Newsletter - 23rd February
2020
Have you won a prize in my New Year
Competition?
Surrey registers at Findmypast
Quick links to Findmypast resources
Ring lost 47 years ago in the US turns up in
Finland
How many family Bibles did you inherit?
Ghost ancestors of the human race
Review: Reading Early Handwriting
1500-1700
Review: A Date with the Hangman
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 31st January) 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!
Have you won a prize in my New Year
Competition?
Nearly
1500 members took part in this year's competition - congratulations to everyone
who entered on playing your part in the LostCousins project to connect cousins
around the world.
The
top 5 prize-winners have been notified and have either received their prizes,
or will do shortly. Many thanks to Findmypast, British Newspaper Archive, Simon
Orde (author of Family Historian), Stephen
Molyneux (author of The Death Certificate), Nathan Dylan Goodwin (author
of The Sterling Affair), and Family Tree magazine (organisers of Family
Tree Live!) for providing such a wonderful array of prizes.
The
top prizes have been spread all over the world: the winners were Dawn in
Cheshire, Deb in Virginia, Elizabeth in Australia, Gill in Maidenhead, and
Stephen in Japan.
But
there are more prizes to come - to find out whether you have won one of them just
log-in to your LostCousins account and look for a message on the home screen.
I'll be posting one message a day over the next week, and the prizes will be offered
on a first-come, first-served basis (so log-in and log-out each day to give
yourself the best chance).
Surrey registers at Findmypast
Some
of my Surrey ancestors are 'brick walls', so I was delighted when Findmypast
recently published millions of parish records for the county, all with links to
the relevant parish register pages. Although Ancestry made available parish
registers for most of Surrey a few years ago, I'm hoping that with records at
two sites I'm going to be able to solve some of the mysteries that have been
holding my research back.
You
can check out the Findmypast Surrey collection by following this link.
Quick links to Findmypast resources
These quick links to the key resources at Findmypast will be
useful whether you’re a subscriber or not:
|
1881 British census (FREE
transcription) |
|
1939
Register (England & Wales) |
* these parish register links will take you to the baptisms for
the county
Ring
lost 47 years ago in the US turns up in Finland
It's not unusual to hear about lost and stolen
possessions that turn up many years later, but this story
of ring that reappeared nearly half a century later on a different continent is
pretty exceptoional!
In the same week I heard this story
about a missing purse that turned up 63 years later.
How many family Bibles did you inherit?
It's
hard to believe that my ancestors didn't own a Bible - even those who couldn’t sign
their own names might have been able to read - and yet the only Bibles I
inherited were 20th century editions that came from my parents.
I'm
always so envious when I hear from fellow historians who have in their
possession a family Bible inscribed with information from their family tree
that doesn’t exist in any public record office - so please treat the question
at the start of this article as rhetorical!
Of
course, when I look at my tree it's obvious what has happened - most of my
ancestors came from large families, and whilst family stories could be passed
down to all of them, only one could inherit physical possessions like the
family Bible. My father inherited from his grandfather - and clearly greatly-prized
- a bound volume of Boy's Own Paper dating from 1879, the first year of
publication, but there are no inscriptions. I wouldn’t even have known it came
from my great-grandfather had Dad not written this fact down on a piece of
paper which was tucked inside the front cover.
When
civil registration commenced in the 19th century (1837 in England & Wales,
1855 in Scotland, 1864 in Ireland) it was no longer so important for families to
record the information themselves - and this means that the cousins in
possession of my ancestors' Bibles could well be 4th, 5th or even 6th cousins
of mine.
This
means it's pointless to attempt to track down the Bibles - we all have far more
4th, 5th and 6th cousins than we can possibly count, let alone contact - but it's
yet another reason to connect with researchers who share your ancestry, whether
through a specialist site like LostCousins
or Genes
Reunited, or through a multi-purpose site like Ancestry
or Findmypast.
Connecting
with cousins, especially cousins who share our interest in family history, offers
the prospect of sharing a wide range of objects and information - not just
family Bibles, but also photographs, medals, diaries, scrapbooks, and
embroidery samplers, as well as postcards and other correspondence.
Although registration of stillborn children commenced on 1st July 1927 in England & Wales, it wasn't until 1939 that similar provisions came into force in Scotland.
