Newsletter - 11th December 2019
GEDmatch partners with Verogen BREAKING
NEWS
How
many great-great-great grandmothers do you know?
Growing Up in London, 1930-1960
When the husband wasn't the father
Why we can't afford to ignore DNA evidence
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 29th November)
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):
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!
GEDmatch
partners with Verogen BREAKING
NEWS
The mostly-free GEDmatch
website, which I've always thought of as the LostCousins of DNA, has recently
been in the news because of its ability to crack previously unsolvable crimes.
Now it has been taken over by Verogen - a business which used to be part of
Illumina, the firm that makes most of the chips used for consumer DNA tests.
Verogen describes itself as a
forensic genomics company, and provides services to forensic laboratories. When
Verogen was spun-off from Illumina in 2017 the stated aim was to bring "an
unprecedented focus on accelerating growth of Illumina’s leading
next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology in the forensic genomics market".
It isn’t a field that I follow closely, so I can’t tell you whether they've
succeeded.
Note: this page
describes what Next Generation Sequencing is, for those who would like to know.
How will GEDmatch users be
affected? It's hard to tell at this stage, not least because the site crashed
when I tried to log-in on Tuesday! I'll update this article if additional information
is forthcoming.
It has been some time since I
actively encouraged the use of GEDmatch - useful though it can be to some of us,
my experience of watching how others use it suggests that it can be counter-productive
for the vast majority. Indeed almost all of the time, effort (and considerable expense)
I put in before testing with Ancestry in 2017 turned out to be wasted - a tragedy
for me, but because the lessons I learned are incorporated into my Masterclass,
it’s a windfall for you!
Latest: this NBC News article
provides some insight into the future of GEDmatch.
How many great-great-great
grandmothers do you know?
These days it's not that
unusual for people to live to 96 - but when baby Caillie was born in October
2016, Vera Sommerfeld of Lethbridge, Canada became a great-great-great
grandmother. Now, I don’t know about you, but one of my 32 great-great-great
grandparents died in 1835, 115 years before I was born, and even the longest-lived
(she lived to nearly 88) missed my arrival by 43 years. I didn’t even get to
meet any of my great-grandparents, and 2 of the 3 grandparents who were still
alive in 1950, when I was born, were dead before I started school.
You can read the BBC's 2016
article about Vera and her family if you follow this link, and this week
there was a new article
in the Guardian (Vera is now 99). Apparently there's only one documented
example of someone living long enough to greet the arrival of a
great-great-great-great grandchild, and she was 109 at the time - can any
LostCousins members match that?
As you can see from this
extract from the 1939 Register, Ernest William Cawcutt was just coming up to his
30th birthday when war broke out in September 1939:
© Crown Copyright
Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and used
by permission of Findmypast
However he didn’t go off to
war. Whether that was because his job as a statistics clerk for the gas company
was regarded as essential to the war effort, or because he had some disability
I can only guess, but one thing I do know is that his interest in statistics
led to him keeping a notebook crammed with information that - 80 years on - provides
fascinating insights into what life was like on the Home Front.
Yesterday I walked round my local supermarket - whatever
I wanted, all I had to was reach out and put it in my trolley: in went a turkey,
apples, oranges, fresh figs, chestnuts, and much more. The only constraint was
that I had to pay for it all when I got to the checkout.....
By contrast, Christmas 1941
was not a time of plenty, and despite rationing the shops were half-empty: indeed,
according to Ernest Cawcutt's notes there was no fresh fruit at all, no nuts,
and very few sweets. And whilst there was a little poultry on sale the prices were
"very high".
Ernest Cawcutt wasn't a
relative of mine - though he might well have worked for North Thames Gas, one
of the companies that provided me with a holiday job when I was at university. The
fact is I stumbled across his notebook by chance, when glancing through an auction
catalogue.....
This week there was a sale of
London-related ephemera, photographs, and artwork at the international auction
rooms just down the road from the home of LostCousins - and Ernest's little notebook
was one of the items up for sale. It was described as having belonged to an ARP
warden, although there's no evidence from the 1939 Register that Ernest Cawcutt
served in this role, and because the personnel records haven't survived - see
item 7 in this Research
Guide at the National Archives website - we may never know for sure.
Over the coming weeks and months
I'm going to feature snippets from Ernest's notebook - it'll be interesting to
see whether they bring back any memories!
Growing Up in
London, 1930-1960
Have you downloaded your free
copy of this wonderful book yet? You'll find it on the Peter's Tips page
of the LostCousins website (remember to log-in to your account first - if you've
forgotten your password you can get a reminder here).
In the meantime here are some
extracts to whet your appetite - and as it's nearly Christmas they're on the
subject of food:
"Our
diet was highly predictable – Sunday roast, Monday cold with bubble and squeak,
Tuesday shepherd’s pie. Mid-week escapes me, possibly liver and bacon, but Friday
was fish, though we were not Catholics. Mum, obsessively hygienic, always wore
an apron in the kitchen and often rubber gloves. Yet on liver and bacon days
she coated the liver with flour sprinkled onto a newspaper (to keep the worktop
clean) with a cigarette drooping from her lips. I longed to see the ash drop
onto the meat, but she always seemed to focus at crisis point and tap it into
the sink."
