Newsletter – 8th
December 2023
My Christmas gift to you
– LostCousins is FREE for the rest of this year!
Your chance to shine –
in this year’s competition STARTS TODAY
Fantastic prizes on
offer – anyone can win
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
Case study: Identifying
an unknown grandparent
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 21st 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!
Believe
it or not, the more experienced you are, the more important it is to
collaborate with other experienced family historians who are researching the
same ancestral lines.
Here’s
why…. each time you go back a generation the number of ancestral lines doubles,
so by the time you’ve been researching 20 years or more there will be at least
a hundred, and possibly several hundred of ancestral lines to research, and a
similar number of ‘brick walls’ blocking your path.
Note:
I’m not counting collateral lines – I’m talking about your direct ancestors,
without whom you wouldn’t be around today.
Some
of you might have been put off by the fact that we use the 1881 Census to
connect cousins. However it’s in no way a measure of
members’ achievements (after all, most of us are researching in the 1600s), it’s
simply a handy technique for achieving 100% accurate matching without either
researcher needing to disclose information in advance.
If you’re still not convinced, this article takes the discussion
further: When
experience really counts
If
you live in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US – or, indeed, anywhere other
than Britain – it's worth remembering that provided you have British ancestry,
most of your living cousins from those lines are still living in Britain. After
all, when someone emigrated they might have taken
their family with them, but they certainly wouldn't have taken their entire
extended family!
Although
we also use the 1841 England & Wales census at LostCousinis,
almost 90% of all matches with cousins are made through the 1881 censuses. So it’s worth tracing your collateral lines all the way
through to 1881, as you'll find many more cousins that way. Remember, they may be collateral relatives to
you, but they’re your cousins’ ancestors – ALL of our cousins
are descended from collateral lines (after all, that’s what makes them cousins!).
Tip:
if you live in the New World your British cousins are thousands of miles closer
to the archives that hold the records of your British ancestors – only a small
fraction of the records that have survived are online.
My Christmas gift to you – LostCousins is FREE for the
rest of this year!
From
now until midnight on New Year’s Eve the LostCousins site will be completely
free, allowing you the opportunity to connect with as many new cousins as you can
– and unlike some other sites you won’t be asked to provide bank or
credit card details. Because this offer coincides with the start of my Annual Competition
(see below) the ancestors and cousins you add to your My Ancestors page will also count as entries - it's a really great
opportunity!
If
you're new to LostCousins, or have forgotten how easy it is to enter relatives,
see the Getting Started Guide on the Help
& Advice page - and remember, all of the key censuses we use are
available FREE online (see the Census Links
page for a list) , so to take part you won’t need ANY subscriptions for ANY sites.
Tip: even if you are
unable to add any new relatives you can take advantage of this offer to check for
matches with your existing entries (click the Search button on your My
Ancestors page).
It
goes without saying that if you have friends or relatives who are researching
their family tree, but haven’t yet joined, this would be a great time to tell
them about LostCousins – no special codes are required, and they certainly won’t
be asked for credit card or bank details! When the free period ends they will still have access to all of their
data, they will still be able to correspond with the cousins they’ve found,
and they will still receive my newsletters, but they won’t be put
under any pressure to pay a subscription.
And,
of course, there will be more free periods in 2024 – as there have been every
year since LostCousins was founded, nearly 20 years ago!
When
there are so many terrible things happening in the world that we can’t do
anything about, perhaps it’s time to consider where we can make a difference?
Times
are hard for many – I know that only too well because of the number of members
who have apologised for not being able to renew their LostCousins subscription,
even though it’s only £10 a year. I suspect that family history societies are
also going through a difficult time.
But
there is something we can all do that will help others, yet won’t cost
us a penny – indeed, it might actually save us money.
We can reach out to our ‘lost cousins’, the experienced family historians who not
only share some of our ancestors, but are actively researching
them. Many will be up against the same ‘brick walls’ as we are, so you might
think “what’s the point of connecting if all we can do is commiserate with each
other?”.