I
recently discovered a paper
entitled Stillbirth registration and perceptions of infant death, 1900–60:
the Scottish case in national context which, whilst focusing on Scotland,
will be of interest to anyone who has an interest in this difficult topic.
It
isn't currently necessary - or possible - to register the birth of a stillborn
child if the period of gestation is less than 24 weeks, though there have been
attempts to lower the limit. This Briefing
Paper prepared by Catherine Fairbairn of the House of Commons Library sets
out the position as it stood in 2018 (it's in PDF format so might open either
in your browser, or in a separate app such as Adobe Reader).
Ghost ancestors of the human race
There
was a time when the family tree of the human race was thought to be quite
straightforward, but recent discoveries - many made as a result of DNA analysis
- have made it clear that things aren’t as simple as they once seemed.
This
article
in Science magazine shows just how complicated things have become - and no
doubt there are even more surprises to come.
Review: Reading Early Handwriting
1500-1700
The average
LostCousins member has been researching for longer than I have, so most people
reading this will have 'brick walls' in
the 16th and 17th centuries - a time when people not only spoke differently and
spelled differently, they also wrote differently. Indeed until 1733 many official
documents were written in Latin, and even after that date some clergymen (and
they were all men) continued to use Latin in parish registers.
Tip:
if you encounter Latin during your research this guide on the National Archives
website might help.
But
even when scribes and clergymen were writing in English their handwriting can
seem indecipherable to modern day researchers - and that's why Reading Early
Handwriting 1500-1700 is so invaluable. The growth of interest in family
and local history, and the availability of documents online means that - as Dr
Mark Forrest, the author of this excellent book points out, there are more documents
from the Tudor and Stuart eras being read now than at any time since the 17th
century.
We're
all used to handwriting where one letter looks much like another - even the
1939 Register has many examples where the letters m, n, u, v, and w can be
easily confused. But go back to the period covered by this book and it gets
worse, much worse - not only are there many different ways of writing the same
letters, many of them look to modern eyes like completely different letters. And, as if that wasn't difficult enough,
scribes would abbreviate frequently used words in ways that made them
completely indecipherable to anyone who hasn't read this book.
I
now know why I find it so difficult to read old documents, even when a transcript
is provided - and whilst £10 might seem a lot for an 88-page book, it's less
than you would pay to have a single page transcribed by a paleographer.
Highly recommended!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Review: A Date with the Hangman
At the beginning of
the 18th century there were more than 100 capital offences in England, and by
1815 there were more than 200. However, as Gary Dobbs points out in A
Date with the Hangman: a History of Capital Punishment in Britain if you committed
a crime in the 18th or early 19th centuries the chances of being caught were
minimal - "there were no police forces to speak of and no detectives at
all".
However,
for anyone growing up in the 1950s and 60s the concern was not so much about
whether the guilty should receive the ultimate punishment, but whether it was
also being meted out to the innocent. The case of Timothy Evans was
particularly troubling, but there was also concern regarding Derek Bentley and James
Hanratty (though Hanratty is now thought to have been guilty). The case of Ruth
Ellis, who murdered her abusive partner, was also controversial.
Much
of the book is taken up with lists of the murderers who were executed during
the 20th century, generally with only brief details of their crimes and victims,
though cases of particular interest are accorded considerably more space. I didn’t
spot the name of any of my relatives amongst the victims, the perpetrators, or
the executioners, but no doubt some of you will be less fortunate.
Whilst
the book is primarily about hanging, other forms of execution are briefly mentioned,
some of them extremely grisly - it's certainly not a book for bedtime reading!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
It was only last
month that I reviewed The Indelible Stain, the second book in the Esme
Quentin series of genealogical mysteries
from Wendy Percival - but I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t resist starting
on the third book in the series when I found myself at a loose end while
travelling. And having started, I just had to finish it, even though there were
other things I should have been doing!
The
plot is cleverly-crafted: it starts innocently enough, with Esme offering to
research her friend Ruth's aunt, but at the same she's working on a completely different
case with Max, a journalist colleague of her late husband. However, things are
not what they seem, and before long Esme is wondering whether the two cases are
connected in some way.