It was very similar for me
when I was growing up in the 1950s (except that my father and mother didn’t smoke).
Liver and bacon is still one of my favourites, and I add a spoonful of Marmite
to the gravy, just like my mother did.
"I’m
too young to remember what food was like before rationing, and what you haven’t
had you don’t miss. The moment I got home from school I’d make myself some
bread and dripping, or marge, colourless and greasy stuff that tastes not at
all like butter,o r today’s you-can’t-tell-the-difference margarine. I much
preferred the dripping,
though
the idea of it now has no appeal whatever. Butter would be wonderful but there
was so little of it on the ration that it was strictly off-limits. An
apologetic coating of jam, which was also on ration, but bread wasn’t, so I
could fill myself up with that."
I just caught the end of rationing
- but it was only when I asked my mother to explain why I had to eat more eggs
than she and my father did, that I was told that my ration was higher than
theirs. According to Ernest's notebook (see the previous article) eggs were
rationed from 1st July 1941 onwards.
When the
husband wasn't the father
Last month a paper was
published which looks at the rates of so-called extra-pair paternity,
where the mother is married, but not to the father of the child - in this
situation the husband is often described as a cuckold, a term which
derives from the cuckoo's habit of leaving its eggs in the nests of other
birds. Although there has been speculation that in the modern world the rate is
as high as 30%, DNA studies have shown that the actual rate is closer to 1%.
A team in Belgium headed by
Maarten Larmuseau looked at whether, in earlier centuries, social class made a
difference. Using data from Belgium and the Netherlands they found that this
was indeed the case: the overall rate was 1.6%, but amongst farmesa and
well-to-do craftsman it was only 1%, whereas amongst labourers and weavers it
was 4%, rising to 6% in densely-populated cities in the 19th century.
Why we can't
afford to ignore DNA evidence
One
of the first things we learn when we start to research our family tree is that
records aren't perfect - and neither were our ancestors. We are continually
frustrated by births that weren't registered, baptisms that weren't recorded, illegitimate
children whose father is unknown, incorrect ages and fathers' names on marriage
certificates, wrong ages on death certificates - and that's without the more
exotic hurdles such as foundlings, adoptions, cuckolded husbands, bigamous
marriages, late or non-existent marriages, and changes of name.
We
don't have a time machine, so we can't go back and ask our ancestors to fill in
the gaps in our knowledge. However we do have evidence that our unsuspecting
ancestors left behind, but which won't be found in any archive or record office
- segments of their DNA that we and our cousins have inherited.
I
know that some genealogists take the view that using DNA is somehow cheating,
but it would be absolutely ludicrous if we ignored some of the evidence,
wouldn't it? I know some people say "It's my DNA", but it
isn't really - apart from the odd mutation every single base out of the 3
billion pairs has been inherited from our parents, who in turn inherited them
from their parents, and so on. What is true is that, with the exception of identical
twins, we all have a different combination. Even brothers and sisters have very
different DNA even though they've inherited it from the same parents.
There
are three key benefits from using DNA as part of our research. One is the way
in which it can corroborate the written evidence and family stories that have been
passed down over the generations; another is the way in which it can
corroborate the research that we've done based on the written evidence - after
all, just because the evidence has survived doesn't mean that we've interpreted
it correctly.
But
arguably the most important benefit is the opportunity to knock down 'brick
walls' by using DNA evidence to fill in gaps in the records, or to point us in
the direction of records that we wouldn't otherwise have thought to search -
I'm thinking particularly of those all too frequent cases where an ancestor
materialises in a parish without any evidence of his or her origins.
Some readers may remember
that in 2012 I wrote
about people who carried the DNA of others in their bloodstream. I was reminded
of this when my attention was drawn to a New York Times article
which reported on the experience of the recipient of a bone marrow transplant.
This is relatively new
technology - although the first such transplant took place in 1956, it involved
identical twins, and it was only in 1985 that the first transplant involving an
unrelated donor took place. It's very unlikely, therefore, that the genetic
genealogists of today are going to be confused - but it does serve to remind
us how important it is that the records of today survive for the benefit of the
genealogists of the future.
It seems that as men get
older, an increasing number of their white blood cells lack the Y-chromosome
that the man inherited from his biological father (red blood cells don’t contain
DNA). According to this article
in The Atlantic studies "have linked loss of the Y chromosome in
blood to cancer, heart disease, and other disorders", though it isn’t absolutely
clear which is cause and which is effect. Nevertheless, one expert quoted suggests
that the disappearing Y chromosome is a sign the body is allowing DNA errors to
accumulate, and that could be a precursor to cancer.
