestor is consistently shown as a carpenter in the baptism register entries for his children:

This Edward Smith was shown as rag merchant, not a carpenter – and to me the two occupations seemed worlds apart. The address wasn’t familiar either – though it was still in the same part of London.

On the other hand, the names and ages of the children were largely consistent with what I knew – though when it came to the three youngest I couldn’t find baptisms for Clara or Alfred, and the one baptism I had found was for Eleanor rather than Ellen. The absence of my great-great grandmother Rebecca was also annoying since it’s a less common forename than the others – although at 15, going on 16, she could well have left home. Indeed, I did find a Rebecca Smith of the right age who was a barmaid at the Old Rum & Puncheon in Rose & Crown Court,

But for Edward Smith’s transformation from carpenter to rag merchant I would have been certain it was the right family – as it was I was fairly confident, but not convinced. The clue that clinched it came from an unexpected source….

A couple of years earlier I had purchased a certificate for the marriage of my great-great grandparents William Beamont and Rebecca Smith:

At the time the names of the witnesses meant nothing to me – the name Maria Hitchins still doesn’t. But the name of the visitor on the 1851 Census looks rather like Thomas Scatchman, don’t you think?

It transpired that just three weeks after the 1851 Census Eliza Smith married Thomas Scotchmer. These days it would be fairly easy to make the connection, despite the misspelling of the surname, however Ancestry didn’t begin putting the London parish registers online until a few years later – so I was fortunate that the unusual surname had stuck in my mind.

That wasn’t my only piece of luck – Edward Smith died from pulmonary tuberculosis later that year. Had he died 9 months earlier I might never have traced his origins to Herne in Kent, or discovered that on his mother’s side he had a 16^th century Walloon carpenter for an ancestor. That census record allowed me to take one of my ancestral lines back more than 250 years!

British Newspaper Archive adds 50 years of The Scotsman

This week the British Newspaper Archive has added more than 400,000 pages from The Scotsman for the years 1951-2002. There are now almost three-quarters of a million pages from this key title, covering the period 1817-2002.

Of course, you can also access the 69 million pages in the British Newspaper Archive through Findmypast if you have a Pro or Premium subscription.

If you haven’t already had a free trial at Findmypast now’s probably a good time (given the weather forecast!). Please follow this link so that LostCousins can benefit if you end up subscribing – and note that whilst you can’t have a free trial of the Premium subscription (which includes the 1921 Census), you can upgrade to Premium from a paid Pro subscription for a modest sum.

Accents and dialects of the British Isles

I suspect that most people can distinguish English accents from Welsh or Scottish accents, but pinpointing the location within each country is more difficult.

I recently discovered a fascinating series of YouTube videos by a language coach Dave Huxtable which graphically (or, rather, audibly) demonstrate the key differences between accents in different parts of the country. I began with A Tour of The Accents of England and even though I could have identified most of them with my eyes shut, I would have struggled to explained to someone else precisely how they differ.

If you want to hear how people spoke more than a century ago, the British Library has a collection of recordings of British prisoners-of-war that were made during WW1 by the German sound pioneer Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967) - you can listen to them here. Discovered in the Berliner-Lautarchiv (now part of Humboldt University) by a British academic in 2006, it’s the oldest collection of English dialect sound recordings in existence.

After the war, between 1928-31 Wilhelm Doegen recorded Irish (Gaeilge) speakers from 17 counties, some of them speaking in dialects which are now extinct – you can listen to those recordings here.

The main language spoken in Scotland is English, but in the 2011 Census about 1.5 million people reported that they could speak Scots. I found Dave Huxtable’s video The Scots language interesting, whilst this article on the British Library website explains far better than I possibly could how people in Scotland speak.

Tip: on the same page there is a map of Britain with pins that you can click to hear modern examples of accents.

Essex Record Office has a sound archive and there is a separate site, Essex Sounds, where you can hear mostly modern examples of accents from around the county. I suspect that most other counties have sound archives, though some may not offer online access.

Of course, the way people speak in different areas has changed over time, first as a result of the migration that was a consequence of the Industrial and Agrarian Revolutions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then in the 20^th century with the invention of radio and television. These days someone who lives within commuting distance of London might well sound very much like a Londoner, but a century ago things were very different.

