Newsletter
- 7th July 2017
Masterclass: Learning
from the mistakes of others
Do you know any family historians in Canada?
Which ancestor would you exhume: follow-up
The woman who discovered her parents were siblings
Review: The Seven Daughters of Eve
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Masterclass: Learning
from the mistakes of others
All successful family historians - and
you probably wouldn't be reading this newsletter if you weren't one of them -
have learned to cope with mistakes, whether transcription errors, incorrect
ages on the census, the wrong father's name on a marriage certificate, or any
of the other traps that are waiting for the unwary.
But have you ever considered that
mistakes can be an asset, as well as a liability? For example, the GRO's new
online death indexes give the age at death, but whilst it's always supposed to
be the age in years, sometimes it's the age in months, days, weeks, or even
hours.
On the face of it this is a major problem
- but because the contemporary GRO death indexes began to show the age at death
(always in years) from 1865 onwards, we've actually got
a little more information available to us than before. For example, a child
shown who died at the age of 1 according to the original indexes might be shown
as 20 in the next indexes - so we can easily work out that the age shown in the
register must be 20 months.
Of course, you'd get this information
and more if you bought the death certificate - but perhaps this additional
detail will enable you to work out that it's actually the
wrong death entry? That's £9.25 saved, all thanks to a mistake.
Sometimes what we learn is more subtle, but even more useful - for example,
misspellings of our ancestors' names, especially their surnames, could reveal
how they pronounced them. My 18th century Calver ancestors often appear in the
Suffolk registers as Carver, even though the two surnames aren't interchangeable
(they have very different origins). So I know how my
ancestors pronounced their surname, even though they died long before sound
recording became a reality.
Birthplaces on the census are often
wrong - for the simple reason that people didn't always know where they were
born. So they give the name of the place where they
grew up - the earliest home they can remember - which might be where they were
born, but often isn't. How can knowing where they grew up help you find their
baptism? Well, it might enable you to find them living with their parents on an
earlier census - and that census is very likely to give the correct place of
birth (since mothers rarely forget where they were when they gave birth to
their children).
And then there are the cases in which
our ancestors deliberately provided false information - but someone else made
the mistake of believing it.
The most common example is the age of
the bride or groom in the marriage register (which, of course, was only shown
after 1837, when civil registration began in England & Wales). Whilst it
always seems as if they did it to confuse us, the reality is they didn't -
nothing could have been further from their minds. Were they trying to fool
their spouse or the vicar - or even the witnesses? If you can figure this out
it might give you some insight into your ancestor's life, both before and after
the wedding.
Boys signing up for the military may
have claimed to be older than they were, either to get higher pay, or to
increase the chance that they'd get to fight the enemy; men signing up may have
said they were younger. One of my relatives did both, but clearly must have
regretted signing up for the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the Great War
because, according to his service file - which was uploaded to the website of Libraries
and Archives Canada in the last week - he died of a self-inflicted wound.
Servants may have lied about their age
to a prospective employer, either to increase their chance of getting the job,
or to secure higher pay - teenage girls who worked as live-in servants are
often shown on the census as older than they really were.
And in the 1911 Census many people answered
the new questions relating to children incorrectly - the questions only applied
to married women, but many husbands and widows filled them in. Whilst the
enumerators often - but not always - spotted these errors and scored through the
entries, they can still be read. My great-grandfather gave the figures for both
of his marriages - in total, not separately - which made it much easier to
identify missing births.
Do you know any family historians
in Canada?
To celebrate Canada Day - which this
year marked 150 years since the passing of the British North America Act, which
brought together the Canadian colonies (the Province of Canada, Nova Scotia,
and New Brunswick) in one dominion - I'm offering new members who live in
Canada a free 6 month subscription.
This offer ends on Monday 10th July, so
if you know of any family historians in Canada, now's the time to tell them
about LostCousins! This link will take them to a page with full details of the
offer:
https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/canadaday.htm
Note:
existing members in Canada were mailed directly last week - there was also a
celebratory offer for them.
I've just counted up
how many 'brick walls' there are in my tree, and it comes to precisely 100!
This demonstrates how far I've come in
the past few years, thanks largely to parish registers for Hertfordshire, Devon
and Kent coming online at Findmypast - the
last time I counted up methodically the number of
'brick walls' was less than 50.
