Newsletter - 28th June 2019
Celebrate Canada Day with your 'lost cousins' FREE
Do you have friends in Canada?
Essex registers indexed by Ancestry NEW
How to get from the transcription to the image EXCLUSIVE
Knocking down a 'brick wall' using the new transcriptions
Irish Poor Law records at Findmypast
Man who refused
to register son's birth loses court battle
DNA competitors unite to protect users' data
Manned mission to Mars? No need says study
Review: The Golden Age of Science Fiction
Review: Tracing Your Ancestors Using DNA
Save on The Somme Legacy ENDS SOON
Records of Nazi persecution go online FREE
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 21st June) click here; to
find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this paragraph
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don't need to keep copies):
To go to the main LostCousins website click the
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Celebrate
Canada Day with your 'lost cousins' FREE
1st July is a special date
for Canadians - it marks the day in 1867 when the Constitution Act came into
force, uniting three British colonies - the Province of Canada (Ontario and
Quebec), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick - into a single dominion called Canada.
Originally known as Dominion Day, it was renamed Canada Day in 1982.
This year it's a double celebration,
because I'm making it easier than ever before to connect with your cousins
through the 1881 Canada census.
First of all, it’s going to
be completely free to connect with cousins through the Canadian census from now
until Monday 8th July - and since the 1881 census is always free at
FamilySearch this means that it won’t cost a penny or a cent (whichever side of
the Atlantic you're on).
Note: initiating contact
with someone new normally requires a LostCousins subscription, although there
are several periods each year when the site is completely free - so nobody is ever
forced to pay.
Secondly, I've greatly
simplified the process for entering relatives from the 1881 Canada census.
FamilySearch have done away with two of the census references we’ve been using
for more than a decade, and whilst you can get them from Ancestry - if you’ve got
the right subscription - I've determined, after much experimentation and many
hours of careful testing, that we can manage without them altogether.
Note: if you've entered
relatives from the Canadian census in the past, and are wondering what has
happened to the sub-district and division information (which is now no longer required),
you won’t see it on the screen, but it has been archived so that it can be
retrieved should this become necessary at some point in the future.
As of now, the only information
you'll need (apart from your relative's name and age) is the district number,
the page number, and the family number - all of which are shown
and clearly identified in the free FamilySearch transcription, as you can see in
the example below:
Here's what it looks like when
you fill out the Add Ancestor form at LostCousins:
It really couldn’t be much
more straightforward. By the way, after you've entered the first person it’s even
easier to add other members of the same household - because most of the
information is filled in for you, including the census references and family
name (which you can, of course, alter if somebody in the household has a
different surname).
Tip: always follow the
advice on the Add Ancestor form - and note that it changes when you select a
different census.
Before I started researching
my family tree I didn’t know that I had any cousins in Canada - dead or alive -
now I'm in touch with at least a dozen living cousins, most of whom are also researching
their tree, and I've got two families listed from the 1881 Canada census.
Finally, please note that if
your relatives lived in Newfoundland - which didn't become part of Canada until
1949 - I'm including the 1921 Newfoundland census in the offer. This census is
also free at FamilySearch, and there's only one 4-character reference you need to
note down - see this article
for an illustrated example.
Do you
have friends in Canada?
Even if you're Canadian you might
not have any relatives who were living in Canada in 1881 - but you probably
know quite a few family historians who would have had relatives on that census.
How about inviting them to take
part in the LostCousins project to connect cousins who are researching the same
ancestors? They don’t need to have any ancestors from the British Isles -
though if they do, there will be additional opportunities for them to connect
with 'lost cousins'.
Essex registers
indexed by Ancestry NEW
Just as the last issue was
published I received an email from Essex Record Office containing some of the
best news I could have possibly imagined - more than a decade after the Essex
parish registers went online, Ancestry has transcribed and indexed them, making
it a hundred times quicker to find elusive entries.
It's not all good news,
however - you'll still need a subscription to Essex Ancestors Online in order
to view the register pages (or else pay £2.99 per image). And whilst the Ancestry
transcription links to the Essex Ancestors site, you won’t be taken to the register
page - even if you have a subscription - so on the face of it you've got to
plough through the register looking for the appropriate page.
Fortunately I've come up with
a partial solution, one that will save you a lot of time - and time is money, especially
if you've splashed out £20 on a 24-hour subscription to Essex Ancestors (a 12
month subscription costs £95 and there are other options in between). In the
next article I'm going to tell you what to do......