Talking
of connections, one of the clues Esme comes across is a photograph of 'Typhoid
Mary', who was a super-spreader of the deadly disease - indeed, as I mentioned
in a newsletter article in 2010, it's just possible that she was indirectly responsible
for the death of my great-uncle, who died of typhoid in New York in 1893. And
naturally my thoughts turned to the coronavirus that originated in China but is
now spreading around the world (this BBC article explains why
super-spreaders can be so dangerous).
Anyway,
I can’t tell you more without giving away too much of the plot - and I
certainly wouldn’t want to spoil your enjoyment of this excellent novel. You don’t
need to have read the previous books in the series, but you'll enjoy all of
them - so why not read them in order? (Just follow the links below.)
I
read the Kindle version of The Malice of Angels, which is a bargain at
just £2.99 (remember, you don’t need a Kindle - a smartphone, a tablet, or a
laptop will do). But it's also available in paperback at £9.99, and one
advantage of having a real book is being able to lend it to your friends!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
It was quite a coincidence
that MI6 - British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909-1945 was
in my pile of books for review because both The Malice of Angels (by Wendy
Percival, reviewed above), and The Sterling Affair (by Nathan Dylan
Goodwin, reviewed below) have plots which involve the security services.
But
the coincidences don’t end there - Robin Brook, one of the operatives mentioned
in the book, was the Chairman of the merchant bank where I worked in the early
1970s, whilst the brother of Nigel West, the author of the book, was my main
competitor when I started in the software business in the late 1970s. And to
cap it all, Lady Menzies, the widow of Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies (who
was head of MI6 from 1939-52), lived for many years in the very building where
LostCousins was founded - and is still based.
Although
the book covers the period from the foundation of the Secret Intelligence
Service in 1909, most of it is devoted to the period from 1939-45 - but whatever
period he's writing about, it’s clear that the author is encyclopaedic in his
knowledge.
There's
a uniquely British tendency to focus on things that go wrong, but there is sufficient
detail in the book to help the reader understand how and why things went awry -
whether it was inter-departmental infighting or an over-reliance on the 'Old
Boy' network.
I
read the hardback, but the book is also available in Kindle format. There are
also cheap second-hand copies of the 1985 paperback edition available - I haven't
read it, so can’t comment on the differences, but I suspect that it might
suffice for the general reader.
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Nathan Dylan
Goodwin's latest genealogical mystery novel is a blockbuster in more ways than
one - it's by far the longest instalment in the Forensic Genealogist series
featuring Morton Farrier, and because many of the key characters were involved
with the Security Services during the Cold War it has enough twists and turns
to make your hair curl.
Since
founding LostCousins I've come across several instances in which a birth
certificate passed down within a member's family wasn't the correct certificate
- it simply fulfilled a purpose, perhaps to obtain a passport or claim a
pension. And anyone who has read of watched The
Day of the Jackal will know how easy it was to assume the identity of a
child who had died.
And
that's how The Sterling Affair begins - with an elderly lady arriving on
Morton Farrier's doorstep claiming that the brother who has just died, leaving
her a legacy of £90,000, had actually passed way in 1944.
Intertwined with Morton's research into his
client's story is a mystery that involves his own family, one studded with
themes that will be familiar to regular readers of this newsletter. Indeed, the
events of the book are as much of a roller-coaster ride for Morton as they are
for the reader.
If you’re an avid reader of Nathan Dylan Goodwin's
books you won’t need to be convinced to buy this latest instalment in the
Forensic Genealogist series - but if you're not, now's the time to start,
because The Sterling Affair is a real cracker!
I read the Kindle version, but it's also available
as a paperback - indeed one lucky member has one a signed copy in my New Year
Competition!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
What do you do when
you meet a celebrity? You ask for their autograph. At last, that’s the way it
normally, works, but when I met Sir Geoff Hurst last month I turned the tables
by giving him my autograph.
How
come? Well, when Geoff Hurst, the only man ever to score three goals in a World
Cup final, was knighted in 1998 I wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to The Times
- which they graciously chose for
publication - so I thought the least I could do was give him a framed and signed
copy of my letter.
Talk
about irresponsible - this BBC article
about a young man who claims to make a fortune as an online trader can only
lead to disaster. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out that for everyone
who makes a profit there's somebody else who makes a loss.
Let's
hope that none of your grandchildren fall for this fairy tale.....
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 in touch soon - in the meantime, enjoy reading the
books I've selected!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2020 Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or republish any part of this newsletter without
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