Newsletter – 25th
March 2022
#HistoryForUkraine THIS
WEEKEND
1921 Scotland Census transcription under
way
What happened to the 1926 Census of Northern
Ireland?
Last chance to save at The Genealogist
ENDS THURSDAY
What should you do when someone steals your
relative?
Review: Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through
Land Records
The LostCousins newsletter
is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated
14th March) 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!
#HistoryForUkraine THIS WEEKEND
In
September 1938 Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, spoke in this wireless
broadcast about a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of
whom we know nothing". The rest, as they say, is history.
On
Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th March historians and genealogists are coming
together to raise funds for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukraine
Humanitarian Appeal. Speakers include Charles Spencer, uncle of Prince William
and Prince Harry, whose book about the regicides who sent King Charles I to the
scaffold was reviewed
in this newsletter some years ago.
But
there are dozens of other speakers – most of them female, as befits Women's
History Month – familiar names include Else Churchill of the Society of
Genealogists whose recent online talk about female ancestors I attended (as, I
know, did some of you), as well as her boss, Wanda Wyporska, who I interviewed
in this newsletter last August.
The
half-hour talks will be broadcast live on YouTube and will be available for a maximum of 48 hours afterwards, so you are advised
to watch them live if possible – see the HistoryforUkraine website for full details, including
how to donate. My own £100 donation was one of the first, but I don't expect
you to give as much as I did – though if you can, it'll really make a
difference.
Note: if you
contribute £25 or more to the appeal before the end of March you can claim a
free one-year LostCousins subscription worth up to £12.50 – simply write to me,
using the address in the email that told you about this newsletter, providing
evidence of your donation.
I
was disappointed and surprised to note that the vast majority of attendees at
last week's virtual lunchtime chat, hosted by Else Churchill on behalf of the
Society of Genealogists, were women. Whilst I can appreciate that it’s more
difficult to research female ancestors than male ancestors, that doesn’t
explain why male genealogists are so much less interested in doing so than
their female counterparts.
I
can only hope that by highlighting this discrepancy I'll encourage some of you
chaps to mend your ways!
1921 Scotland Census transcription under way
Who
Do You Think You Are?
magazine recently reported that the contract for the transcription of the 1921
Scotland Census was awarded to Queen's University, Belfast in January this
year. The value of the contract is £438,566 – not exactly small change.
The
population of England & Wales was almost 8 times greater, which would
suggest that the cost of transcribing that part of the census would have been
around £3.5 million, though in practice it's likely that it was significantly
higher because of the stringent conditions under which it had to be carried
out. The England & Wales census was transcribed before the 100-year
embargo was lifted, which meant it had to be done in such a way that no
personal information could be identified – this meant splitting up each
household schedule into chunks so that no one person could see it all, then
combining the pieces, while still maintaining confidentiality.
And
all that was done in the space of 2½ months, less than half the time allowed
for the simpler (and far smaller) Scotland transcription. You can understand,
perhaps, why I get so annoyed with people who whinge about transcription
errors!
Note:
the costs quoted above are for the transcription alone – they don’t allow for
the costs of repairing, conserving and scanning the census schedules, or the
cost of the infrastructure that enabled the census to be released without any
noticeable glitches. Anyone who has been researching as long as I have will
recall that when the 1901 England & Wales Census was launched in January
2002 the website crashed almost immediately, and it was nearly 9 months before
it re-opened.
What happened to the 1926 Census of Northern Ireland?
There
was no 1921 Census in Ireland because the troubles, but in 1926 the first census
of Northern Ireland was taken.
Unfortunately
in 2013 an investigation by the Public Record Office, the forerunner of the
National Archives, found no trace of the census schedules, and concluded that
they might have been destroyed during World War 2. An earlier investigation by
the Public Records Office in Northern Ireland had found that there was no
evidence of the census having been transferred (see this BBC article for
more information).
I
wonder if there is any chance that this census was destroyed in the same fire
that consumed the 1931 England & Wales Census? It's not mentioned in the
report that I referred to in the last
newsletter, but since there's no evidence that it was stored anywhere else,
I don’t think it can be ruled out, do you?
