Newsletter – 25th
October 2022
Save 20% on most Findmypast subscriptions EXCLUSIVE EARLY ACCESS
Upgrade to Premium for unlimited access to
the 1921 Census
Save 20% at the British Newspaper Archive EXCLUSIVE OFFER
Who was the oldest person on the 1921 Census?
King Charles sends first cards to centenarians
How the 1921 Census differs: step-parents
The census wasn’t meant for us!
Why the ‘Black Death’ still affects us today
Nottinghamshire parish registers go online NEW
Cambs, Hunts,
and Sheffield registers also to be digitised?
Time to start your Christmas shopping?
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 19th October) 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
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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!
Save 20% on most Findmypast subscriptions
EXCLUSIVE EARLY ACCESS
Great
news - I’ve managed to negotiate early access for readers of this newsletter to
an offer that starts later this week for everyone else! However
you must use the links I have provided at the end of this article.
You
can save 20% on 12 month Plus and Pro subscriptions at Findmypast’s
sites in the UK, Ireland, and Australia; at their US site the offers applies to 12 month Essential and Ultimate subscriptions. Whilst
the new Premium subscriptionn (which offers unlimited access to the 1921 Census) isn’t included in the offer you can
purchase a 12 month Pro or Ultimate subscription
at the offer price, then immediately upgrade to Premium for just £19.99
(or the approximate equivalent in the currency of the chosen website).
It’s
worth reminding you that Findmypast are almost unique in offering a Loyalty
Discount to subscribers who purchase 12 month
subscriptions, and this currently provides a useful 15% discount on automatic renewals.
This means that if you do decide to take up the offer, you’re unlikely to be
faced with a big increase in a year’s time. There’s no absolute guarantee,
because with inflation at the current rate it would be foolish to predict what
will happen to prices, but you can always cancel the renewal – just don’t leave
it until the very last minute!
(If
you subscribe through the UK site the offer also applies to 3
month subscriptions, but the discount will only last for the first 3 months
– so crack open the piggy bank, lock in the savings for a full year, and give
yourself the chance of a 15% discount in a year’s time.)
To
take advantage of this offer please use the relevant link below:
Findmypast.co.uk
– SAVE 20% ON 3 & 12 MONTH PLUS & PRO SUBSCRIPTIONS EARLY ACCESS
OFFER
Findmypast.com.au
– SAVE 20% ON 12 MONTH PLUS & PRO SUBSCRIPTIONS EARLY ACCESS OFFER
Findmypast.ie
– SAVE 20% ON 12 MONTH PLUS & PRO SUBSCRIPTIONS EARLY ACCESS OFFER
Findmypast.com
– SAVE 20% ON 3 & 12 MONTH ESSENTIAL & ULTIMATE SUBSCRIPTIONS EARLY
ACCESS OFFER
You
can continue to use those links to support LostCousins even after this offer
becomes available elsewhere.
Tip:
if you’re asked about cookies please accept them as
otherwise your purchase may not be recorded as coming from LostCousins. You can
always change the settings later if you want to.
Upgrade to Premium for unlimited access to
the 1921 Census
If
you have a 12 month Pro or Ultimate subscription you
can upgrade to a Premium subscription for a fixed price of £19.99 (or equivalent).
It’s the same price no matter how long your subscription has
to run so it makes sense to upgrade as soon as possible – though if your
existing subscription is due to run out in the next few weeks you might prefer
to wait until the renewal date.
If you've
just saved £36 on a Pro subscription by taking advantage of the offer above, why not use part
of your savings to upgrade?
Note:
you can also upgrade from lesser 12 month
subscriptions but the cost will usually be significantly higher, because you’re
gaining access to hundreds of millions of other records. But why not click the
link and find out – you’re not committing to anything?
Save 20% at the British Newspaper Archive EXCLUSIVE
OFFER
For
just one week you can save 20% on 3 month and 12 month
subscriptions to one of the most under-appreciated and under-used resources available to family historians.
There are more than 58 million pages in the British
Newspaper Archive – the biggest online collection of British newspapers and
magazines in the world, and it is continuing to grow. Within this enormous
collection you’ll find (by my estimate) well over half a billion articles, and
literally billions of names.
The
primary focus is on local and provincial newspapers, so your ancestors don’t
need to have been famous – or infamous – to qualify for a mention. Local
newspapers specialise in ‘human interest’ stories, covering accidents, weddings,
school sports days, examination results, amateur dramatics, and a wide range of
sporting events – indeed, the more local people they could mention, the more copies
of the newspaper they were likely to sell. All too often our research into relatives
from earlier generations is limited to their interactions with officialdom – certificates,
censuses, electoral registers etc – but these only tell a small part of the
story.
The
British Newspaper Archive is a sister site to Findmypast, and if you have a Pro,
Ultimate, or Premium subscription to Findmypast you’ll already have access to
the newspapers and magazines in the archive – but don’t stop reading, because I’m
going to tell you why searching at the dedicated newspaper site is more
powerful and more effective.
Frequent
users of historic newspapers will really appreciate the more flexible searching
options – for example you can restrict your searches to pages added to the
archive after a certain date, so that you don't keep ploughing through the same
list of results. This allows you to focus on what's new, which is important
because the archive is growing rapidly – by my calculation pages are being
added at the rate of 10 million a year!
Another
very useful search option is the ability to exclude words or phrases from your
search – this is a good way to cut down the unwanted search results you would
get if your ancestors happened to have the same name as a well-known person. For
example, my own name is hardly a common one, but were I to search without any
exclusions the few results that refer to me would be swamped by those relating
to the late racehorse trainer.
This
offer is exclusive to LostCousins members, but you will only be supporting
LostCousins when you use the link below:
BRITISH
NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE – SAVE 20% ENDS MONDAY 31ST
OCTOBER
Please
bear in mind that the reduction only applies to the initial payment (and
shorter subscriptions are, in any case, much more expensive per month), so best
to get a 12 month subscription if you can.
Who was the oldest person on the 1921 Census?
Now
that I have a subscription that includes the 1921 Census
I can look for interesting entries that aren’t necessarily connected with my
family. For example, yesterday I received an email from Colyn
in Australia who mentioned an interesting juxtaposition – one of the oldest
people on the census with one of the youngest:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives and with the kind permission of Findmypast
William
Walker, 99 years and 5 months old at the time of the census,
was thought to be Britain’s oldest man when he died in 1929 aged 107 – and at the
British Newspaper Archive you’ll find many articles from the 1920s that mention
him. Annie Walker, his grand-daughter is shown as under 1 month old, but Colyn suspected she was a very new member of the family,
given her position at the bottom of the list, and she discovered from the 1939
Register that Annie was actually born on 18th
June 1921, the day before the census – making her one of the youngest people on
the census (though not, of course, the youngest).
All
this got me wondering – who was the oldest person recorded on the 1921 Census? It
certainly wasn’t John Davey Lidstone, recorded by his
landlord as having been born in 1802!
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives and with the kind permission of Findmypas
But
was it Sarah Benardout, shown as 106 years old on the
census schedule completed by her son?
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives and with the kind permission of Findmypast
The
writing is clear, but she’s shown as 49 years older than her son, which seems
improbable – and when she died in 1926 her age was recorded as ‘only’ 103, so I
think we can disregard Sarah’s claims to be the oldest. Frederick Stabbins, aged 105 and 11 months has a much better claim –
he’s shown as 76 years old in the 1891 Census, and his age was also recorded as
106 when he died a few months after the census:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives and with the kind permission of Findmypast
To
make absolutely sure I found his baptism, which was on
1st October 1815. Also shown as 105 years and 11 months old was
Elizabeth Eliza Curtis who was in the workhouse at the time of the census – I haven’t
attempted to find her baptism, but perhaps someone reading this would like to
try? If you find it please post the information on the
LostCousins Forum so that others don’t duplicate your efforts.
King Charles sends first cards to centenarians
Since
1917, in the reign of King George V, the monarch of the day has sent
congratulations to subjects reaching their 100th birthday, or their
60th wedding anniversary. In the first year just 24 telegrams were
sent; by 1952, when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne the number had
increased to 273, and in 2014 more than 7500 reached the landmark.
This
week the first cards from King Charles arrived on the doormats of centenarians
according to this article
on the Royal Family’s website. And if you know someone approaching their
centenary you can contact the Palace by following this link.
How the 1921 Census differs: step-parents
Rather confusingly, column
(e) of the household schedule has a dual purpose. For persons aged 15 and over
it shows their marital status, for children under 15 it shows whether their
parents were still alive.
Those
of you who are familiar with marriage law in England & Wales will recognise
immediately that there is a conflict – in 1921 it was possible for a girl aged
12 or a boy aged 14 to marry with parental consent, though it was a criminal
offence for a man to have intercourse with a girl below the age of 16, as this Hansard
transcript
reminds us.
The
minimum age at marriage was raised to 16 only in 1929 (and there it has remained
ever since, though it will be going up to 18 in February next year). So in
theory there could be children recorded in the census who were married, but not
shown as such – although the evidence I can find suggests
that marriage below the age of 16 was extremely rare by the turn of the 20th
century, at least in Scotland.
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives and with the kind permission of Findmypast
When
I showed you the household schedule for my maternal grandfather and his family I wondered whether anyone would comment on the fact
that my grandmother is shown as only 13 years older than the eldest daughter.
Nobody did, so I imagine that you figured out that my grandmother was my
grandfather’s second wife, his first wife having died from pulmonary
tuberculosis in 1907 – when their only daughter was just a year old.
I
thought at first that my grandfather had completed his census form incorrectly –
many householders did – because against his eldest daughter Marian (actually Marion, or ‘Min’ as she was known to the family) he
put 'Both alive', even though her mother had died 14 years before. However the Instructions to Registrars circulated in
1921 state:
Where, however, a child has a step-parent, the stepfather or stepmother should be regarded
as having taken the place of the natural father or mother as the case may be
and no reference to the latter should be made on the schedule.
In this connection it may be added that
while, generally speaking, it is an enumerator's duty
to make further inquiries in respect of any answer on the schedule which he has
good reason to believe to be erroneous, the Registrar may accept a statement of
the relationship of parents and children which, though in doubtful concordance with
their legal status, is not inconsistent with the other information returned on
the schedule.
So,
whether by accident or design, my grandfather did fill that in that box correctly.
However, he didn’t get everything right – not only did he omit the column (e) entry
for my grandmother's sister Clara, he got several of
the ages wrong by a month. My grandmother was born on 22/10/1893, so at the time
of the census she was just under 8 months past her 27th birthday, but her
stepdaughter had been born on 11/11/1906, so was 14 years and 7 months old on
Census Day. Similarly Charlotte's birthday was on 3rd
January, so she was also a month older than shown, whereas Clara was a month
younger.
I
suppose it's easier to be out by a month when you're doing these calculations
in your head – but much more difficult to understand is how he came to be 4
months out on his own age. It was such a large discrepancy that I went to my
paper files and dug out his birth certificate, to make certain that I hadn't
recorded his age incorrectly – however it definitely states
that he was born on 24/11/1882, making him 38 years and less than 7 months old
on 19th June 1921, not 10 months as shown in the census schedule.
His
birth was registered on 1st January 1883, just a few days within the 6 week limit, so was it possible that his mother had changed
the date to avoid a penalty? Probably not - both my grandfather's baptism register
entry and his 1939 Register entry give the same birthdate, so I'll just have to
assume that his arithmetic let him down in 1921.
The census wasn’t meant for us!
Important
though the surviving censuses are to family historians, this application is merely
an incidental by-product. So why was the census necessary? In
1921 the government published a document entitled The Coming Census
which explained, amongst other things, that:
The object of the census is to obtain
reliable figures of the population of the country, showing how the
population is made up, that is to say of what sorts
and compositions of people it is composed, and how it is distributed through
the local sub-divisions of the country, such as counties, towns, rural districts,
parliamentary divisions, parishes &c.
As the object of the Census is figures, it
is not concerned with the private lives or actions of the individuals counted,
and only asks them questions as to their personal characteristics in order that
they be properly accounted and assigned to the particular
groups of the population in which they ought to be reckoned. For
example, the Census needs to know that Mr. William Smith is a married man aged
49, not because the State proposes to interest itself in Mr Smith's private
life or actions, but solely in order that the number of married men in the
population and the number of men aged 49 in the population may be properly counted.
This information as to the number and
composition of our population is not asked for to gratify curiosity or merely add
to the sum-total of human knowledge. The cost of census-taking is far too great
to be incurred solely to provide interesting facts.
Tip:
you can currently download this and other documents about the 1921 Census free
from The National Archives when you follow this link.
Although
I still don’t have any information about the timing of the release, it has now been
confirmed that ScotlandsPeople will be charging 6
credits, equivalent to £1.50, for each page from the 1921 Scotland census.
Whilst
this charge is significantly lower than Findmypast’s £3.50 charge for pay-per-view
access to the England & Wales census, Findmypast have already launched a subscription
which includes unlimited access to the 1921 census. By contrast, because ScotlandsPeople don’t have any subscriptions, researchers
will be paying £1.50 a page for ever and a day – allowing ScotlandsPeople
much more time to recoup their investment.
There’s
another difference – the household schedules for the England & Wales census
have survived, so we get to see the our ancestor’s
handwriting, including any errors and corrections. But the household schedules
for the Scotland census were destroyed – all that remains are the summary
sheets to which the enumerator copied the information – though on the plus side
you’ll get to see some of the neighbours as well.
Why the ‘Black Death’ still affects us today
Analysis
of the remains of 14th century skeletons, many of them from the East
Smithfield ‘plague pits’ in London, have revealed that inhabitants with particular variations in the ERAP2 gene were 40% more likely
to survive – a major advantage given the virulence of the disease.
It
is thought that between one-half and one-third of the inhabitants of Europe
succumbed to plague in the mid-1300s, and it took centuries for populations to
recover. The genetic variations that helped the survivors have been passed down
the generations – but whilst they helped our ancestors survive
they have been linked to auto-immune diseases, such as Crohn’s disease.
This
BBC article summarises
the research and has a link to the research paper should you wish to know more.
Nottinghamshire parish registers go online NEW
Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812
Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Baptisms,
1813-1919
Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1937
Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Burials,
1813-1994
Cambs, Hunts, and Sheffield registers also to be
digitised?
Ancestry
recently advertised
three vacancies for ‘Digitisation operatives’ based at Cambridgeshire Archives,
Huntingdonshire Archives, and Sheffield City Archives – which suggests that they’re
planning to make the registers available online. In each case the project is
expected to last 6 months, so we’re unlikely to see the fruits of their labours
before the end of next year.
All
autosomal DNA tests use similar technology, so you might think it wouldn’t matter
which test you take – I’m well-known for my moneysaving tips, so you might
expect me to recommend one of the cheaper tests on the market.
And
yet I don’t – because my long experience of working with DNA has taught me that
being able to access the world’s biggest database of genealogical DNA tests is far
more important than price alone. Only by taking Ancestry’s own test can you get
into their database of more than 23 million tests – because, whilst you can
transfer your Ancestry results to other providers, you can’t upload results from
other providers to Ancestry.
The
other feature that sets Ancestry apart from other sites is the way that they integrate
DNA with family trees – they’ve done this far more than any other site, which
not only makes it easier for you and me, it saves us
an enormous amount of time and effort.
Please
use the relevant link below so that you have a chance of supporting LostCousins
when you make your purchase (if you’re not taken to the offer page first time,
log-out from your Ancestry account then click the link again).
Ancestry.co.uk
(UK only) – REDUCED FROM £79 to £59
Ancestry.com.au
(Australia and New Zealand only) – REDUCED FROM $129 to $89
Ancestry.ca
(Canada only) – REDUCED FROM
$129 to $79
Tip:
make sure you follow the advice in my DNA Masterclass – doing what comes
naturally won’t work nearly as well!
I never make BIG misteaks
Apologies
to anyone who was affronted by my deliberate use of the grammatically incorrect
construction ‘would of’ in the title of an article
in the last issue. As you’ll know if you read the article, it was done to make
a point – but in more than a few cases recipients of my newsletter email were
so shocked that they wrote to me before reading the article.
The
good news is that most people seem to agree with the hypothesis I put forward
in the article. We are so dependent on parish registers that it certainly simplifies
our research if we maintain the convenient fiction that the entries in the
registers are always correct and complete, but in the long run it works against
us.
So
often I hear people say that this or that person wasn’t baptised as if this was
an undisputed fact – but in reality all that we can
know is that if they were baptised, we haven’t found the entry yet, or else we
haven’t recognised it (perhaps because of deficiencies in the register).
Time to start your Christmas shopping?
It’s
never too soon to start buying Christmas gifts – leave it to the last minute
and it becomes a chore, rather than a pleasure.
Findmypast
have just launched Gift Subscriptions, which are in most ways identical to
normal subscriptions – the main differences are that when you give a
subscription as a gift, the subscription does not renew automatically, and the
recipient will have 3 months to activate the subscription (which means you can
buy ahead of time). Gift subscriptions are available at all
of Findmypast’s sites – prices at the UK site start at £36.99 (for a 3
month Plus subscription):
Sad
to say I won’t be giving Findmypast subscriptions to members of my family –
they’re all quite happy to let me do the research and pass the results onto
them (don’t worry, there are plenty of more distant relatives with whom I’m
actively collaborating). But I will be giving some Poems by Post
subscriptions this Christmas – at prices from £11.25 for a 3
month subscription they’ll make great ‘stocking fillers’, and I can
choose when the subscription starts.
Please
bear in mind that the EXCLUSIVE 50% discount I arranged for readers of this
newsletter ends on 31st October! Click the banner above if you can
see it, or else follow this link
– the discount should be applied automatically when you go to the checkout, but
if not enter the code LC50
Even
if you don’t live in the UK it’s likely that you’ll be
reasonably familiar with the recent upheavals in Westminster. Though it’s more than half
a century since I read the book, and nearly a century since it was published, I
couldn’t help being reminded of the phrase “this week’s Prime Minister”, coined
by Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies, his second novel, published in 1928.
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......
I’ll be back soon with more news from the world of family history –
but in the meantime please do what you can to connect with, and collaborate
with, the experienced family historians who are researching YOUR ancestors. It’s
the reason this newsletter exists!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2022 Peter Calver
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