Personally I take a more positive view, and perhaps you
will too – once you’ve thought it through? First of all, there’s the old adage
that “two heads are better than one” – it’s not only easier to solve problems
when there’s someone else to bounce ideas off, it’s more
fun. Sherlock Holmes needed Watson, Cagney needed Lacey, Tintin needed Snowy… you
get the picture.
But
it’s not just about tactical advantages, there also practical advantages – when
two of you are working together rather than independently there’s less
duplication of effort, and you can use the time saved to work on your other ‘brick
walls’.
Let’s
face it, when we’ve been researching as long as we have, there are more
ancestral lines and more ‘brick walls’ than we can possibly manage on our own.
We all have corners of our tree which we haven’t explored for months, or even
years – but that’s not something to be ashamed of since there are, after all,
only 8 days in a week (according to The Beatles).
And
then there are the financial advantages – it’s not just about exchanging copies
of certificates, there’s also the cost of subscription and pay-per-view sites,
and the travelling expenses involved in visiting record offices. After all,
there’s still an enormous amount of data that isn’t online, and the further we
get back the more reliant we are on records that have yet to be digitized.
Best
of all, the more experienced we are, the more we benefit from collaborating
with our ‘lost cousins’ – it’s the gift that keeps on giving!
Your chance to shine – in this year’s competition STARTS TODAY
To
have a chance of winning my competition you only have to do what should come
naturally to any LostCousins member: search for your 'lost cousins', and tell other family historians about the opportunities
that LostCousins offers.
For
those of you who've yet to begin searching for cousins, this is a very good time
to put your excuses to one side and make a start, even if you can only spare 5
minutes a day.
Every direct ancestor
or blood relative you enter on your My
Ancestors page before midnight (London time) on Wednesday
31st January 2024 represents an entry in the competition, and for each one you
enter from the 1881 Census you'll get a bonus entry.
Tip: a 'direct
ancestor' is someone from whom you are descended, such as a great-great
grandparent - many people just call them ancestors; a 'blood relative' is someone
who shares your ancestry, but isn’t a direct ancestor (eg your ancestors' siblings and cousins, and their
descendants).
Last
year there were more prizes and more winners than ever before, and it’s likely
to be same this year! And because I'll be giving away prizes during the
competition period, as well as at the end, the sooner you start adding
relatives, the more chances you'll have of winning. You can win more than one
prize – some entrants won several prizes last year!
Fantastic prizes on offer – anyone can win
Two
years ago I introduced the My Prizes page at the LostCousins website:
this lists the prizes on offer and allows you to express your preferences – it doesn’t
guarantee that you'll get the prize that you want, but it does mean that you won’t
be offered a prize that you don't want (because you will only be considered for
prizes that you have rated positively).
The competition also moved into the 21st century
with several prizes that took advantage of Zoom to provide unique experiences
and opportunities – from one-to-one consultations with experts, to
exclusive presentations with a small audience so that everyone who wanted to was able to ask a question. Some sessions were repeated at different
times of the day so that members could join in whichever part of the world they
were in.
This
year we are being supported by Findmypast and The Genealogist –
the two leading British genealogy companies, with billions of records to help
you explore your family history.
12
MONTH FINDMYPAST PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION – NORMALLY £199.99
A
Findmypast Premium subscription offers exclusive online access to the 1921
England & Wales census, as well as billions of other records from Britain
and around the world – including Catholic records that you won’t find anywhere
else. The winner will also be able to search more than 70 million pages from the
historic newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive – by far the largest online
collection of British newspapers.
Tip:
Findmypast have recently upgraded their newspaper search
12
MONTH DIAMOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE GENEALOGIST – NORMALLY £139.95
With
the biggest online collection of tithe maps and tithe records, and a growing
collection of maps and records from the ‘Lloyd George Domesday’ survey of
1910-15, The Genealogist offers the opportunity to discover records that you
won’t find anywhere else. It’s also a
great place to find missing ancestors in the England & Wales censuses,
because not only does The Genealogist have better quality images of many census
records, there are search features that you won’t find
elsewhere.