Men produce sperm cells
throughout their lives, so could this phenomenon result in older men fathering
more daughters than sons? Some of your may remember that in 2013 I reported
research from the US which suggested that this was indeed the case for fathers
over the age of 55, although subsequent analysis of LostCousins members' family
trees didn’t support this.
Note: if you want to check
your own tree and have a Windows PC the free Family Tree Analyzer program will
do it for you - and much more besides. You can download it here, but if you need support please don’t
contact me, as the members of the LostCousins
Forum are in a far better position to help.
Family Tree DNA have
discounted prices until Christmas - but their Y-DNA test is the only one I'd
generally recommend, and even then it might not be the best option. Unless
you're taking part in a Surname Project the chances are that testing your Y-DNA
won’t provide any useful information, so if your 'brick wall' is within range
of autosomal DNA (ie it's in the last 5 or 6 generations), Ancestry DNA is a
much better bet (and it can tell you about any of your lines, which makes it
really cost-effective).
Prices below exclude
shipping.
Ancestry.co.uk
(UK only) - reduced from £79 to £59 until 24th December
Ancestry.com.au
(Australia/New Zealand) - reduced from $129 to $89 until 25th December
Ancestry.com
(US) - reduced to just $99 to $59 until 31st December
Ancestry.ca
(Canada) - reduced from $129 to $89 until 25th December
Family Tree DNA - save
up to 40% on ALL tests until 28th November; use this link from 29th
November
Remember, you can transfer
Ancestry DNA results to most other sites in order to get more matches, but you can’t
go the other way. The only way to get exposure to the world's largest
genealogical DNA database is to test with Ancestry - which is why I re-tested
with them in 2017.
DJ Wiseman is best known to readers of this newsletter
as author of the Lydia Silverstream series of genealogical mysteries (you'll find
my reviews here
and here).
But with each book that I
read my opinion of the author goes up, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day
he's competing for the Booker Prize. Indeed, when I reviewed
The Subtle Thief of Youth last year I wrote that of all the authors whose
work I've reviewed in this newsletter, only Ian McEwan (nominated for the
Booker six times, winner in 1998) is in the same league.
Set on a fictional island off
the Pacific coast of Central America, Casa Rosa could pass for a
posthumously-published work by Graham Greene - and rather like my experiences
with Greene's A Burnt-Out Case, I didn’t, at first, think that I was
going to like it. How wrong can one be? By the time I was on page 6 I was absolutely
captivated!
Stuart Henry Rose, known to everyone
as Harry, is not a perfect man - he's done things that you and I wouldn't
approve of - but he seems to be, at heart, a good person. So naturally our
instinct is to disbelieve the allegations.... and yet, there's that little nagging
doubt. After all, we're seeing everything from his point of view - he may not
be the narrator, but without a doubt he's the one pulling our heart-strings. Well,
him and Gabriela, but she's surely too young and innocent to have been involved?
It's not a genealogical
mystery - there's no genealogist amongst the cast of characters - yet the
author has been researching his family tree for far longer than I have, and birth
certificates are key to the story; even DNA has a bit part. And it's certainly
a mystery - a young mother has gone missing even before the book begins. Why
did she leave, where did she go, and what prevented her from returning?
I found I had to ration myself
- I could easily have read this novel, all 256 pages of it, in a single
sitting. But that would have been like drinking Chateau Lafite from the bottle
- to get the most from this wonderful novel take small sips and roll them
around in your mind!
Anyone who has read DJ
Wiseman's other books will need no encouragement to read Casa Rosa - so
this review is addressed primarily at those who are new to his work. The good
news is that there's absolutely no need to read the author's other novels
before reading this one, though if you decide to go on and read the Lydia
Silverstream novels (as I suspect you will), I'd recommend you read A Habit of
Dying before The Death of Tommy Quick.
Available as a Kindle book or
in paperback, Casa Rosa is a delight to read - and I'd like to think
that having created such an interesting collection of characters the author has
plans for a follow-up. You can support LostCousins when you buy Casa Rosa
(or anything else, for that matter) using the relevant link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
The Art of Midwifery: Early
Modern Midwives in Europe offers
fascinating insights into the important role of midwives (primarily female
midwives). Who were they, what training did they undergo, how much did they charge
- and how did our poor ancestors manage to pay? I'm hoping to put together an
article that will answer most of these questions.
This Christmas advert for a family-run hardware shop in
Wales is really heart-warming. Produced for just £100 it can hold its own against
the seasonal adverts that cost millions - and because it features three generations
of the same family it’s not only appropriate for this time of year, it’s also perfect
for a family history website. And no, LostCousins won’t earn a penny if you buy
from Hafod Hardware, but I hope
you'll support them anyway - innovative small businesses deserve to succeed.
DNA uploads to MyHeritage
are free until 18th December, potentially saving you $29.
That's all for
now - but I'll be back in touch before Christmas - see you soon!
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
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?