How to get
from the transcription to the image EXCLUSIVE
In this article I'm going to
take you through a worked example from my own tree in order to demonstrate a
nifty technique that I came up with when Essex Record Office confirmed my worst
fears, that even as a subscriber to both sites I couldn't click through from
the Ancestry transcription to the image of the register entry at Essex Archives
Online.
I'll use the marriage of my
great-great-great grandparents - here's the transcription at Ancestry:
Note that there's a link in
the top left which reads View Image at Essex Archives Online - this got
me all excited the first time I saw it, but when you click it, all you'll see
is a page with a virtually illegible miniature version of the register page:
I've indicated the key pieces
of information - there's an image number in the URL at the top (833137), and a
reference halfway down. Write them both down.
Now log-in to Essex Archives
Online if you haven't already done so, and go to the
Parish Registers page - as a subscriber you'll be familiar with the dropdown
menu system, which might be a bit clunky, but it works. The page for All Saints
and St Peter, Maldon has long list of registers, and the relevant entry is shown
in this snippet:
Note that the reference
matches the one we noted down earlier. When you click the View link you'll be taken to minimised version of the first page
of the register:
Once again
I've included the URL - write down the ID number shown there (45535 in this
case).
Now for the exciting bit - copy
the URL below and modify it by entering the two numbers you've written down:
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewSecureImage.aspx?&ID=XXXXX&DocID=YYYYY
For example, in this case you
want to end up with:
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewSecureImage.aspx?&ID=833137&DocID=45535
Finally, paste the modified
URL into the command line of your browser, and bingo! You'll jump straight to
the image of the register entry you’re after.
In this case there are only
21 pages in the register, and they're easy to read, so it wouldn't have taken
me very long to get to the right page - but some registers have 200 pages or
more, and the entries aren't always in a logical order.
Of course, if you're looking
at lots of entries in the same parish you won't need to keep looking up the document
numbers for the registers - which is why I also suggested noting down the
archive reference (in this case 201/1/10).
If you're already a
subscriber to Essex Archives Online you'll find this tip save you lots of time
- and if you’re not, perhaps it will provide you with the incentive you need to
become a subscriber?
Knocking
down a 'brick wall' using the new transcriptions
I've been looking for the
marriage of my great-great-great grandfather Ebenezer Bright for 16 years, and
whilst several Ancestry trees show him marrying Sarah Precious in Maldon, Essex
in 1812 I wasn't prepared to add this marriage to my tree without convincing
evidence. Bright is a common surname, and whilst Ebenezer might seem like an
unusual forename, the area of Essex where my Bright ancestors lived was a
hotbed of non-conformity - Ebenezer was baptised at the Coggeshall Independent Meeting
house, as were his children, including Samuel, Isaac, and Benjamin (all names
from the Bible).
Ebenezer gives his place of
birth in the censuses as Little Tey, whilst his
children - though baptised at Coggeshall - are shown as born at Great Tey, where the family are living in the censuses from 1841
to 1861. Their last child was born in 1835, so there was no chance of
discovering Sarah's maiden name in the new GRO birth indexes.
The Ebenezer Bright who
married in Maldon was recorded as being from Mundon, a
couple of miles further south - and though Mundon is
less than 20 miles from Great Tey, a quick radius check
on the FamilySearch maps page showed that there were as many as 180 parishes
that were nearer than Mundon. It seemed unlikely that
my ancestor would have married so far away when there were so many other places
to choose from - and, apparently, 4 years before the baptism of his first
child.
Sarah is shown on the census as born in Althorne, just 5 miles from Mundon,
and 9 miles from Maldon - but I long ago searched the Althorne registers looking for her baptism without success.
Indeed I've spent hundreds, possibly thousands, of
hours going through unindexed Essex registers, either in the record office or
online - but because there are over 400 parishes in Essex it was a never-ending
task.
I certainly didn't get as far
afield as Great Clacton, far from where any of my ancestors were known to have
lived - but it was there, in November 1813 and April 1815 that two sons were baptised
to Ebenezer Bright, a labourer, and his wife Sarah. Could this possibly be the link
between Maldon in 1812 and Great Tey in 1816? At first I was doubtful - even today it would take an hour to
drive between Maldon and Clacton, and nearly as long to get from Clacton to
Great Tey.
