Newsletter – 6th August 2025
Ancestry bring forward release of Suffolk registers ONLINE NOW
The unsung hero of the Great War
Certificates of naming: follow up
Save £25 on Ancestry DNA ENDS 13TH AUGUST
The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
99p Kindle books for family historians
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 26th 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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Ancestry bring forward release of Suffolk registers ONLINE NOW
Like many of you I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the parish registers for Suffolk, and the initial announcement from Suffolk Archives at the end of July gave a release date of Thursday 14th August. But earlier this week my attention was drawn to an announcement on the Suffolk County Council website which gives a revised release date – this Friday!
If you’ve already rearranged your holiday in order to be around for the launch I’m sorry – this is something that is completely out of my control. What I can do, however, is explain that only the parishes which are in the diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich are included in this release – several parishes in and around Lowestoft (ie in Lothingland Deanery) are excluded from this new release because they are in the diocese of Norwich. However, most or all of those parishes are already included in the Norfolk collection which has been online at Ancestry since 2016.
While you’re waiting for Friday you might find it amusing to watch this short video demonstrating how Ancestry scanned the Suffolk documents – don’t worry, it has been speeded up!
Suffolk registers
The unsung hero of the Great War
Today, Wednesday 6th August, is the 71st anniversary of the day I slipped on a grassy slope in a Romford park and fractured my left femur. I was taken to Oldchurch Hospital, a former workhouse, where I spent the next 6½ weeks recovering, the first part with my leg suspended in the air with a 5lb weight stretching it.
I have very few memories of that time: the only reason that I know these precise details is because after my discharge on 21st September 1954 the Orthopaedic Registrar, P N Barua, wrote to my GP with details of my treatment – and some years ago I obtained a copy of my medical records from my current GP. Prior to that I couldn’t even be sure which leg it was that was broken – though perhaps the fact it was my left leg might explain why I am right-footed, despite being left-handed.
Re-reading the letter from the hospital a few days ago I noticed that it referred to a Thomas splint, and I was curious to discover what that meant. As so often happens, this quest took me on an unexpected voyage of discovery – one which began with a shipwreck 280 years ago.
Between 1743 and 1745 two young brothers washed up on the coast of Anglesey in north Wales; their speech was unintelligible and from their appearance they were presumed to be Spanish. One of the brothers survived only a few days, but the other – thought to be aged 7 or 8 at the time – was adopted by a childless couple and given the name Evan Thomas.
It soon became clear that he had special skills in healing injured birds and animals. He was so successful that the locals went to him for treatment. Indeed, the gentry also went to him. He treated Lady Bulkley after local doctors had tried and failed. Lord Bulkley was so impressed he commissioned a marble plaque to commemorate his achievements which is still to be seen inside the parish church of Llanfairynghornwy.
Source: The Anglesey Bonesetters
Evan Thomas passed on his skills to his sons. Bonesetting is an ancient art, and its practitioners – very few of whom had medical qualifications – tended to be disparaged by doctors. Most were part-time: for example, Richard Thomas, the third son of Evan Thomas, was a farmer who also held a clinic for those in need of treatment for bone and joint conditions.
Richard’s son, also Evan Thomas, was the first of the dynasty to work full-time as a bonesetter. He initially planned to emigrate to America as some other members of the family had already done, but decided to settle in Liverpool when he realised that there were many people there who needed his skills. He ran into opposition from local doctors and was involved in several court cases, but was acquitted on each occasion; a portrait of Evan Thomas as a young man now hangs in the office of the President of the Institute of Orthopaedics.
His eldest son, Hugh Owen Thomas, was born in Anglesey in 1834 when his mother was visiting relatives, and baptised at Bodedern on 21st September:
© Archives Wales – used by kind permission of Ancestry
He was a sickly child, so it was decided that he should grow up with his grandparents in Anglesey, but at the age of 13 he came back to Liverpool to study at New Brighton College, and you can see him on the 1851 Census with his father, now widowed:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
Having had so much conflict with the medical establishment Evan Thomas was determined that his sons should be medically qualified, and in 1859 Hugh Owen Thomas set up his own medical practice at 11, Nelson Street, Liverpool.
