Newsletter - 18th April 2019
LostCousins is completely
free for Easter ENDS
WEDNESDAY
Win an Ancestry test for yourself or your British cousin EXCLUSIVE
Last year's competition winner is very happy!
Success story: lost and foundling
Woman with her organs in the wrong place lives to 99
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (13th April) 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!
LostCousins is
completely free for Easter ENDS WEDNESDAY
Nobody has
to pay to find their 'lost cousins'. Almost all of
the censuses we use (including at least one from each country) are free online,
and each year there are several periods when the LostCousins site is completely
free, which means that all members can contact the cousins they've been matched
with.
It's easier to find cousins
than you might think - when you enter a relative from the England & Wales
1881 census on your My Ancestors page
there's 1 chance in 15 of an IMMEDIATE MATCH. This
means that most new members would be able to find at least one 'lost cousin' on
the day they join!
Of course, there are many members
who don't complete their My Ancestors
page on the day they join. That's fine, of course, so long as they don’t keep
kicking the can down the road. Unbelievably there are some people who've been
members for over 10 years but still haven't found a spare half hour to help
their own cousins.... let's hope they read this article and put matters right!
Nobody can research their
entire family tree on their own - so connecting with others who share your
ancestors is a great way to achieve far more than you possibly could on your
own. And most people have inherited photographs, correspondence, medals, or
other items that have little intrinsic value but would mean a lot to a relative
- you won’t find everything online or in record office.
Of course, there are many
ways to search for cousins, but when you find them in the phone book or the
electoral register there's nothing to tell you whether or not
they know anything about their family tree, so most of the time you’re going to
be disappointed. You need a thick skin and a lot of confidence to go down that
route!
It's the same with DNA - you'll
be matched with tens of thousands of genetic cousins, but most of them won’t have
a tree, and even when they do, the chances that there are common ancestors who
appear in both trees is very small indeed (typically around 1 in 1000). So most of the time you can't be sure whether they're really
cousins or how they're related.
By contrast, finding a 'lost
cousin' - someone you know to be researching their family tree, and - whose
connection to you is documented - is like gold dust. Yes, there's still a small
chance that they won’t reply (usually because they've changed their email
address), but in that case you have me to act as a helper or intermediary.
Incidentally, if you have tested
your DNA then finding a 'lost cousin' who has already tested (as many
LostCousins members have) will make it easier for you to make sense of your DNA
matches - see this article
from last month. And even if your cousins haven't tested, it'll be much easier
to persuade a fellow reader of this newsletter to test than someone who doesn’t
share your interest in genealogy!
Win an Ancestry
test for yourself or your British cousin EXCLUSIVE
Wednesday 1st May will be the
15th Birthday of LostCousins, and to celebrate this achievement I'm giving away
an Ancestry DNA test. I purchased it from Ancestry.co.uk, so it can only be used
by someone in the UK - but since every LostCousins member either lives in the
UK, or has cousins here, I hope you'll all take part in my competition.
Every direct ancestor or blood relative you
enter on your My Ancestors page between 13th April and
midnight (London time) on Tuesday 30th April 2019 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 - most people just call them ancestors; a 'blood
relative' is a cousin, ie someone who
shares your ancestry.
If the winner lives outside
the UK they'll be invited to nominate a relative in
the UK to receive the prize - and even if you live in the UK you can do the
same (if you have already tested). Arranging for a cousin to test is a great
way to maximise the value of your own DNA test.
Last year's
competition winner is very happy!
Some of you will recall that
Muriel won a DNA test in my competition last year - and as there's another test
up for grabs in our 15th Birthday Competition she thought that you might be
inspired to enter by hearing how successful she's been:
"I
hope this year's winner has as much enjoyment out of it as I have had, and what
with getting another test for my husband, it has been quite a memorable year.
We too have found more cousins in far away places and
with connections back several generations, showing what a powerful tool DNA can
be - and that our data is sound.
"I
have not found the connection where several of our matches show up on both our
DNA results.
[Muriel
is referring to matches that she shares with her husband - this could indicate that
he and she are distant cousins, but that's not the only possible explanation.]
"I
was interested to find how many of my relatives had gone to live abroad as I
thought my lot were firmly rooted in the south of England.... We have also
managed to solve a family mystery on my husband's side, something we had not
hoped to do before DNA testing."
Success story:
lost and foundling
If you watched the TV
programme about foundlings earlier this year you'll be
heartened to read this wonderful story from a LostCousins member who I've been
corresponding with over many years:
"In
November 1918 a baby girl was found on the streets of London; there was no
evidence of who her parents were. She was taken into the nearby workhouse
infirmary, where she was assessed as being about 4 months old. Staff gave her
the name Florence.