When I looked at the names I was even more sceptical - the eldest son was called
William, and whilst my great-great grandfather was also called William Bright,
he wasn't born until 1833. Once again Ancestry's transcriptions came to my rescue
- in the registers for St Barnabas, Great Tey, I found
a May 1831 burial entry for a William Bright aged 17 - precisely the right age
to fit with the Clacton baptism. Even more convincing was the fact that 9 days
earlier another Bright child had been buried, one who was undoubtedly the
daughter of my ancestor.
It seemed very likely that
there had been an infection going round the Bright family, one that had not
only taken the life of infant Emma, but also her big brother William - so when
my great-great grandfather was born less than two years later he had been christened
William in honour of his deceased elder brother.
In less than an hour I'd
achieved more than in hundreds of hours over the previous 16 years - my 'brick
wall' had come tumbling down! And for once it wasn't the result of DNA......
Irish Poor
Law records at Findmypast
This week Findmypast added more
than 400,000 records from seven Poor Law Unions in Donegal to their growing collection
of Irish Poor Law records - you can search them here.
Findmypast have an amazing
collection of Irish records, many of them exclusive - for an example of their
criminal records see last year's newsletter article
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? about an Irish lad who really was called Roger
Rabbit!
I've been in touch with the
General Register Office again about the large blocks of missing or duplicated
entries in their online birth and death indexes, but
am still waiting for confirmation that work is in hand to rectify the faults. I
will report back when I have more information.
In the meantime, please bear
in mind that the original indexes - the ones that you'll find at sites like FreeBMD, Ancestry, Findmypast, and The Genealogist - were
also compiled by the GRO. The difference is that they were compiled soon after
the end of each quarter, and using whatever protocol was on force at the time -
thus the birth indexes don't show the mother's maiden name before 1911, and the
death indexes don’t give the age at birth before 1866.
It's quite unusual to find an
error in the contemporary GRO indexes, however Catherine sent me an example
where the page number is recorded as 143 in the original indexes, but as 243 in
the new online index. A few minutes spent analysing the data at FreeBMD was sufficient to prove
that an indexing error had been made back in 1839 - I found that all 10 of the
entries for page 243 had been wrongly indexed as page 143.
When I use FreeBMD it’s not because it’s free - I have subscriptions
to most of the other sites - it’s because FreeBMD
have analysed the data and flag up likely errors. For example, the way that the
GRO registers were compiled from loose pages submitted by local registrars
means that entries from a particular registration district
will be found on consecutive pages in the relevant volume for that quarter. An
index entry with the wrong page number will usually stick out like a sore
thumb.
Tip: the GRO uses different
register volumes for each quarter, so the page numbering starts again from 1 at
the start of the next quarter. Whilst registration districts tend to be filed
in the same order, so that the numbers roughly correspond from one quarter to
the next, they could be higher or lower, depending on the number of events
registered in each quarter.
Man who
refused to register son's birth loses court battle
A High Court judge has
ordered an unnamed man to register the birth of his son - you can read all
about this strange case in this Guardian article.
DNA
competitors unite to protect users' data
Not long ago Ancestry and
23andMe were slugging it out in court, in a dispute over patents, trademarks,
and goodness knows what else!
But they've buried the
hatchet in the interests of the genetic genealogy industry, coming together to
form the Coalition for Genetic Data Protection, which will allow the industry
to "let Congress know what the best practices are for protecting
customers’ data and also to show their customers that they’re deserving of
their trust."
You can read more about this development
here.
Members in Australia (and, I
suspect, New Zealand) can save 25% on DNA tests at Ancestry.com.au - but only
until Sunday 30th June. Please use this link so
that you can support LostCousins (if you've previously bought a DNA test you
might need to log-out from your Ancestry account before clicking the link).
And you can celebrate Canada
Day by connecting with your ancestors - Ancestry.ca are offering a $40 saving
until Monday 1st July - again, please use this link.
The MyHeritage offers in my
last newsletter are continuing - you'll find the details and links here.
Tip: watch out for websites
offering fake DNA kits - this news report
tells how a New York woman was scammed.
Manned mission
to Mars? No need says study
As an avid reader of science
fiction as a boy in the late 1950s, everything seemed to be coming true when
Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969 - surely we would establish a colony
on the moon and use it as a base to explore other planets in the solar system,
starting with Mars?