We may not be able to hear how our ancestors spoke, but we can imagine how they might have sounded, and how their words might have been misinterpreted by a vicar or a registrar – though the example in the next article surely can’t be down to accents…..

Is this the most inaccurate birth registration ever?

Pauline sent me a copy of this entry from the GRO birth registers. It’s misaligned so that some of the information is missing, but that’s not why I wanted to share it with you – it’s the information that it does show that is of concern:

Don’t worry – you couldn’t possibly be expected to spot the errors without having done considerable research into this family. But, to cut a long story short, the child was not called Richard – it wasn’t even a boy! And the mother wasn’t called Sarah Ann.

Neither Richard Fox nor his wife Elizabeth Allerton could sign their names when they married by licence at West Walton, near Kings Lynn, in 1831 (Richard came from Middleton, about 15 miles away). So when Elizabeth went to register the birth of their daughter, Sarah Ann, on November 1842 it would been the responsibility of the registrar to question her carefully in order to solicit the relevant information before entering it in the register.

We can’t possibly know what Robert Johnson said, nor how Elizabeth interpreted his questions, but clearly there was considerable miscommunication! The outcome is reminiscent of Eric Morecambe’s assertion that he was playing “All the right notes…. but not necessarily in the right order”. (You can see the classic Morecambe & Wise comedy sketch featuring André Previn here.)

In the birth register Elizabeth is shown as Sarah Ann (twice), Sarah Ann is recorded as Richard, and the poor baby is suffering from gender dysphoria. At least the vicar got it right when the child was baptised at St Mary’s, Middleton on 20th November 1842!

Note: the GRO birth registers were assembled from loose leaves submitted by registrars, the entries having been copied from the registers held locally – notice the signature of the registrar at the bottom of the page. Whilst it’s possible that the entry was recorded correctly in the local register, the fact that the wrong mother’s name appears twice suggests that this is unlikely.

Bissextus

If LostCousins members are representative of the population as a whole, roughly 1 in 1500 of you will have good reason to know what the term bissextus means – but you will all be familiar with the concept.

Both the Julian and Gregorian calendars incorporate leap years, in which an extra day is added to some years to allow for the fact that the Earth takes slightly more than 365 days to orbit the Sun. If you were born on February 29^th you’ll know only too well that your birthday only comes round every 4 years – but what you may not realise is that it hasn’t always been that way.

Instead of adding an extra day at the end of February the Romans doubled up – in leap years 24^th February was repeated, so 28^th February was always the last day of the month. And it wasn’t just the Romans who adopted this strange practice: it was also used in other countries, including England. In 1236, under Henry III, it was ordered that the two days should be reckoned as one, and whilst 29^th February begins to appear in records during the 1400s, the proceedings of the House of Commons continued to use the old system until the mid-16^th century.

It is unlikely that family historians will encounter the old-style leap days in parish registers, but nonetheless there’s plenty that can confuse us. The switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1752 famously resulted in the loss of 11 days in September, and 1752 was also the first year which, for legal purposes, began on 1^st January – though even before that most people celebrated New Year’s Eve on 31st December.

Nevertheless, whilst in England both calendar changes took effect in the same year, this wasn’t the case in many other countries – for example, Scotland switched to 1^st January in 1600, but didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. (There is a list of countries and dates here.)

Note: I read this week that Ukraine has moved Christmas Day from 7^th January to 25^th December, which means that Ukrainians will have two Christmases this year. 7^th January is the date in the Julian calendar which corresponds to 25^th December in the Gregorian calendar.

Double-dating

When you’re referring to a date prior to 1752 it’s important to make it clear whether it’s an old-style or new-style date, and if you come across correspondence written between 1582 (when the Gregorian calendar first came into use) and 1751 you may well find that it shows two dates.

My own practice is to record dates as if the year had always begun on 1^st January, but not to adjust for the change in the calendar. However where the date is between 1^st January and 24^th March inclusive I’ll note the year as, for example, 1711/12.

If you are looking at transcribed records it may not be obvious what protocol the transcribers used. Sometimes in search results you’ll see the same entry with two different years – typically this happens when there are multiple sources for the same record.

Tip: one eagle-eyed member has noticed that Ancestry seem to be updating their pre-1752 transcriptions so that the year is based on a 31^st December year-end, even though this won’t be what the register entry shows.