The next series of advances will very probably
come from DNA, primarily through Ancestry - I've
already made progress on several of my oldest (which actually
means 'most recent') 'brick walls', and I've still got thousands of
matches to analyse.
There are many readers of this
newsletter who have been researching much longer than I have, so I'm sure some
of you have many more than 100 'brick walls' - where do you see your breakthroughs coming from, I wonder?
Note:
although the term 'brick wall' is sometimes used more widely, I only use it
where there is a 'brick wall' that stops me getting further back on one of my
ancestral lines (most 'brick walls' exist because I can't find a direct
ancestor's baptism). Frustrating though it might be not to know what happened
to a relative from a collateral line, when an ancestor died, or where they were
buried, I don't count any of these as 'brick walls', so please bear this in
mind if responding.
Which ancestor would you
exhume: follow-up
In the last issue I reported that
Salvador Dali was going to be exhumed in order to carry
out a paternity test - and asked readers "given the chance, would you have
one of your ancestors exhumed for DNA tests, and if so, which one and why?".
Many of those who responded argued that
it would be disrespectful to exhume our ancestors simply to satisfy our own
curiosity. But what if the remains were going to be disturbed anyway?
Every year thousands of old graves are disturbed and the bodies moved
just so that cemeteries can fit in more new graves. In some instances
cemeteries are completely cleared to enable redevelopment of the site - perhaps
turning it into a car park or supermarket. Whilst none of us would want our
ancestors to be disturbed in this way, surely it would be better if when it
does happen, their DNA was tested? At the moment this simply
doesn't happen.
Michelle would have liked a DNA sample from her great-great
grandfather, Andrew Reis - who was said by his wife to have been born in
Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1816. The fact that his name had clearly been anglicised
didn't help, and this 'brick wall' had been frustrating Michelle for a quarter
of a century.
Fortunately
it wasn't necessary to dig him up after all - Michelle had recently had a DNA match
with a cousin who also had Swedish ancestry, and while we were corresponding earlier
this week Michelle's cousin came back with the solution to the mystery. Not
only was Michelle's 'brick wall' comprehensively knocked down, the information
she was able to provide solved a mystery for her Swedish cousins, who had an Anschel von Reis in their tree who seemed to disappear off
the face of the earth!
It's good to know I'm not the only one who has been knocking down
'brick walls' using DNA.
The woman who
discovered her parents were siblings
In 2014 Donna Price reported her biological
parents to police after discovering that they were siblings, half-brother and
half-sister. You can read about it in this Independent
article.
As you'll know from my articles about
cousin marriages, relationships between relatives heighten the chance of
genetic defects in the offspring - and the closer the relationship the more
likely this is. But whilst a relationship between half-siblings sounds much
worse than one between an aunt and her nephew, the amount of DNA they share is
the same, so I would expect the risks to be similar (though I haven't done the
calculations).
Tip:
if you upload your atDNA results to GEDmatch you can
find out whether your parents were related - it's one of the many free features
of that site.
This week England's Chief Medical
Officer said that cancer patients should be routinely offered DNA tests now
that whole genome testing has come down in price to under £700.
Although we're a long way from a cure
for cancer, DNA testing can help determine which patients are most likely to
respond to a particular form of treatment - this is
important, because many of the treatments have unpleasant side-effects.
Already over 31,000 NHS patients - some
of them cancer sufferers - have had their entire genome sequenced. Over time,
building up a larger database will help researchers to find cures for some
cancers, but the immediate benefit will be better treatment.
Of course, there's always a scaremonger
somewhere on the horizon, and in this case it was a
tabloid newspaper which published an appalling article whose only effect will
be to harm cancer suffers and cause additional worry for their relatives (which
is why I am not going to name the newspaper or publish a link to the article).
Goodness me, we've been providing blood
samples to doctors and nurses for decades and they all contain our DNA - as do
the samples taken during biopsies. Is someone with cancer really going to worry
about the remote chance that their DNA results end up in the wrong hands? Even
if they did, why would it matter? After all, we're giving away samples every
day, in our sweat, our saliva, in the hundreds of little flakes of skin that
slough off as we go about our everyday lives.
I can understand why some people are
reluctant to take DNA tests for genealogical purposes - there's always the risk
that a skeleton might fall out of the closet - but what cancer sufferer would
turn down a test that will help to determine the best course of treatment, and by
so doing either prolong their life or make it more pleasant?
My mother died from liver cancer in 1976
when she was just 50 years old. It was only three days before she died that the
illness was diagnosed - thank goodness the National
Health Service has improved by leaps and bounds over the past 40 years. Let's
hope that the scaremongers don't win, and that the improvements continue for
the next 40 years.
I've just heard that Living DNA are
offering discounts to customers in the UK and the US - please use the links
below if you want to take advantage of the offer prices:
I'll update this article if and when the offer is extended to other territories, and
also if I am able to discover the closing date of the sale. Want to know more? You
can see my Living DNA results here.
Tip:
the Living DNA test is focused on ethnicity - it aims
to tell you where your ancestors are likely to have been living a few hundred
years ago, well within the range of conventional records. It's of particular interest to those of mainly European ancestry who
have tested elsewhere but are looking for more detail; it won't, however,
enable you to identify and connect with your DNA cousins, something that other
tests are good at.
Review: The Seven Daughters of Eve
I resisted reading Professor Bryan
Sykes' bestselling book about DNA for many years because - being a family
historian - I don't like it when people mix fact and fiction. But when I eventually
started reading the book, which describes how analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was able to shed light onto
some of mysteries about the origins of homo
sapiens, I realised that the fact and the fiction were carefully separated
- and more than three-quarters of the book is based on fact.
Of course, what was regarded as fact in
2001, when this book was published might not be fact today - genetics is a
fast-moving field, and Professor Sykes was at the cutting edge. Because mtDNA is easier to recover from historic or pre-historic
human remains, and is by far the smallest component of human DNA, it was the
DNA of choice in the 1980s and 1990s, when the analysis was mostly done by hand.
Note:
it was mtDNA that helped to identify the remains of
King Richard III.
But mtDNA
tells us only about one ancestral line - whilst mothers pass on their mtDNA to their sons as well as their daughters, only the
daughters can pass it on to their own offspring. Go back just a few hundred
years and we have thousands of ancestral lines, and whilst they won't all be
represented in the DNA of any one descendant (because of the randomness in the
way that autosomal DNA is inherited), any one of them could be.
Over half a century ago I read The Kon Tiki
Expedition, which told the story of Thor Heyrdahl's
epic 101-day voyage on a balsa wood raft - he set out to prove that it would
have been possible for the original inhabitants of Easter Island to have come
from Peru. But Professor Sykes' analysis of mtDNA
suggested otherwise (although I suspect that the story has become more complex
as technology has advanced).
Similarly, Professor Sykes demonstrated
that most modern Europeans have inherited their mtDNA
from one of 7 women - and these are the 'seven daughters of Eve' mentioned in
the title of the book. It's certainly fascinating to consider that we can trace
our ancestry back to a specific female ancestor, even though we don't know her
name - but it's of limited relevance to family historians, since even if you
find someone who has identical mtDNA your common ancestor
could well pre-date the introduction of parish registers and surnames!
I really enjoyed the book, which tackles
a highly-technical topic in a way that makes it accessible to all of us. Just
bear in mind as you read it that it was written around the beginning of the
century, before the first human genome was sequenced at a cost of around $3
billion (it now costs less than $1000) - things have changed quite
dramatically.
My copy came from a charity shop, price
20p, but there are second-hand copies at Amazon.co.uk
for a few pounds.
Perhaps the most poignant advertisement
I've ever seen was a card put up by a customer in my local supermarket which
read "Wedding Dress for sale - never worn". It immediately conjured
up a vision of Dickens' Miss Havisham, who was jilted at the altar - and had me
wondering if there was a similar tale of woe behind the postcard.
Coincidentally, as I was finalising this
newsletter I spotted this BBC News article
on the same theme - though it doesn't quite have the same poignancy.
When I was at the supermarket checkout
yesterday evening I noticed that amongst the mobile phone SIM-cards on offer
was one for GiffGaff - this was quite a surprise,
since they normally rely on word-of-mouth to promote the network. But LostCousins
members can do better - if you order a SIM online using this link
and activate it before the end of July you can get £10 of free credit!
From Monday 10th July until Sunday 16th
July you can save 10% on your second and subsequent books when you buy from Wordery
and use the code JULYBREAK (the most
expensive book on your order will be the one on which you pay full price, but
their prices are pretty competitive and they offer free Worldwide delivery).
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 2017 Peter
Calver
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