Tip:
try the Map Explorer
I’m
also able to announce two of the fantastic speakers who will be supporting
LostCousins this year:
Professor Rebecca
Probert
will be giving an exclusive presentation entitled Why EVERY family historian needs to
know the history of family law at 10am (London time) on Saturday 10th
February.
As
the author of Marriage
Law for Genealogists Professor Probert is the leading expert in a field
that is incredibly important to everyone with English or Welsh ancestry.
Understanding why our ancestors married when and where they did, or why they
didn’t marry, is fundamental to our research.
Dave Annal worked for The National Archives for
many years, and is now a professional genealogist and author
– but he’s also known to many as the presenter of Setting the Record
Straight, a series of short YouTube films which take a new look at old
records.
At
10am (London time) on Thursday 15th February Dave will be leading a
seminar on the subject of Misinformation and
What YOU Can Do About It.
Incorrect
information whether in trees, books, are even parish registers presents a
problem that we all have to face, and after showing a
brief video we’ll be opening the discussion up to the audience – we want to
know what problems misinformation has caused for you, and how you dealt with
them. Were you able to persuade someone to change their tree?
Further
prizes will be added during the coming week and the My Prizes page will
be updated as prizes are added, so check now and again to see what is 'up for
grabs'.
Researching
who our ancestors were and how they lived is one thing, but would I want to live
as they did? A 19 year-old in Scotland is doing just
that, dressing in 1940s clothes, driving a 1938 Austin Cambridge car, and only
using a bakelite telephone from the 1940s (goodness
knows what will happen when they switch off landlines in his area).
You
can read more about this remarkable individual in a BBC News article.
When
I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a
child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish
things. (1 Corinthians 13:11 - King James version)
As
we go through life our understanding improves and our priorities change. I’ve
never kept a diary as a record of what I’ve done during the day – the most I can
manage is a wall calendar on which I record upcoming appointments.
It’s
only in recent years that I’ve regretted not having kept more evidence of my
life – not necessarily so that I can pass it on, but so that I can be more
certain about what I did and when. Youngsters are always looking forward, but
when you get to my age there’s a lot of looking back and, if I can’t be sure of
the details or the timing, there may not be anyone else I can ask.
Earlier
this year I set up a spreadsheet where I could note dates and events from the
past as I came across them – I haven’t got very far, but having somewhere to
record the information is reassuring.
Last
week I was searching through old photos in order to
find a suitable snow scene for this year’s Christmas card when I realised that digital
photos provide a record of where I was on certain dates – even a badly taken photo
can provide vital clues. I got my first digital camera in 2000, a wonderful 50th
birthday present from my wife (or partner, as she then was), and the great
thing with digital cameras is that you don’t have to worry about developing and
printing costs – you just keep pressing the button, and
hoping that some of the shots work out.
Also
last week, when I heard about the death of Shane McGowan, lead singer of The Pogues, it reminded me that we’d seen them perform at a Madness
concert in Hackney (Madness is a musical combo, m’lud).
I wondered if I might find some photos that would confirm the date, but didn’t find any – I suspect cameras were banned - however
Google managed to find a site that had all the details of the concert, so I now
know where I was, and what I was doing on 17th July 2009.
Inspired
by Google’s success with that concert I came up with another challenge for the
doughty search engine – could it tell me when folk rock singer and guitarist Roy
Harper performed at Southampton University in the early 70s? Once again Google was
able to help, and I now know what I was doing in the early evening of 31st
January 1971 – sitting in Roy Harper’s van directing him and his support team
to the Student’s Union. Sadly I couldn’t afford 7
shillings for a concert ticket in those days – it was the equivalent of 4 lunches
in the refectory – and, despite my suggestion that one good turn deserved
another, I never did get to see Roy Harper that night.