Hugh Owen Thomas and his wife Elizabeth Jones were childless so when Elizabeth’s nephew, Robert Jones, came to Liverpool to study medicine they took him in – as you can see from the 1881 Census:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
It was Hugh Owen Thomas (1834-1891) who invented the Thomas splint – but it was his wife’s nephew Robert Jones (1857-1933) who, as Inspector of Military Orthopaedics, was in a position to promote its use during the Great War. The adoption of the Thomas splint resulted in a reduction in the mortality rate for soldiers suffering fractures of the femur from 80% to 20% (or less – I discovered a range of statistics whilst researching this article). At the start of the war the most common treatment for a broken femur was amputation – no wonder so many soldiers died.
Sir Robert Jones, as he later became, has been described as the “Father of Modern Orthopaedics” (so has his uncle); this 2014 article from the Malaysian Orthopaedic Journal gives a much broader overview of Robert Jones’ career and achievements. You might also be interested in this historical factsheet provided by The Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, an NHS hospital in Oswestry, Shropshire.
I benefited from the Thomas splint, as I suspect did hundreds or (even thousands) of LostCousins members reading this. Indeed, some of you might owe your very existence to its use during the First World War!
Of course, the story doesn’t end there…. as genealogists we aim to go as far back as we possibly can. So where did the shipwrecked brothers really come from? In 2012 a BBC News article reported the results of analysis of the Y-DNA of a direct male line descendant of the first Evan Thomas – which strongly suggested that he came from the area of the Caucasus Mountains which includes Georgia, Ossetia and Southern Russia.
Note: one of the sources I reviewed when writing this article described Robert Jones as a descendant of Evan Thomas, but I didn’t uncover any evidence to support this assertion.
My wife recently drew my attention to the story behind some engravings that are coming up for sale at our local auction house this month. The description of the woman pictured in the engravings was intriguing:
Margaret M'Avoy was born in Liverpool in 1800. Having developed blindness, she became well known as being able to sense colours 'through the medium of her fingers'. Her claims were investigated by William Roscoe, a Liverpool historian, at the request of Sir Joseph Banks, a notable scientist. Roscoe concluded that her abilities were due to the fact she was not actually blind. M'Avoy passed away in 1820.
I was intrigued – but not by the story. I was curious about the spelling of the surname: was it really M’Avoy, or had it been mistranscribed? Searching at genealogy sites suggested that the name didn’t exist – and yet every reference to this woman that I could find on the Internet gave the same spelling. Next I tried the British Newspaper Archive at Findmypast – there was an 1817 article from the Lancaster Gazette, again with precisely the same spelling (you can read it here – it’s free to view, even if you don’t have a subscription, but you’ll need to log-in at Findmypast before clicking the link).
Finally I reviewed her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) published by Oxford University Press – I can access the latest (2004) edition through my local library, but the 1921-22 edition is online at Ancestry. Both give the surname as M’Avoy – here’s the earlier entry:
Source: Ancestry.co.uk
Searching at Ancestry had thrown up another clue – two names in the Liverpool Gaol calendars which began with Mc had been mistranscribed:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of
The National Archives, London, England.
Used by kind permission of Ancestry
Note how very small the letter ‘c’ is in relation to the other characters – it’s hardly surprising that the transcriber read it, erroneously, as a single quote. Was the surname M’Avoy a mirage? It was time to get a second opinion, so I uploaded the snippet from the Gaol Calendars to Claude.ai to see whether I was on the right track.
Yes, it's very likely that "M'Avoy" is indeed a "mirage" created by misreading the typography of the period.
What you're seeing is typical of 18th and early 19th century printing:
- The "Mc" prefix was often printed with a superscript lowercase 'c' that appears almost as a diacritic mark
- In your example, you can see this clearly with both "M'Avoy" and "M'Ilroy"
- The superscript 'c' was so small and positioned so high that it could easily be mistaken for an apostrophe, especially in worn or poor-quality prints
Liverpool parish registers (including Catholic baptisms and burials) are online at Ancestry, so it was time to look for entries that matched the biographical details.
