Newsletter - 10th July 2019
ThruLines goes live at Ancestry
Mary Berry is NOT my ancestor - but my 'brick wall' came tumbling
down
Discover your ancestors in film archives
Finding Masterclasses (and other articles)
How autosomal DNA is inherited
What does it mean to be genetically Jewish?
Growing up in London: a new series
How espionage and ambition built the first factory
Review: Women's Suffrage in Scotland
The most successful author you've never heard of?
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ThruLines goes live at
Ancestry
On 1st July ThruLines permanently replaced DNA Circles, having been
optional while it was in beta test. Although it's a feature that's only
available to those who tested their DNA with Ancestry, it's important to
realise that ThruLines suggestions for 'potential ancestors'
are based on family trees - Ancestry aren't using DNA to prove the connection.
In other words
they're hints - some will be more useful than others, but even when the hint is
wrong good things can come out of it, as the next article demonstrates.
Mary Berry
is NOT my ancestor - but my 'brick wall' came tumbling down
When I looked at ThruLines last
Wednesday morning I noticed that there two potential ancestors I hadn't seen before:
Stephen Berry and his wife Mary.
I was particularly intrigued
because the surname Berry hadn't come up at all during my researches, and
whilst this could mean it was a 'red herring', I've learned over the years that
clues can come from the most surprising sources.
When I took a look at the
tree on which this suggestion was based I realised that the tree owner had
inadvertently combined two families into one - yes, the daughter Mary had
married an Edward Smith, which fitted, but my great-great-great grandmother's
maiden name was Rowse, not Berry. Smith is a very
common surname, and all this took place in London, which at the time was the most
populous city in the Western world, so it was understandable that a mistake
might have been made.
Nevertheless, rather than
dismissing the information out of hand I decided to make sure that I hadn't missed
any children, by checking for Smith births with mother's maiden name Rowse in the GRO birth index. When the GRO's indexes went
online a couple of years ago I used them primarily to help knock down 'brick
walls', or to find missing children revealed by the 1911 'fertility census' - I
didn’t methodically go through every family in my tree, mainly because I was
hoping the GRO would update their search to make it less 'clunky' (which sadly hasn’t
happened yet).
Fortunately Findmypast
took up the baton that the GRO dropped - most entries in their birth index now
include the mother's maiden name, even for the period from 1837-1911 when it
wasn't shown in the original GRO quarterly indexes. Note that you don’t need a
subscription to search at Findmypast - it's only when you try to look at the
record that the drawbridge goes up, and often the search results will tell you
all you need to know (use this link
to check it out yourself - note that you might have to log-in).
These are the results I got
when I searched for births between 1837-1847:
Clara, Eleanor, Emma, and
Maria are all in my tree, but the two Alexanders and Christiana aren't. Even
though the births are in the same part of London I could tell from the dates
that they must have a different mother, so I wondered whether it might be a
case of two brothers marrying two sisters. This would be very good news, because
Mary Ann Rowse had been a 'brick wall' for about 15 years,
and any clue would be worth having.
Before continuing I'm going
to tell you what I knew about Mary Ann: when she married Edward Smith in 1824
at St Mary, Whitechapel the witnesses were William Rowse,
and another Rowse whose name began with E - my best
guess was Ebenezer, but the writing was so bad it really was just a guess.
Because it was 13 years before civil registration was introduced in England
& Wales there was no indication of her father's name - he might have been
one of the witnesses, but then again, he might not.
The 1851 Census showed her age
as 43, and her birthplace as Soho, Middlesex; when she died in 1855 she was
just 47 years old, tallying with the age shown in the census, and implying that
she was born in 1807 or 1808 (making her a young bride when she married in 1824
- she would have needed the permission of her parent or guardian). Soho is in
Westminster, so when Findmypast added the Westminster
parish registers a few years back I had a good look for Mary Ann - and found
a Mary Ann who was baptised to John & Mary Rouse at St Margaret's Westminster.
Not the right parish or the same spelling of the surname, and no sign of a
William or Ebenezer, but it was certainly worth including a note in my tree -
just in case some other corroborating evidence came to light.