Can
you fill in some of the gaps in your memory using photographs or searching the
Internet?
The
best prices of the year are almost always over the Black Friday period, and I’m
sure many of you took advantage of the opportunity to save on Ancestry DNA
tests. But if you didn’t, there are still significant savings to be made – the
current offer could well be the best deal you’ll get between now and next
November.
Lies,
damned
lies, and statistics!
According
to Ancestry, 326 of my 11749 DNA matches are with relatives who are my 4th
cousin or closer. If I look at the figures for my wife the number is slightly
higher, 377 out of 17237 total matches. You might feel that the number of close
matches ought to be higher – but consider this: an analysis by Ancestry found
that on average people of British descent have 1778 cousins who are 4th cousin
or closer, and of those 1778 close cousins, only around 1320 would share
sufficient DNA to show up as a match.
You
can see the breakdown in the chart below, which is included in my DNA
Masterclass. Note that Ancestry reported the expected number of
1st to 6th cousins – the figures for 7th to 10th cousins are my
extrapolations.
Are
you with me so far? If the figures at the start of this article are to be
believed then, assuming my wife and I have an average number of living cousins,
around 25% of them must have taken an Ancestry DNA test! This seems most
improbable considering that Ancestry only claim to
have 23 million or so sets of DNA results in their database. If you total up
the populations of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain
and Ireland you get to a figure of around 480 million, so even if Ancestry only
sold their tests in those locations the proportion of the population who have
tested can’t be more than 5%.
It would seem that Ancestry are reporting around
5 times as many close matches as they ought to be – so how might this happen?
One possibility is that my wife and I have many more cousins than average – but
in fact the number of close matches we have seems to be on the low side. I
picked at random five of the other DNA tests that I manage, and all had rather more
close matches than I do, whilst all but one had more close matches than my
wife.
Realistically
the likelihood is that the number of close matches reported is higher because
it includes some cousins who are more distantly-related, but
happen by chance to share more DNA than the theoretical average. For example,
the coloured chart in the Masterclass shows that the average DNA shared by 5th
cousins who are matches is 25cM, not only more than the theoretical average for
4th cousins, but also above the 20cM cut-off point for ‘close matches’ at
Ancestry. Again these are not my figures, the chart is provided by the Shared
cM Project run by DNA guru Blaine Bessinger, with
contributions from thousands of individual researchers,.
What
can we learn from these surprising statistics? First of all,
they remind us how variable the amount of DNA shared by cousins can be – partly
because the amount of DNA we inherit from each of our ancestors is randomly
distributed, but mainly because the size of the match with a cousin depends on
the overlap (if any) between the segments that each of us inherited from our
common ancestors.
Second,
this variability means that you can’t look at the amount of DNA shared and from
that deduce how two people are related. For example, I share just one 16cM
segment of DNA with a 3rd cousin, so little that Ancestry suggested that he was
5th to 8th cousin, whereas I share two segments totalling 30cM with a 5th
cousin.
I
was always taught that you shouldn’t pigeonhole people; each person should be
treated as an individual. And yet, when we’re faced with thousands upon
thousands of DNA matches we have to group them
somehow, otherwise we would never make sense of them.
Ancestry
provide 24 groups – each associated with a different
colour dot – that you could use to identify cousins from particular ancestral
lines. There aren’t sufficient colours that you can allow one for each line,
and when this feature was first introduced I didn’t
plan precisely how I was going to use the groups. That was a mistake – you can
do much better than I did.
Tip:
most of what I write about DNA is designed to prevent you making the same
mistakes that I did – having worked with DNA for well over a decade and taken
every test there is, from every major provider of genealogical genetic tests,
I’ve not only made my share of mistakes, I’ve also disappeared down numerous
rabbit holes in an attempt to mine my DNA matches for more information.
A
better way to use the colours would be to allocate one to each great-great
grandparent, which would require 16 of the 24 groups, leaving 8 for ‘special projects’. Genetic genealogy expert Dana Leeds came up with
much the same solution, so rather than reinvent the wheel I’m going to direct
you to this free
online
presentation in which Dana explains the ‘Leeds Method’.
Advice
from genetic genealogy gurus who live in the US has to
be taken with a pinch of salt – their experience of DNA is likely to be very
different from ours. For example, it’s likely that you won’t have nearly as
many matches as they do – when you watch the video you will notice that Dana
has ‘over 1000’ close matches, and bearing in mind the presentation was given
over 3 years ago it’s fair to assume that she has significantly more now. I
only have 326.
Tip:
something else to bear in mind about DNA gurus is that some of them are a
generation younger than most of us, so in many cases they’ve benefited from
being able to test their parents (and perhaps some of their grandparents).
Techniques
that work for these young gurus might not be as effective for you and me - but
the principle behind the Leeds Method is a sound one.
Case
study: Identifying an unknown grandparent
This autumn I’ve been helping a
LostCousins member, who I’ll call ‘Valerie’, in an attempt to
identify an unknown grandparent. In this case it’s her paternal grandfather,
but the principle would be similar whichever grandparent it was.
Note: you might think
it’s unlikely that a grandmother would be unknown, but it’s important to
remember that many people were adopted informally before the Adoption of
Children Act came into force in England & Wales in 1927, and it’s rare that
any documentary evidence has survived – if, indeed, it ever existed..
The first crucial step was to attach a
tree to Valerie’s DNA results. You might be wondering why this was so important
given that the relevant quarter of the tree was empty – however, attaching a tree
allowed Ancestry to look for Common Ancestors, DNA matches whose connection
could be inferred from Ancestry trees, and that was a key part of the process.
Tip: Ancestry don’t just
look at your own tree and your cousin’s tree, they look at all
of the trees in their collection – including not only public trees, but
also searchable private trees.
Once Ancestry had worked their magic
it was simple to pigeonhole the Common Ancestors matches according to
which quarter of Valerie’s tree they belonged in. We
used reddish colours for her maternal grandparents, and a blue shade for her paternal
grandmother. Of course, there were no Common Ancestors matches for the final
quarter of the tree – but don’t worry about that just yet.
The next step was to identify the Shared
Matches for each of the Common Ancestor matches – these were put in
the same pigeonhole as the relevant Common Ancestor match.
Finally
it was time to start looking for clues to the identity of Valerie’s grandfather.
Working down her list of matches, starting from the top (ie the cousins who shared the most DNA), we looked
for matches which hadn't already been put in one of the pigeonholes, ie they had no coloured dot.
When we came across a match with no dot we didn’t assume that it was necessarily related through
the mystery grandparent – first we double-checked, by looking at Shared
Matches, to make sure that none of them had a coloured dot either. If none had
a dot we started a new group, choosing shades of green so that they stood out visually
from the groups for the three grandparents who were already known.
We ended up with four groups that didn’t
connect with any of Valerie’s three known grandparents, so it was reasonable to
hypothesise that they were linked through her unknown grandfather. The next
step was to look for links between the different groupings – two of which were
in Scotland, and two in the south of England.
First
we found a connection between the two Scottish groups: then, after
researching their descendants, we found one who had moved south and married in
the very same county where the largest of the two English groups was centred. From
knowing absolutely nothing about Valerie’s grandfather we now have some very
interesting leads, and I’m confident that we’ll solve the mystery before long.
If one of your recent ancestors is
unknown don’t despair – you have thousands of clues in your DNA!
I have added an important update to the article Pigeonholing your DNA matches.
I’ll be back soon – and in the meantime I hope you’ll be adding considerably
to your My Ancestors page!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2023 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?
Many of
the links in this newsletter and elsewhere on the website are affiliate links –
if you make a purchase after clicking a link you may be supporting LostCousins
(though this depends on your choice of browser, the settings in your browser,
and any browser extensions that are installed). Thanks for your support!