"Florence
eventually had children and grandchildren of her own. One of her grandchildren
decided to see if she could find out more about where Florence came from, and
she and two of Florence’s children took DNA tests. These revealed a strong
(probably 3rd cousin level) match with one of my 2nd cousins, as well as
matches with other relatives of my 2nd cousins. This enabled us to see who the
common ancestor was, a man born in Norfolk in 1822 who moved to London in the mid 1800s.
"We
drew up a tree of all his descendants, and used the
details to assess who might be a candidate for one of Florence’s parents (at
this point we didn’t know if it was the father or mother that we were looking
for on this line). We divided people
into 3 categories: impossible (dead, too old, too young, already married before
1918 etc), strong (aged around 15 to 40 in 1918), or in-between. Initially there were about a dozen names on
our strong list.
"We
then looked for living descendants using BMD indexes, electoral registers,
wills, phone books and social media sites. Our aim was to get more people to
take a DNA test so that we could use the strength of the matches to narrow down
the possibilities. We contacted several; some of them did not reply, but a
couple of DNA results helped us to reduce the number of strong candidates and
to exclude some of the others. But we needed a stronger match.
"We
had already established that there was no birth record of a baby with the right
surname being born out of wedlock at the right time in the right area of
London. But it then occurred to us that if Florence was about 4 months old when
she was abandoned, there ought to be a birth record for her. So
we looked for any girl born in mid-1918 to a descendant of the known common
ancestor.
"There
was only one such record in the right area of London. This child had been born
in June to a married couple who had already had 3 children and had another in
1920. We had originally put the mother in our impossible list! But a check on
the child turned up no further record of her between 1918 and 2017 - no death,
no marriage, no appearance in the 1939 Register (even just searching on her
birth date). And interestingly, the
child’s forename was used as the second name of the child born in 1920. Was that in memory of the abandoned
child? Could she be our Florence?
"Fortunately we were able to find the war record of the
father; this suggested (but not conclusively) that he was away on service at
the times the child would have been both conceived and born. So
we looked for living descendants of the couples’ other children, and one (a son
of the child born in 1920) agreed to take a DNA test. The strength of his match
to Florence’s children indicated that he was almost certainly their half 1st
cousin. We had surely found both Florence and Florence’s mother - so much for
thinking that the impossible was impossible! Presumably the mother had
abandoned the child in fear of the reaction of her husband when he returned
from the war following the Armistice.
"We
are now looking for Florence’s father. The original DNA results had indicated
strong links to a second family, so we have gone through the same process as
for the mother. Interestingly several descendants on this line were living
within a stone’s throw of Florence’s mother in the period 1911-1918. We are
also using an online tool that allows us to hypothesise where in a tree an individual fits and calculates the relative probabilities of
the hypotheses, based on the strength of DNA matches. We now need just one
strong DNA match."
Until recently it would have been
impossible to work out who Florence's parents were - now her mother has been
identified, and the list of possible candidates for the father has been
whittled down to just two. All it took was determination, hard work, and DNA!
Note: I heard the first part of this wonderful story
last year - and the question I asked my correspondent then was very simple, but
absolutely crucial. Can you guess what it was?
Woman with her
organs in the wrong place lives to 99
This story on the BBC
website was fascinating - I wonder how many of us have undetected conditions of
this type?
I don't usually write about a
website before I've had a chance to try it out myself, but this Singapore-based
site comes highly recommended by the LostCousins member who discovered it - and
it’s free!
Follow this link to try it out yourself - and let me know
what you think.
Much as I enjoy reading
genealogical fiction, I also have the duty to identify books that are going to
help you research your tree, or understand the world
in which your ancestors lived.
I don't know how many of you
have ordered the books on cohabitation that I reviewed
in the last issue, but they are such important contributions to English family
history that, even though they were published a few years ago, I felt they shouldn’t
be ignored. Professor Probert's book is the more comprehensive, and the more
accurate of the two, but they are both enlightening in their own way.
Books on the use of DNA by
genealogists are not as common as one might expect, given the surge in popularity
of the tests themselves - but perhaps that's because you don’t need to know
what's under the bonnet in order to drive a car. When I first started taking
DNA tests I read anything and everything that was
published, but nowadays DNA providers like Ancestry insulate users from the
nuts and bolts.
Nevertheless, when I heard
that my favourite DNA guru, Debbie Kennett, had contributed a chapter to Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and
Case Studies I knew it would be worth reading... and with nearly 400 large format
pages to get through I suspect I'll be reading it for some time to come!
If you can’t wait for my review please use the links below when you place your order:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca The
Book Depository
This is where any
major updates and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted
an error first reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check again before writing to me, in case someone else has
beaten you to it......
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?