Anyway, back to last Wednesday
morning - my first objective was to find the marriage of the other Smith & Rowse couple, and hope that it was
after July 1837 (which seemed quite likely as there were apparently no children
born before 1843). In the event I found it in 1838:
© Reproduced by kind
permission of the London Metropolitan Archives and Ancestry
There two key pieces of
information that stood out: the bride's father's name was William Rowse, which tied in neatly with first witness to the
marriage of Edward Smith and Mary Ann Rowse; secondly,
the bride's name was Rebecca, which happened to be the name of my
great-great-great grandmother (daughter of Edward & Mary Ann).
At this point I was quite
encouraged - the only fly in the ointment was the possibility that the William Rowse named as the bride's father was also the W S Rowse who had signed as a witness, because the signature
looked nothing the one from the 1824 marriage of my great-great-great
grandparents (see below):
© Reproduced by kind
permission of the London Metropolitan Archives and Ancestry
At Findmypast I'd found a Mary
Ann baptised to a William and Rebecca Ann Rowse in
Stepney in 1811, but with a birth year of 1808 recorded - otherwise she'd have
been very unlikely to marry in 1824! There was no image - it was a transcript
sourced from FamilySearch. Perhaps this was the right family at last - but if
so, was the Soho birthplace simply wrong? And why hadn't I found this baptism
in the London Metropolitan Archives collection?
Now that I was increasingly
confident that my Mary Ann was the daughter of William & Rebecca I decided
to go back to the London
Metropolitan Archives collection at Ancestry for another look. I found the
baptism of Rebecca at St Mary, Whitechapel in 1814, which fitted in with an 1838
marriage - and eventually spotted the baptism I'd been looking for all these
years. My ancestor was recorded as 'Many Ann Rowse'!
But I wanted more proof. Who
was W S Rowse, the witness at Rebecca's wedding; who
was Ebenezer (??) Rowse, the second witness to Mary
Ann's marriage? Was I in danger of making the same mistake as the Ancestry tree-owner
who had set me off on this quest, by merging two separate families into one?
I realised that the the best
way to prove the connection was to find signatures that matched, so I resolved
to find as many marriages as possible. The first step was to identify all the
children of William and Rebecca Ann - there were 6 in all, 5 of them daughters
(no wonder William was happy for Mary Ann to marry at such a young age!). And as
they all married, including the son - William Samuel - who was clearly the W S Rowse who witnessed the marriage of Alexander Smith to
Rebecca Rowse, I had plenty of evidence to confirm my
findings.
Ebenezer, by the way, was actually Eleanor; Alexander Smith isn't, so far as I can
tell, related to Edward Smith; and Mary Berry certainly isn’t my ancestor.
Nevertheless, thanks to the muddled tree that ThruLines
discovered, I was inspired to knock down a 'brick wall' that had blocked my way
for 15 years - and all in a morning!
The moral of the tale is that
whilst luck certainly plays a part, it's up to us to grab hold of the
opportunities that come our way and make the most of them. This is far from the
first time that the names and signatures of marriage witnesses have provided me
with vital clues, and you won’t be surprised to learn that one of the other
occasions also involved my Smith ancestors.
I quite often get emails from
people who tell me that this or that surname is so common that they've given up
all hope of finding the answer. But it’s not usually the magnitude of the problem
that stops us succeeding, it's a lack of determination to find the answer - sometimes
people are so convinced that they're going to fail that they don't order the
certificates or buy the subscriptions that could provide the solution. Watching
the tennis on TV last week it wasn't difficult to tell which players had the right mentality to be winners, and which were
setting themselves up for failure. Whilst most of you are amateur genealogists,
like me, that doesn’t mean that we have to fail - I
can remember when everyone playing at Wimbledon or competing in the
Olympics was an amateur!
Postscript: Finding Mary Ann's
parents was just the start - every time we knock down one 'brick wall' there
are at least two more behind it! Put it another way, the more experienced and
successful you are, the more 'brick walls; you'll have - which is why
connecting with cousins, no matter how distant, is crucial to your continued success.
In the mid-19th century graveyards
in many British cities were full, prompting the development of new out-of-town
cemeteries. Now, it seems, we're running out of space again - prompting one
expert to propose burying our loved ones alongside motorways. See this Guardian
article
for more details and some of the other ideas that are being suggested. But
perhaps you have a better suggestion? If so, please let me know.