The entry below, dated 13th July 1800, and taken from the baptism register of St Mary’s, one of the Catholic churches in Liverpool, is a good match. Her birth date is shown as 28th June 1800 in the ODNB entry so, whilst you could read the birth date in the register as either 25th or 28th Ult, I’m convinced this is the right entry:
© Liverpool Record Office – used by kind permission of Ancestry
Note that the spelling of the surname in the register is not M’Avoy or even McAvoy, but Macavoy.
Finding her burial in 1820 was slightly more difficult because, whilst she was Catholic, she was buried in a Church of England graveyard:
© Liverpool Record Office – used by kind permission of Ancestry
Whilst there is a discrepancy between the date of death shown in the ODNB entry and this burial register entry, this is clearly the correct entry. Note that this time the surname is written as McAvoy.
I have no interest in the spurious claims of a young girl who lived over 200 years ago – but I am interested in the unusual way that her surname was recorded in the newspapers and magazines of the day. Was it a timesaving shortcut at a time when all type was set by hand, or was it a way of avoiding a shortage of certain letters?
As it turns out, I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I’d looked more closely at the engravings that are coming up for sale in 2 weeks’ time – under magnification it’s clear that the inscriptions show her surname as McAvoy. Then again, if I’d spotted that at the outset I wouldn’t have embarked on this interesting journey!
For me, it’s a further reminder that we shouldn’t be too fussy about the spelling of our ancestors’ surnames – even if they could read and write. But what about you – are you still wedded to the idea that there’s only one correct spelling of each name?
Certificates of naming: follow up
You will recall from the article in the last issue that in England & Wales there are now two ways that a child’s forenames can be changed or added within 12 months of registration: one, which has been in place since the beginning of civil registration in 1837, is a name change following baptism; the other course is to submit a certificate of naming.
It’s always dangerous to make assumptions when it comes to civil registration, and I erroneously assumed that the introduction of certificates of naming coincided with a change in the heading of the final column on birth certificates. In the 19th century the heading read “Baptismal Name, if added after Registration of Birth”, as shown in this 1874 example sent in by Tony:
However it transpired that, remarkably, this form of wording was still being used as recently as 1952, 30 years after the example in the last newsletter, which clearly refers to a ‘Certificate of Naming’.
Fortunately, a member of LostCousins who is a former deputy registrar was able to pinpoint the legislation which implemented the change – it was section 8 of the Births and Deaths Registration Act, 1874.
8 Registration of name of child or of alteration of name
When the birth of any child has been registered and the name, if any, by which it was registered is altered, or if it was registered without a name, when a name is given to it, the parent or guardian of such child, or other person procuring such name to be altered or given, may, within twelve months next after the registration of the birth, deliver to the registrar or superintendent registrar such certificate as herein-after mentioned, and the registrar or superintendent registrar, upon the receipt of that certificate, and on payment of the appointed fee, shall, without any erasure of the original entry, forthwith enter in the register book the name mentioned in the certificate as having been given to the child, and having stated upon the certificate the fact of such entry having been made, shall forthwith send the certificate to the Registrar General, together with a certified copy of the entry of the birth with the name so added.
The certificate shall be in the form given in the first schedule to this Act, or as near thereto -as circumstances admit, and shall be signed by the minister or person who performed the rite of baptism upon which the name was given or altered, or, if the child is not baptized, shall be signed by the father, mother, or guardian of the child, or other person procuring the name of the child to be given or
Every minister or person who performs the rite of baptism shall deliver the certificate required by this section on demand, on payment of a fee not exceeding one shilling.
The provisions of this section shall apply with the prescribed modifications in the case of births at sea, of which a return is sent to the Registrar General of Births and Deaths in England.
The original fee for registering a change of name (specified in the Second Schedule to 1874 Act) was 1 shilling – but according to the website of Ealing Council the current fee is £44 (and that doesn’t seem to include a birth certificate).
There
are PDF copies of the (presumably) current change of name forms on the Surrey
County Council website:
Baptism Other
The heading on birth certificates seems to have changed in 1953, possibly as a consequence of the Births and Deaths Registration Act passed in the year (although I can’t see any reference to the change in the Act).
Tip: members of the LostCousins Forum had all this information last week – isn’t it time you joined? Check your My Summary page to see whether you’ve been invited – if you haven’t, it’s probably because you’ve too few entries from the 1881 Census on your My Ancestors page. Remember that LostCousins is about experienced family historians helping each other to knock down the ‘brick walls’ that you share – but until you enter sufficient data your ‘lost cousins’ won’t be able to find you!