In the event none of this
happened, and it has only been in recent years that the prospect of returning
to the moon has become more likely. A manned mission to Mars still seems like a
fading dream, one that might not be realised in my lifetime.
However, studies suggest that
some of the problems of a manned mission could be eliminated by sending an all-female
crew to Mars. In 2013 a simulated Mars mission in a geodesic dome on a Hawaiian
volcano found that female 'crew' members used considerably less energy, even
though they were carrying out similar exercises to the men - you can read more
in this article
on the NASA website (it includes a link to a longer article in Slate
magazine).
But if you're going to set up
a colony, don’t you need both men and women? Not according to this Guardian
article,
which reports on a study which has shown that frozen sperm can survive perfectly
well in zero-gravity conditions. I wonder what the family historians of the future
will make of Martian birth certificates?
Review:
The Golden Age of Science Fiction
I'm not the only one who grew up on a diet of science
fiction - John Wade, author of The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey
into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books is another, and
I'm willing to bet that there are many more amongst the LostCousins members.
By the late 1950s I'd read
all the Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome books in the
Children's Library, and upgrading to the Adult Library
I discovered writers like Jules Verne, H G Wells, Isaac Asimov and John Wyndham.
Sadly I was too young to be allowed to watch the Quatermass serials, but I did see The Invisible Man,
inspired by the H G Wells novel. And, of course, there was Dan Dare, the hero
of the Eagle comic - who was constantly battling The Mekon
- and also Superman, whose exploits I read about in
second-hand American comics.
The 1960s, which for teenage
boys was defined by A for Andromeda, Doctor Who, and Star Trek
(which I thought rather unrealistic, though I must confess to enjoying Thunderbirds),
falls beyond the scope of this book, but many of the books which I read, and
the films which I watched in the 60s and 70s, had their origins in the 1950s
Reading this book reminded me
how science fiction inspired me to dream, as it did millions of others - and
provided us with a vision of the future, albeit one that has taken rather
longer to come to fruition (where are the flying cars?). It is lavishly
illustrated and beautifully produced - and whilst not as large as a typical 'coffee
table' book I suspect that quite a few purchasers will leave it out for their
visitors! For many it will be a book to dip into and savour, rather than read
from beginning to end - there's a comprehensive index at the back to guide you
to you favourite memories.
I read the hardback edition,
which costs a hefty £25, but when I checked just now you could buy it from Wordery for less than £17
(including shipping) through Amazon.co.uk,
(or for even less if you go to their own site - though strangely they describe
it there as a paperback, even when you search by ISBN). There is a
paperback edition due out at the end of September in the UK (later in North
America), but if you can pick up the hardback at a good price it’s well worth
the extra, since this book is likely to be extremely well-thumbed, especially
if you leave it on the coffee table.
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Wordery
Review: Tracing
Your Ancestors Using DNA
Typical - you wait ages for a good, practical guide to
DNA to arrive, then two come along at once! Just two months ago I reviewed
Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies, then this week Tracing
Your Ancestors Using DNA arrived on my desk for review.
This new book, edited by
Graham S Holton, and with contributions from John Cleary, Michelle Leonard,
Iain McDonald, and Alasdair F MacDonald is probably the one I would have
written myself if I'd had the time and the patience, and as I read it I
repeatedly found myself nodding in agreement with the advice on offer. For
example, ethnicity estimates are described in the introduction as
"promoted, very successfully, probably the most unreliable feature of DNA
testing for genealogy, in its current state of development".
I did spot one error - in the
first main chapter, a collaboration between three of the authors entitled 'Why
Use DNA Testing for Genealogy' there's a paragraph headed 'Leaving a Legacy',
which begins:
"Another reason to DNA test is to leave a legacy for your descendants. The way atDNA inheritance works means that older generations have more of our ancestors' DNA than we do: parents have double, grandparents have triple and so on."
It should, of course, say
that our grandparents have four times as much of our ancestors' DNA than we do
(after all, there are four of them). But it doesn't undermine the main premise,
which is that testing the earliest generations will lead to more useful matches,
and otherwise I didn't notice any other mistakes.