You didn’t keep a diary? Me neither

I’m afraid that I’ve never been in the habit of keeping a diary – I’ve started once or twice, but I always gave up because I never seemed to have anything interesting to write about.

Of course, what seemed uninteresting to me at the time might be very interesting now, but it’s too late. Or is it? Although I may not have kept a diary, I’ve kept all sorts of bits and pieces – ticket stubs, old passports, bank and credit card statements, and bills. Whilst they might seem rather mundane to you, one of the problems I have is that whilst I can remember places I’ve visited, and things that I’ve done, I struggle to remember when these things happened – but with the help of my accumulated ephemera I can often work out the year, and sometimes the precise dates.

I was reminded of this when I saw a Daily Mail article about a man who found an old Tesco receipt – and wondered why there was anything newsworthy about a grocery bill from 1997 (other than the fact that prices were a lot cheaper then). I’ve got plenty of bills that are a lot older than that, including the invoice for the first computer I bought (in 1978)!

Note: other sources of information include friends and family, photo albums, postcards, local newspaper reports, church and parish magazines, society records, even historic weather data. And, if you still have access to them, emails from the early days of the Internet.

Save on Ancestry DNA in Germany ENDS THURSDAY 10TH

In Germany you can currently purchase Ancestry DNA kits for just €59 plus shipping, a saving of €10 – and even if you don’t live in Germany yourself, like me you may have cousins there.

The offer runs until Thursday 10^th August – please use the link below so that you can support LostCousins when you make your purchase:

Entdecke deine Herkunft, mit Ancestry DNA

Tip: wherever you live, be sure to follow the advice in my DNA Masterclass – you can make a start even before you get your results!

New records at The Genealogist

The Genealogist has just added a significant batch of The Jewish Chronicle from the First World War and The Jewish Echo (Scotland and Ireland’s only Jewish paper of the time) covering years during the build up to World War 2. Other Jewish records at The Genealogist include Seatholders of London Synagogues between 1920 and 1939, The Jewish Year Books from 1896 to 1939 and the Jewry Book of Honour (1914-1918).

The Genealogist continues to add records from the ‘Lloyd George Domesday Survey’, which was compiled between 1910 to 1915 – the most recent additions are for the Hitchin area of Hertfordshire. At the moment the coverage is centred on London and the Home Counties – you can see which parishes are currently included if you follow this link and click the box on the Search form labelled Parish.

Also on the site you’ll also find the biggest online collection of tithe records and tithe maps – again, you can find out which parishes are included by clicking here.

Tip: The Genealogist has scanned many tithe maps in colour, which really brings them to life (if you do find tithe maps elsewhere they’ve usually been scanned from microfilm). If you can’t find the property you’re looking for in a search, you can usually find the plot number from the map.

EXCLUSIVE OFFER

A good way to discover how The Genealogist can help your research is with a 4 month Diamond subscription (which gives access to all of the records on the site). For the next two weeks the price is reduced by 30% to £44.95 and when you use this link you’ll also get a free 12 month subscription to the digital magazine Discover Your Ancestors worth £24.99

Note: your subscription will renew automatically at the same discounted rate – in fact you’ll benefit from the same rate so long as you subscribe continuously.

Avunculate marriage

My article in the last issue about the grand-daughter who was described in the 1911 census as a niece prompted a great deal of correspondence, and one of the topics that came up was the legality of marriages between uncle and niece.

Avunculate marriage, ie between uncle and niece or aunt and nephew, is illegal in England and many other countries, but legal in others including Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Germany. In the US it is generally prohibited, but in the state of Rhode Island it is permitted for Jewish marriages.

When Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act came into force in 1754 it specifically excluded Jews and Quakers from the requirements of the Act, and it seems that Jewish marriages between uncles and nieces, or aunts and nephews, continued to take place well into the 19^th century.

Many historical figures married their nieces. Alois Schicklgruber and his third wife Klara Polzi are often said to have been uncle and niece, but if one accepts Schicklgruber’s claim that he was the natural son of Johann Georg Hiedler, his step-father, they were 1st cousins once removed. Only if he was the son of Johann Georg’s brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (or Hüttler), as some suggest, would they have been half-uncle and half-niece.