Save £25 on Ancestry DNA ENDS 13TH AUGUST
If you’re in the UK you can save £25 on the cost of Ancestry DNA until midnight on Wednesday 13th August. It’s not the cheapest price ever, but it’s still a useful discount – and there’s no doubt that the Ancestry DNA test is the best.
Please use the link below so that there’s a chance of supporting LostCousins if you make a purchase (you may find it works better if you are logged-out from Ancestry when you click the link):
Save 30% on AncestryDNA®. Terms Apply.
Tip: if you don't currently have an Ancestry subscription you may have the option to purchase a 3 month World Membership for just £1 when you buy a DNA kit!
The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
Since I first mentioned that the Kindle version of this 3137-page masterpiece was available free from Amazon.co.uk over 2000 members have downloaded it – a theoretical saving of over half a million pounds!
Sadly, members outside the UK reported that they couldn’t get the Kindle version free, but I’ve since discovered that it’s also available free from Google Play Books and Google Books: this had enabled some overseas members to download it, though I can’t guarantee it will work for everyone. But do try this route if you can’t get the Kindle version!
If you did manage to get a copy you probably went straight to the entries for the surnames of most interest to you. However there’s a truly superb explanation of name origins at the beginning of the dictionary – I learned so much by reading it!
99p Kindle books for family historians
In the last issue I listed 17 books in the Pen & Sword Tracing Your Ancestor series which were reduced to just 99p for the Kindle versions. I know many members in the UK were able to take advantage of the offers while they lasted, but in most cases the prices had gone back up (typically to £4.99) even before the end of July, and when I checked just now there were only 3 books still available at 99p (please follow this link for the latest list).
I had hoped to bring you a list of genealogical mysteries at the knock-down price of 99p – a few days ago it was possible to buy Kindle versions of any of the first 7 books in Steve Robinson’s Jefferson Tayte series for 99p, but they’ve now gone back up. On the other hand, if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription (or take the free trial) you can read them completely free. Also included in Kindle Unlimited are MJ Lee’s wonderful Jayne Sinclair genealogical mysteries, so if you’re stuck for something to read on the beach this year you’ve got plenty of choices!
Sian has written a seasonal article for readers in the northern hemisphere….
While Spring is often considered the main season of gardening activity, Autumn is an equally important time especially for planting deciduous trees, shrubs, Autumn-flowering perennials and Spring bulbs. Autumn brings cool, damper weather; as with sea temperature, the ground temperature reduces slowly towards winter but takes much longer to warm up in Spring. This means that Autumn provides optimal conditions for new plants to acclimatise before enduring extremes of drought or a bitter winter.
September and October are also ideal for pruning many summer-flowering shrubs, shrub roses, fruit bushes, hardy climbers and deciduous trees. Wait until November and December to prune apples and pears; wait even longer until April-June to avoid introducing disease into your stone fruit trees and ornamental cherries (all “prunus”).
Choose shears, secateurs and loppers which are kinder on hands, wrists and backs. Sharp tools are less stressful for you and your plants; keep them clean and rust-free with alcohol sanitiser and linseed oil.
To prune, first remove dead, diseased, damaged or crossing branches, then reduce the height of tall shrubs and climbers to prevent strong winds loosening the roots (“wind rock”). Thin out congested or overgrown trees and shrubs by up to 25% of growth: improved air circulation reduces disease. Provide secure support if still at risk of wind damage. Chop grasses and herbaceous perennials down to ground level. Fleece-wrap tender plants or move them to a frost-free environment before overnight temperatures drop below 5c. Overwinter tender evergreens (like citrus) in a cool, naturally lit environment where you can occasionally water as necessary. Plant spring bulbs now; tulips can also be planted later.
Trim hedges and sweep lawns, paths and driveways; dump fallen leaves into a chicken wire pen to make compost. Remember: autumn gardening can also keep you healthier by boosting immunity, oxytocin and serotonin levels.
Finally, I’ve just received an email from Gardening Express about their End of Season Clearance – and looking through the Special Deals there are many plants selling for half-price or less:
Gardening Express Special Deals
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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