There
was a Northern Ireland census taken in 1937, but it was limited in scope and
won't be released until 2038 at the earliest – a potentially better source is
the 1939 National Register, which is (in theory) available under the Freedom of
Information Act. See Claire Santry's Irish Genealogy Toolkit website
for more information.
Last chance to save at The Genealogist ENDS
THURSDAY
All
good things must come to an end, and sadly the exclusive special offer I
arranged with The Genealogist expires on Thursday 31st March.
But
the good news is that if you take up the offer, which provides a 12 month
Diamond subscription for the price of Gold subscription (saving you £41),
you'll have the chance to save next year, the year after, and the year after
that – in fact, as long as you keep your subscription going. You'll also get a
12 month subscription to Discover Your Ancestors digital magazine, which
means that your first year savings total £75.99
To
take up the offer follow this link,
or to find out more about how The Genealogist can help you follow this link to the
presentation that Mark Bayley recently gave to runners-up in this year's
competition.
What should you do when someone steals your relative?
It's
not unusual to find an online tree whose owner has added one of our
relatives to the wrong family – indeed, things like this are bound to happen
because not everyone is as experienced as you and I. We're used to simply
ignoring hints, knowing that more often than not they're not relevant, but beginners
are often more trusting.
But
what really matters is not whether someone has stolen your relative, but what
you do about it. You could simply do nothing, but that doesn’t help anyone, or
you could send a message to the tree owner.
However,
experience shows that many tree owners either don't receive the messages, or
don’t feel any need to act upon them – after all, if they don’t know you from
Adam (or Eve), why should they trust you rather than their own judgement (or
Ancestry's hints)? Others might not have the time to delve into the matter –
either they're taking time off from family history, or they're focusing on a
different part of their tree. Something that's very important to you might not
be nearly so important to them.
So
whilst sending a message is better than the 'do nothing' option, it's not a
complete answer. It might be a year or more before the tree is updated, and in
the meantime goodness knows how many others might be misled by the erroneous
entry.
My
advice is to post a comment against the individual in the tree, explaining why
they shouldn’t be there – that way someone tempted to copy the entry might
think twice. If you can identify the correct individual and include their
details so much the better – nobody likes having to completely delete someone
from their tree, but replacing the wrong person with the right one is much more
palatable.
The
offer I arranged with Who Do You Think You Are? magazine is still continuing – see this article
for details of the generous discounts on offer, and please use this link
so that you can support LostCousins.
However if you’re in the UK there are nearly 30
other magazines with enticing introductory offers at the same website – follow
this link
to find out more (this wider offer isn't exclusive to LostCousins but you
should still be supporting my work if you use the link I've provided).
Sir
Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain KCB, KCVO, KStJ, KPM is not as
well-known as his namesake, but as the inventor of the game of snooker he also
has a lot to answer for! Though to be fair the well-known but oft mis-stated
and mis-attributed quotation
referred not to snooker but to its progenitor, billiards.
My
schooldays were not, on the whole, spent playing billiards or snooker, but
bridge – though it did allow me to represent my school (and subsequently my
university and my county), at something approaching a sport. As it happens Neville
Chamberlain and I were educated at the same school, though nearly a century
apart – and whilst his middle class parents no doubt paid for his education, my
working class background meant that I was only there courtesy of a council
scholarship.
Although
there seems to be no contemporary evidence supporting Chamberlain's 1938 claim
to have invented snooker some 60 years earlier, it seems to be generally
accepted. Not so for another inventor – while at school in the 1960s I came
up with the game now known as buzzword bingo, though if you read the Wikipedia entry you won’t find
any mention of my name, which has been airbrushed from history.
Note: the Classics master who taught us Greek had a significant number of
quirky mannerisms; I can no longer remember the phrases he'd use, but I can
remember some of the actions, which included throwing the chalk at any boy who
exasperated him, and twirling the end of his frayed gown. He was one of the
more popular masters, but it wasn't the most absorbing subject, so before one
lesson I distributed bingo cards populated with different selections of
mannerisms. It did at least keep us all focused on what he was saying!
The
last time I updated the entry to reflect the game's true origin it lasted just
26 minutes before another user reversed it on the grounds that I could provide
no reference to backup my claim. Funnily enough that wasn't something that was
uppermost on my mind as a 14 year-old schoolboy! There was a time when the
testimony of somebody who was actually present during an historic event counted for
something, but in this case I seem to be snookered.
Going
back to Neville Chamberlain, he followed his father into the army – fighting in
Afghanistan, then serving in India and (during the 2nd Boer War) in South
Africa, where he was Aide-de-Camp to the Commander-in-Chief of British
forces around the time when Winston Churchill was captured by the Boers. He
ended his career as Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary,
resigning in 1916 following the Easter Rising.
Review: Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land
Records
Earlier this year, on
Burns Night, a few dozen fortunate prize-winners were able to hear Chris Paton
speak about Scottish Research Resources Before 1800. However, whilst the
genealogist, author, and journalist lives in Scotland he was actually born in
Ireland, and has ancestors from both countries.
His
latest book, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records – a guide for
family historians, wouldn't have meant much to me a year ago, when I had no
knowledge of any Irish ancestry. But, as you'll know from my June 2021 articles,
I discovered that the Burns ancestors that were thought to have originated in
Scotland were actually Byrne ancestors from Ireland. So, as you can imagine, I
read the book very attentively!
It's
certainly true, as another reviewer wrote, that not all of the material relates
specifically to land records – if you've known about your Irish ancestry longer
than I have, you might well be more familiar than I was with the history and
geography of Ireland, as well as the surviving records (and where to find
them). But I was hearing most of it for the first time, so I was extremely
grateful for the comprehensive introduction provided by those first 4 chapters,
even though they account for over a third of the book's 174 pages.
As
the author reminds us, the fact that so many records have not survived until
the present day makes those that remain all the more valuable. Many will be
familiar with Griffith's Valuation, which has long been regarded as a census
substitute, but there are many other land records which can provide clues to
our Irish ancestors' origins. Most people didn’t own land or property, but
those who did were the landlords of those who didn't, and those records which
record tenants and occupiers are going to be of more interest to most of us.
Having
read several of the author's other books and many of his magazine articles, as
well as hearing him speak on several occasions I was expecting a comprehensive
and well-researched book – and I was not disappointed. It's going to guide me
through the next stages of my research in Ireland, and it could do the same for
you!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
What
sorts of things do you give as presents? This week I ordered some plastic file tabs
from Amazon, and I was offered the opportunity to have them gift-wrapped at a
special price (for the gift-wrapping, not the file tabs). I can't think of anybody
who would want me to give them file tabs as a present!
It's
not very often that I have to buy stationery: I'm very good at recycling office
supplies. When I ran my software business (from the late 70s through to the
late 90s) much of the stationery and all of the furniture, including desks and
filing cabinets was second-hand (at least). Many of the suspension files I use
were in the second-hand filing cabinets when I bought them, and they're all
foolscap width, not A4, which suits me down to the ground.
My
desk was bought over 20 years ago from the company my wife used to work for
(they bought new ones when they moved offices); it might be old, but at least
it's solid wood with dovetailed joints – no laminates, no hardboard, no screws
or nails. I sit on a dining chair from the 1980s, which in theory shouldn't be
good for my back, but in practice I have no problems.
But
all these things which are functional and useful to me would have little or no
value if I had to downsize and dispose of them. In fact I'd probably have to
pay someone to take them away, because these days people want things that are
new, even when they're not as good, and even when they can’t afford them. Many
of the people who have been hit by price inflation had no savings to cushion
the blow – indeed, I suspect some of them were already over-borrowed when the
crunch came.
Saving
money regularly when we were younger benefited us in three ways: first, it got
us in the habit of saving up for things we wanted rather than needed, rather
than borrowing so that we could have instant gratification; second, it gave us
reserves of capital that we could draw upon in lean times; third, it meant that
we had a cushion against unexpected drops in income – we could pause saving
until things improved.
When
I was young I was always hungry; when I was a toddler I would hide under an
armchair and eat dog biscuits. They came in different shapes and colours (buff,
green, pink and black are the ones I remember); I think they were Spillers'
Shapes. I was reminded of this when I saw this story
about a government minister who mistakenly ate biscuits intended for the
Queen's corgis.
According
to that newspaper article the Queen was given her first Corgi on her 18th
birthday, in 1944 – coincidentally it's the 18th birthday of LostCousins in a
few weeks' time but, please, no Corgis (our cat wouldn’t appreciate them).
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 2022 Peter Calver
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