Having highlighted the
important paragraph quoted above, I'm going to reinforce some advice of my own
- which is that testing our DNA is even more important if we don’t have
children! Unless we have descendants all of our
DNA dies when we do - it’s only by taking the test ourselves that we can preserve
that legacy for future generations of our extended family.
When I got to the end of the first
chapter it was like re-reading the last issue of this newsletter - the authors emphasise
the symbiotic relationship between genetic genealogy and traditional research,
which I've written about many times, and featured a week ago in this article.
It's not all about autosomal
DNA - the book also looks at Y-DNA, mtDNA, and even
X-DNA (which tends to get forgotten). But unless you're single-mindedly focused
on tracing your paternal line, or have a distant
'brick wall' that could be demolished using Y-DNA, it's atDNA
that is going to deliver the goods, and the depth of coverage in the book
reflects that.
As you would expect, the book
writes about the various tools that are available to manipulate our DNA results
in an effort to glean more information - but I'd argue that now most of us have
tens of thousands of DNA matches, rather than the hundreds that we had in the
early days, it’s rarely necessary to complicate matters. If you've tested 10 or
20 close family members then things might be different, but most people who
have made that sort of investment will have been following the genetic genealogy
blogs, and will have already made up their mind what
tools they really need.
[Note: the book was written
before Ancestry introduced ThruLines which, for the average
user, is likely to take them further toward their goals than all the third
party tools - and with very little effort on their part.]
Chapter 7 is devoted to choosing
between test providers, but at under 6 pages it's the shortest chapter in the
book - even though this is one of the biggest decisions for a first-time tester.
Quite rightly it doesn’t point you in the direction of this or that company,
instead posing some of the key considerations that you should take into account.
Where it could have been more
helpful, however, is in explaining how well-integrated Ancestry DNA is with
Ancestry trees - not just public trees but also private searchable trees (as
almost all private trees are). Because I manage about a dozen tests at Ancestry,
half a dozen at FTDNA, and several at MyHeritage -
plus my own results at 23andMe - I know from experience how important this is.
The book ends with a look
into the future of genetic genealogy - and introduces the concept of DNA-only
ancestors, people we can’t identify in the records, and are only known to us through
the traces of DNA that we and others have inherited. It'll be interesting to
see where that leads.....
At just £14.99 for the
paperback edition, a fraction of the cost of even one DNA test, this book is
likely to prove a very worthwhile investment - wherever you are on the spectrum
between the enthusiasts who trying to persuade as many as possible of their
living relatives to test, and the sceptics who are still trying to make up
their mind whether it’s all hocus-pocus. There were discounted copies available
when I checked just now, so you’re unlikely to have to pay full price, even
allowing for the cost of shipping, but there is also a Kindle version (which
costs under £6 in the UK).
Note: the book isn’t due
out in North America until the fall, but you might be able to get it from The
Book Depository or Wordery
(though Wordery didn’t have it in stock when I looked).
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca The
Book Depository
Save on The
Somme Legacy ENDS SOON
It's almost exactly 103 years
since the Battle of The Somme began on 1st July 1916, and from Sunday 30th June
until Friday 5th July you can buy the Kindle version of MJ Lee's genealogical
mystery The Somme Legacy for just 99p at Amazon.co.uk or 99c at Amazon.com (I'm afraid the offer isn't
available in other territories).
Records of
Nazi persecution go online FREE
The latest issue of Who Do
You Think You Are? magazine arrived on my doorstep today, with news of the
release of more than 13 million records of victims of Nazi persecution.
The Arolsen
Archives was originally founded by the British Red Cross in 1944 under the name
Central Tracing Bureau, and renamed to the International Tracing Service in
1948 - the new name reflects their location in Bad Arolsen,
in Germany (last week I was just 70 miles away in another German spa town, escaping
the British weather and visiting my brother-in-law).
To search the records follow
this link.
With the approaching 50th
anniversary of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon I couldn't resist Apollo
11: The Moon Landing in Real Time - will it recreate the excitement that
kept me up until 5am (even though I had to go to work a few hours later)? I'll
let you know next time, but if you can't wait, please use the relevant link
below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Wordery
But the book that's really
bringing back memories is The Secondary Banking Crisis 1973-75, because
I was working in 'the City' at the time, first as an investment analyst, then
in corporate finance - and perhaps if we had remembered the lessons of 1973-75 we
wouldn’t have suffered from similar mistakes in 2007-8?
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
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you MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for
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instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?