If Alois and Klara were closely-related it might have contributed to the deaths of their first three children; unfortunately the fourth child survived….

Slaughter of the innocents?

Another historical figure who married his niece was King Herod who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, ordered that all males under the age of 2 in the Bethlehem area be slain. Whether or not that actually happened is debated by scholars, though there’s no doubt that Herod was a nasty piece of work.

But according to Professor Gregory Hanlon at Dalhousie University, Canada our ancestors were just as ruthless, routinely practising infanticide – and he’s not talking about prehistoric peoples, or even our medieval ancestors, because his book Death Control in the West covers the period 1500-1800.

After examining baptism records from Italy, France, and England Professor Hanlon comes to the conclusion that in the absence of birth control, parents limited the size of their families by committing infanticide – in other words, death control. It’s certainly true that in researching my own tree I’ve found that the further I go back, the fewer siblings my ancestors seem to have had, but in the past I’ve always attributed this to low fertility rates due to malnourishment, high numbers of miscarriages, and poor standards of mother and baby care.

Could Professor Hanlon have spotted something that others have missed – or turned a blind eye to? I’m going to take a close look at the section of the book which relates to England, to see if there might be other possible explanations for the anomalies he has identified. I suspect that the author isn’t as familiar with Church of England parish registers as we are!

Not all deaths are registered

This news article, about the discovery of the body of a man who disappeared 6 years ago, is a reminder that not every death is registered, and not all of our ancestors would have been buried (or cremated).

In earlier centuries when there was no NHS or social security, few people had bank accounts or owned property, and passports were not required for overseas travel, it was relatively easy for someone to disappear – even if they didn’t change their name, which they often did. These days it’s more difficult, but you can’t assume that someone has died, just because they’ve disappeared. This guide on the GOV.UK website explains how to obtain a declaration of presumed death.

Note: when convicts were transported they often lost contact with their families – this article from 2018 by Professor Rebecca Probert is well worth re-reading.

Society of Genealogists EXCLUSIVE OFFER

One of the first things I did when I began to research my family tree was to join the Society of Genealogists. Founded in 1911, when genealogy was the preserve of a privileged few, the society has come a long way in the last 112 years – indeed, it has probably adapted better to the opportunities that the Internet offers than most family history societies.

All SoG members have online access to the society’s collection of digital records, some of which are unavailable at any other site, and we can also benefit from the support of a thriving community of fellow genealogists.

The SoG hosts several regular free member-only sessions, including a Book Club (family historian and gardening expert Alan Titchmarsh will be talking about his latest book in September), Brick Wall busting sessions, a Palaeography Club (the first session is on Tuesday evening), and Lunchtime Chats on specific topics with expert genealogist Else Churchill (the next one is on 31^st August, and focuses on building a genealogical library – what books would you recommend?).

As an SoG member you are able to book courses and talks at a discounted rate, and as almost all of them are delivered online via Zoom it doesn’t much matter where you live. Indeed, most are recorded and made available to registered attendees for 14 days afterwards, so even if the timing is inconvenient (or you have a last minute change of plan), you needn’t miss out.

Now is a particularly good time to join (or rejoin) the SoG because I’ve negotiated a very special deal for readers of this newsletter – purchase an Associate Membership for £56 and you’ll be able to attend FIVE different 1-hour talks absolutely free. As a non-member you’d pay at least £10 for each talk, and even at the member rate it’s a substantial saving. You could argue that you’re only paying £6 for your first year’s membership!

Here are some upcoming 1-hour talks that caught my eye:

The Life of a Live-In Servant through Letters – 2pm Saturday 26^th August

Unravelling Jewish Genealogy – 7pm Wednesday 30^th August

Murder, Sex & Mayhem in English Churches – 10.30am Saturday 2^nd September

How We Used to Live: Vernacular Houses through Time – 2pm Thursday 14^th September

Family Photography: Past, Present and Future – 2pm Thursday 21st September

Beyond the Death Certificate – 2pm Saturday 23^rd September

I highlighted those to give you an idea of the variety, but there are many other topics to choose from.

To take advantage of the offer the first step is to join via sog.org.uk/members. Once you have activated your account, email membership@sog.org.uk with the offer code LCAug2023 as the subject, and your choice of 5 events in the body of the email. You have until 31st August to join and choose your inclusive talks – don’t miss out!