In Australia construction
works on the Sydney Metro uncovered the remains of a 19th century cemetery - you
can read about it here.
Discover
your ancestors in film archives
Over the past decade I've
written about a number of major film archives, most of them offering free
online viewing, and as there's an article on this topic in the latest issue of Who
Do You Think You Are? magazine I thought this would be a good time to
provide an update.
I first wrote about the East Anglian Film Archive in 2012 - there
are around 200 hours of footage online, all of it free to view, but this is
only a very small fraction of the material in the collection. The earliest
footage dates from 1896!
British Pathé
is another site I've mentioned many times - and whenever I do, there's always
someone who spots an ancestor in one of their newsreels!
I watched the BBC documentaries
about the films of Mitchell and Kenyon (there are some short clips from their
work here,
but you'll need to register). I recorded the programmes when they first aired, over
a decade ago, but you can pick up second-hand DVDs of the series at very low
prices here.
The British Film Institute
National Archive has an immense collection of films or all types - and whilst
most are only available on subscription there's still a lot that is free (follow
this link).
A site I hadn't discovered
before reading Jonathan Scott's article in Who Do You Think You Are? is
London's Screen Archives, which hosts nearly 80 collections held by the London
Metropolitan Archives, London Transport Museum and many others - you can find
out what's available here.
When I searched for Ilford, the town where I grew up, I found a wealth of
material held by Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre, all of it free to view,
and mostly home movies.
Tip: on this site you can
add music to silent movies - it's amazing what a difference it makes.
Another site new to me was
the Media Archive for Central England - you'll find it here but I had trouble with the search
so wasn't able to check it out properly in the time available. See the magazine
for other film archives around the country.
Finding
Masterclasses (and other articles)
My DNA Masterclass, which provides
the optimal strategies for anyone who has tested with Ancestry DNA (but will
also help those who have taken an autosomal test with another provider) is
frequently mentioned in the newsletter. But where can you find it?
The good news is that there
are links to all of my Masterclasses, covering a wide
range of topics, from the Subscribers Only page at the LostCousins site.
However you don’t need to be a subscriber to make use
of the Masterclasses - every newsletter has a search box at the top that allows
you to search every LostCousins newsletter published in the last 10 years
(since February 2009, to be precise).
The results look like a
standard Google search, but - apart from the usual adverts at the top - the
results are all from the newsletters. This means it's really
easy to find articles from past newsletters - far easier than it would
be if there was an index.
For example, if you wanted to
find the DNA Masterclass you would search for 'dna
masterclass'. To find all of the Masterclasses search for 'masterclass'; to
find other articles just type in one or two key words, such as 'bigamy', 'GRO',
or 'illegitimate births'. There's no need to restrict
yourself to topics you remember reading in the newsletter - even I can't
remember everything I've written about!
How autosomal
DNA is inherited
If you'd like to have a
better understanding of how DNA is inherited, all you need is a deck of playing
cards - we're going to use it to represent your parents' DNA.
Here's what to do: first remove
the Aces - you're not going to need them - then separate the remaining cards
into two piles, one with the minor suits (clubs and diamonds) and the other with
the majors (hearts and spades). Now turn them over so that you can't see them
and thoroughly shuffle each pile, keeping them separate.
When you’re satisfied that
they're randomly shuffled deal 12 cards from each pile face down; now take the
24 cards you've just dealt and, keeping them face down, shuffle them again.
Finally turn the cards over and fan them out so that you can see the suit of
each card.
How does this relate to DNA?
Well, the clubs and diamonds represent the DNA you inherited from your paternal
grandparents, hearts and spades the DNA from your maternal grandparents; the
red cards represent the females, and the black cards the
males.
In the nest photo I've sorted
the cards into suits. When you do this you'll notice
that you have the same number of cards from each couple (ie
12), but the chances are that you didn't inherit precisely 6 from each
grandparent. This demonstrates that whilst we get 50% of our DNA from each of our
parents, and they got 50% of their DNA from each of their parents (and so on), we
don’t inherit precisely 25% from each grandparent.
If you were to start again
and select another 24 cards following the instructions above
you'd find that about half of them match the first set, which demonstrates that,
on average, full siblings share 50% of their DNA. But don't do it just now, because
there's another part of the exercise that you'll need to do first.
Although in this simulation
you can identify the DNA that came from each grandparent, you wouldn’t be able
to do this in real life - at least, not without some help from your cousins. Segments
of DNA that you share with one of more maternal cousins must have come from
your maternal grandparents, whilst segments that you share with one or more paternal
cousins must have come from your paternal grandparents (of course, if your
parents were related it's a little more complicated).
Most of the time we don’t need
to know which segments of our DNA came from which ancestor - what we really want
to know is how we are related to the genetic cousins we've been matched with. And
to do this you need the help of documented cousins who have also tested, ideally
with the same provider. After all, if you and your cousin Jack both have Rosemary
on your list of matches, the chances are that Rosemary is connected to you
through one of the ancestral lines that you share with Jack.
Of course, just because you
and a cousin have common ancestors doesn’t mean that you'll share a detectable
amount of DNA - it mostly depends how closely related you are. In the playing
card example above we looked at inheritance over a single generation - the 48
card deck that we started with represented the DNA of your two parents, whilst the
24 cards you ended with represented your DNA. Halve the number of cards again,
and now those 12 cards represent the DNA that you pass to one of your own children
(of course, they'll receive a similar amount from their other parent):
The second set of 12 cards
are the result of going through the whole process a second time: they represent
the child of your sibling. - in other words the two of
them are 1st cousins.
Note that there are just 3
cards that appear in both selections. 3 out of 24 is one-eighth or 12.5%, which
happens to be the average amount of DNA shared by 1st cousins (as you will see
if you go through the process multiple times).
Let's just recap what we've
learned: full siblings share 50% of their DNA on average, even though they have
identical ancestors; 1st cousins share just 12.5% of their DNA, even though
they share half of their ancestors. It doesn’t seem right, does it? But it is -
and the reason for the discrepancy is that only half of DNA gets passed on from
one generation to the next.
In fact, with every
generation the amount of DNA we share with our cousins reduces by three-quarters
- thus 2nd cousins share, on average, just 3.125% of their DNA and 3rd cousins
a mere 0.781%. It's just as well we have more autosomal DNA than there are
cards in a deck (around 3 billion base pairs).
In practice all 2nd cousins and
almost all 3rd cousins share a detectable amount of DNA, though the chances of
a match reduce significantly after that - by the time you get to 6th cousins
there's only an 11% chance, and for 8th cousins it's just under 1%. On the
other hand, we have so many distant cousins that they'll account for over 99%
of all our matches! DNA is full of contradictions - it’s no wonder that so many
people are confused by it.
There's a table in my DNA
Masterclass which shows not only the average amount of DNA shared with cousins
of different degree, what the chances are that two cousins will share DNA, and how
many cousins we have at each level, but also how many cousins you would expect to
find if they all tested with Ancestry. Of course, that's unlikely to happen,
but so many tests have been sold that the proportion of our cousins who have already
tested could well be 5% or more.
What does it
mean to be genetically Jewish?
Although ethnicity estimates
aren't normally of any practical value, one thing they're good at picking up is
Jewish ancestry. Sometimes this is an unexpected discovery - and a common question
that people ask is "Does this mean I'm Jewish?".
I have ancestors from Germany
and Wallonia, but I still think of myself as English. On the other hand, I get
the impression that anyone in the USA who has an Irish ancestor thinks of
themselves as Irish - at least when it comes to celebrating St Patrick's Day!
A thought-provoking article
in the Guardian last month examined the relationship between Jewish
ancestry and Jewish identity - it's well worth reading.
Growing up
in London: a new series
Over the past 6 months I've
been indulging in a guilty pleasure - dipping into the pages of Growing Up
In London 1930-1960, a wonderful book which was compiled and edited by
LostCousins member Peter Cox, who interviewed more than one hundred U3A members
aged between 75 and 95 (the interviews were conducted in 2014, so they would
have been born between the wars).
On every page there are quotes
that remind me of my own childhood, or of the stories I heard from my parents -
and whilst all the memories are from Londoners, the vast majority will be just
as relevant to those who grew up in different parts of Britain.
Normally I'd simply read a
book and review it, but there are some books which deserve to be consumed in
small portions, and savoured: Growing Up In London
is one of them. So with the permission of the author
I'm going to be featuring short excerpts from the book over the coming months -
each just a paragraph or two, but every one evoking the spirit of a bygone age
(albeit a time that is still within living memory).
The first excerpts come from
p.31, where the memories are of bathrooms - or the lack of them. These two comments
reminded me of my own childhood - how things have changed!
"Toothpaste
is something we take for granted nowadays. What we used then was a powder
called Eucryl that felt as if we were brushing our teeth
with chalk and sand."
"Our
hair was washed over the sink in the scullery using ordinary soap. You had to
check that all the soap came out."
I can't remember the brand of
the toothpowder I used as a child, but it came in a small flat round tin. It was
a lot more economical than modern toothpastes, since you had to work hard to get
any on your toothbrush - and for this reason it was probably safer for children.
When I graduated from washing
my hair with soap it wasn't to shampoo, but washing-up liquid. That couldn’t have
happened previously because we didn’t have washing-up liquid in the 1950s - at
least, not in our house (we used Daz washing powder to
clean the dishes, which seems rather strange now).
L P Hartley wrote at the
start of his most famous book, The Go-Between, "The past is a
foreign country: they do things differently there" - and we certainly did,
didn’t we!
There are thousands of reminiscences
in the book - it's a goldmine. Growing Up In London was published in
hardback at £20, and even the cheapest used copy on Amazon cost £35 when I
checked - but you can purchase it direct from the author for just £10 plus
postage if you follow this link to his
website and mention that you are a LostCousins member (Peter Cox will also sign
and dedicate the book on request). If you’re outside the UK and ordering a copy
as a gift place your order well in advance so that the book can be sent by
surface mail, which is a lot cheaper (especially if you are buying more than
one copy).
How
espionage and ambition built the first factory
Almost a
decade ago I read a fascinating book about the Industrial Revolution (you'll
find my brief review here)
but this BBC article
has an intriguing story that I don’t remember from the book.
Thankfully I've never had to
work in a factory, although I'm sure most modern British factories are a long
way removed from the 'dark satanic mills' that William Blake wrote about in the
early 19th century.
Although fossil fuels have
been in the ground for millions of years, it was only in the mid-19th century
that the advantages of crude oil were recognised. So how were the wheels of
industry oiled before then?
I found an article from the MRS
Bulletin which has all the answers - you'll find it here
(it's in PDF format).
If you look through your
family tree you'll probably notice that until the second
half of the 19th century your ancestors tended to be named after other family
members - usually parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts. Some may be named for
godparents, but most parish registers don't record who the godparents were (Catholic
registers are the main exception).
Then parents started to be more
creative - this may have been forced upon them by the reduction in infant mortality,
which meant that many families had 10 or more children who survived, but I
suspect that many were also influenced by what they read, and later by the films
that they saw.
Fashions come and go, so you
can often tell how old somebody is just by knowing their name. A recent BBC
article draws on an analysis of baby names in England & Wales from 1996-2017
- you'll find it here.
Probate genealogist (or heir-hunter) Anna Ames is one
of my favourite literary characters, so when her creator, the author Geraldine
Wall, sent me a draft of her latest novel a couple of months ago I was absolutely
delighted.
What I love about the series is
the interaction between Anna's work and her personal life. I've watched her
children grow up and her daughter leave home, I've sympathised as she cared for
her husband (who had early onset dementia), I've shuddered as things have gone
wrong, and cheered when they've gone right.
In the early books of the
series she found her mother, but couldn’t bring
herself to like or understand her during the brief period they were together. In
this latest book she finds herself researching into her mother's background, and searching for her maternal cousins: the
discoveries she makes help Anna to appreciate the pressures her mother was
under, and comprehend why it was she abandoned her young daughter.
All this is against the
background of her day job - it's just like real life, in other words!
Will this be the last book in
the series? I hope not - I'd hate to think that I would never meet these
wonderful characters again. