Newsletter – 24th September 2025
Are you planning to watch the Waltham Forest FHS talk? FREE
King Charles meets world’s oldest person
Stop Press UPDATED
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 17th September) 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!
I spend a lot of my time researching and writing the LostCousins newsletter, so it’s heartening that members frequently write to let me know how useful they find the articles, especially when they tell me that it’s always the first email they open when it appears in their inbox.
But LostCousins isn’t just a newsletter, it’s a website where serious family historians who are researching the same lines can connect and collaborate. So I’m going to begin this issue by explaining how this can make your research more productive and more meaningful…. and, like this newsletter, it’s FREE!
Let’s face it, when it comes to researching family trees, nobody has enough time to do everything they would like to. So it certainly doesn’t make sense to repeat research that another experienced family historian has already done – that would be a waste of your time. Of course, you’d want to review their findings, but you wouldn’t want to spend days or weeks of your valuable time repeating it from scratch.
But where are you going to find experienced researchers who share your ancestors? Most online trees are riddled with errors, and few of them are based on original research, so if you ask where such-and-such came from they won’t have a clue. If they answer at all….
Fortunately there’s a place where you can be sure of finding people who are not only researching your ancestors, but are likely to be just as meticulous as you are. You’ll find it at a website where most of the contributors have been researching for over 20 years, so you won’t be dealing with beginners who are still struggling with the basics.
Where is this Shangri La of genealogy? Believe it or not, it’s right under your nose – it’s the My Cousins page at the LostCousins site!
Right now, you might be thinking, “What a load of tosh – there’s nobody on the My Cousins page when I look”. Well, there’s usually a good reason for that – typically it’s because you’ve entered little or no information on your My Ancestors page. As with so many things in life, what you get out of your LostCousins membership depends on what you put in: the more relatives you enter on your My Ancestors page, especially those who were recorded in the 1881 Census, the more cousins you’ll find.
What’s that? You already know all your cousins? Absolute balderdash. Nobody knows all their cousins – it’s impossible, because on average we have around 200,000 living cousins who are our 6th cousin or closer. Of course, they won’t all be interested in family history, and they certainly won’t all be LostCousins members, but the more interested they are, and the more experience they have of researching their family tree, the more likely it is that they will be members of LostCousins.
It’s all my fault… when I was designing the LostCousins site in late 2003 I wanted the pages to have short snappy names that are easy to remember, like My Cousins and My Ancestors. Unfortunately, the name My Ancestors can be misleading because some members infer that they can only enter their direct ancestors (the people they are directly descended from). It’s too late to change the name now, but what I can do is reprint this advice from one of my January newsletters:
Tip: ALL of your living cousins are descended from collateral lines, the lines that branch off from your direct lines, so the best way to find them is to enter the relatives from the branches. Start with your ancestors' siblings then continue with their cousins. A good approach is to start with everyone you know about in 1841 – whether or not you can find them on that census – then track each branch and twig through the censuses until you get to 1881.
Here’s one reason why entering only your direct ancestors won’t work: if you’re of my generation then most of the direct ancestors recorded in 1881 will be your grandparents or great-grandparents. Their descendants are your 1st and 2nd cousins, which means they’re so closely-related that it’s unlikely that you could both have been researching for years without either of you realising that the other shared your passion for family history.
By contrast, if you enter your direct ancestors’ 1st cousins, their descendants are your 3rd and 4th cousins – close enough that they share a good chunk of your tree, but sufficiently distant that you wouldn’t necessarily know that they’re also researching their ancestors.
Of course, everyone’s tree is different, but the same principle applies – the further you cast the net, the more ‘lost cousins’ you’ll find.
- In the world of genealogy there is nothing quite as exciting as knocking down a ‘brick wall’, especially when it’s one that has been holding you back for years, or even decades. But nobody can appreciate the true importance of the discovery and share in your joy unless they also share your brick wall ancestor – when you’ve been collaborating with other family historians who share the same brick wall you can ALL celebrate when it finally comes tumbling down.
- By working towards a common goal you and your cousins are more likely to succeed in knocking down the brick walls you share, and because the workload is also shared you’ll have more time to work on parts of your tree which are relatively neglected.
- Collaborating with your ‘lost cousins’ has other benefits: it helps to ensure that your research is passed down to future generations, not as one online tree amongst many, but in a way that ensures that it gets the respect that your hard work and painstaking efforts deserve.
Now let’s look at some of the other ways that you can benefit from your LostCousins membership….
- Back in 2004 LostCousins was the first genealogy site (and possibly the first website of any kind) to make provision for members to pass on their data to another family member. It took the best part of 20 years for Ancestry to replicate what I did back then, and so far as I can tell Findmypast have still not followed my lead. Do take advantage of this feature to ensure that the data you enter is preserved: at LostCousins look for My Beneficiary on your My Details page; at Ancestry you’ll find Legacy Settings under Account Details.
- By taking part in the LostCousins project to connect cousins you can earn an invite to join the LostCousins Forum, where there’s an opportunity to share your knowledge and experience with other members, and benefit from discussing research problems with people who have encountered similar issues in the past.
- Relatives you add to your My Ancestors page also count as entries in my Annual Competition: nearly 4000 prizes were awarded in the latest competition, which closed in January, including invitations to exclusive Zoom presentations and subscriptions to Findmypast, TheGenealogist, and Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. There’s no need to wait for the next competition to be announced – relatives you add now will count as entries.
Are you planning to watch the Waltham Forest FHS talk? FREE
This year I’ve arranged exclusive presentations for LostCousins members from family history societies across England including Cheshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk, Calderdale, Huddersfield & District, and London Westminster & Middlesex – all of the recordings are available NOW, but only through your My Events page.
At 10am on Saturday 4th October we’ll be hearing from Waltham Forest Family History Society about how they can help you research ancestors from Walthamstow, Chingford, Waltham Abbey and the surrounding area. My 3G grandfather was born in Walthamstow, and baptised there in 1805, so I’ll certainly be listening carefully – and I hope that you’ll be able to join us.
To book your FREE place at the live talk – or indicate your interest in viewing the recording – simply log into your LostCousins account (yes, you DO have an account otherwise you wouldn’t have received an email from me telling you about this newsletter), then go to the My Events page.
Note: if you’re wondering why all of the societies presenting have been English societies, there’s a simple answer – no Scottish or Welsh societies have volunteered.
It was a pleasure to meet so many LostCousins members at last weekend’s Secrets and Lies conference, organised by the Halsted Trust charity. It’s the first time I’ve been to a residential genealogy conference that I haven’t been running myself, so it was relatively relaxing – though the agenda didn’t allow for much downtime (for example, the last presentation on Friday evening ended at 9.45pm).
Perhaps the most thought-provoking talk was The Visual Record – Fact or Fiction by Paul Blake. It was not just a reminder that Victorian and Edwardian photographers were quite capable of fooling the viewer even without Photoshop and AI, but also a warning to us not to mislead the family historians of the future by allowing colorised, doctored, or AI-generated images to be mistaken as genuine.
Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I am not a fan of historical fiction: this isn’t a whimsical preference, I hate to see fact and fiction muddled together in such a way that it’s impossible to determine which is which.
It’s not just the province of novelists, it’s a mistake that’s often made by family historians when they turn their discoveries into a book that they can give to family members. For example, some put words into the mouths of their ancestors, even though they can’t possibly know what was said at the time, whilst others seem to think they know how an ancestor “must have felt” at a particularly critical time in their life. They don’t.
We must always remember that we’re family historians, which means our role is to search out and record facts. It’s far better to encourage our readers to use their own imagination than to present them with a misleading muddle of fact and fiction!
King Charles meets world’s oldest person
King Charles III recently had an audience with Ethel Caterham, the 116 year-old who is not only the oldest person in the world, but the last surviving subject of King Edward VII, the present King’s great-great grandfather. She’s also, as readers of this newsletter will know, the only living person who was recorded on the 1911 Census – you can see the census entry here, in one of my January 2023 newsletters.
It’s not clear from this BBC article whether the King visited Mrs Caterham in her care home in Lightwater, Surrey – but it’s only 12 miles from Windsor Castle, where the King is living whilst Buckingham Palace undergoes renovation.
Windrush aftermath
I recently wrote about the destruction of government records, and mentioned the distress that was caused for Commonwealth citizens who had come to the UK. The case of Thomas Tobierre is particularly sad – after being made redundant in his early 60s he was unable to find another job because he had no documents – even though he had arrived in the UK as a child around 1960 and had married here in 1975.
I suspect that he arrived in 1961, rather than 1960, as he is not recorded in the passenger lists for the earlier year (as readers will know, the Board of Trade ceased collecting passenger lists after 1960). This BBC article refers to him as a 71 year-old, but also says that he arrived in the country at the age of 7, which would be consistent with a 1961 arrival.
Although we were in Peterborough for the Secrets and Lies conference for much of the day, we still managed to make pretty good use of the 12 hours free electricity provided by EDF last Sunday under their Sunday Saver scheme.
We had known before leaving on Friday morning that Sunday would be cold, so we set up a couple of electric heaters on timers (we use these smart plugs) set to come on at 8am to heat the house ready for our return. After arriving back at our lovely warm house we ran the washing machine, tumble dryer, and dishwasher – and I spent an hour in the kitchen making batches of aubergine curry and baked apples using produce from the garden, and a bread-and-butter pudding using panettone left over from last Christmas.
Note: paradoxically I don’t use butter when I make bread-and-butter pudding – I don’t feel it is necessary to add any fat.
This Sunday we’ll be at home all day, so I’ll take the opportunity to charge up my electric car, and I know my wife has been saving up the washing. I’m also planning to make jam for the first time this year – there’s nothing quite like home-made bullace jam, sweet and sharp at the same time. But what about you? EDF have a 10% market share in the UK, so there must be lots of readers who are also taking advantage of Sunday Saver – do you have any tips to pass on?
Note: if you’re considering switching to EDF use this link, and not only will you get a £50 bill credit, we should also benefit.
With winter approaching it’s a good time to mention how we cut our energy bills using low-cost Perspex sheets held in place by magnetic strips. Of course, it’s not as effective as replacing the windows with double-glazed units, but it does a pretty good job for a fraction of the price, and without any of the disruption. My wife did it all herself, from ordering to installation – she uses a company called Magneglaze, but there are other suppliers.
Finally, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that Findmypast’s half-price offer will end on Tuesday, 30th September. For convenience I’m repeating the links below:
Findmypast.co.uk – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com.au – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.ie – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Wednesday 1st October: when I checked just now the Findmypast links (see above) were STILL providing a 50% discount - but it must end soon, surely?
Also today I noticed that there are currently 16 titles in the Tracing Your Ancestors series on offer at just 99p (for Kindle - but you don't need a Kindle to read them). Please follow this link for the latest list.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 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). Proud to be an Amazon Associate.