Note: please give at least 5 working days' notice of the talk. Although the talks can be scheduled for any date, you must book them by 31st August. Places are subject to availability – it’s first come, first served.

Keeping tabs on Scottish relatives

If you’re entering relatives on your My Ancestors page who were recorded in the Scotland 1881 Census you may have encountered difficulty locating the census references.

For example, here’s a record from Ancestry (I’ve added the blue lines to pinpoint the census references:

You can see that whilst the Registration Number, and the Enumeration District (ED) are shown, the Page number seems to be missing.

However at the top of the record you’ll see the words Detail and Source. What isn’t immediately obvious is that you can click on Source to display additional information about the record, ie:

Normally the Source Citation gives all the information necessary to identify a record and find it again, but that isn’t the case with this dataset: you need to take information from both parts of the record.

But at least Ancestry include the census references for the Scotland censuses – at Findmypast you won’t find them anywhere! However you don’t need any subscriptions to get the information because the LDS transcription of the Scotland 1881 Census is FREE at ScotlandsPeople, and the census references are really easy to find:

Tip: because LostCousins focuses on censuses which are FREE online you don’t need ANY subscriptions to find and connect with your ‘lost cousins’, the experienced family historians who not only share some of your ancestors, but are researching them!

Masterclasses

Over the past 20 years I’ve helped thousands of individual members research their ancestors, but I soon realised that I could help far more people by recording everything I knew about a particular topic in a Masterclass article. These comprehensive Masterclasses have subsequently been updated as new records have become available, or new techniques have been introduced.

If you’re supporting my work by paying a subscription (it’s a trifling £10 a year, or £12.50 for a joint subscription covering two accounts, usually husband and wife) then you’ll be able to access the Subscribers Only page, where you’ll find a link to the latest revision of each Masterclass.

But even if you’re not a subscriber it’s not difficult to find the Masterclass articles – just type ‘masterclass’ into the search box near the start of any newsletter. Make sure that you sort the search results by date, so that the first Masterclass you come across for a particular topic is the current version.

Tip: you can use the Search in the newsletter to find articles on any topic – it saves you having to ask me when an article was published, then wait for a response. This self-service option is not only quicker, it ensures that I can focus on writing new articles and updating Masterclasses.

Peter’s Tips

This week I was picking blackberries for the first time this year. For now they’re in the freezer, but the chances are they’ll end up in a batch of my Spiced Blackberry, Apple, and Elderberry jam – I’m just waiting for the elderberries to ripen.

We have a bumper crop of cucumbers this year, so I’m looking for ways to cook them. They’re far too big for pickling whole, and in any case we don’t eat a lot of pickles, so I’ll probably turn them into soup or curry – but if you have any better ideas, please drop me an email (my address was in the email telling you about this newsletter).

Finally, a reminder that if you do receive emails telling you about this newsletter, it’s because you registered as a LostCousins member at some point in the past.

Whilst free LostCousins membership entitles you to search for your ‘lost cousins’, the family historians who – unbeknown to you – not only share some of your ancestors, but are researching them, it also puts you under a moral obligation to do what you can to help your cousins to connect with you. LostCousins isn’t a site where you pay a subscription and download records – it’s all about cousins helping each other, not because you’re related, but because you’re researching the same ancestral lines.

Fortunately it isn’t difficult – simply add to your My Ancestors page as many relatives as possible, ideally from the 1881 Census. You don’t have to enter them all in one go, of course, but the sooner you enter them the better for everyone – and because matching is not only automatic, but highly accurate, nobody else needs to see your entries.

No need to worry about privacy because you’re not publishing information online – other people can’t see your My Ancestors page, and the only way they’ll know you’ve entered someone from the census is if they’ve entered the same person from the same census.

To find out how to log into your account click this link and enter your email address (the one that was shown in the body of the email you received) – you’ll receive an automated email with all the information you need.

I give my help and advice freely on the understanding that you’ll do your level best to help your own cousins. If you’re not prepared to do that (and please, no wishy-washy excuses), clearly you can’t expect me to help you. God helps those who help themselves – I help those who are prepared to help their cousins!

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I’ll be back soon with more news from the world of family history – look out for my email!

Description: Description: peter_signature

Peter Calver

Founder, LostCousins

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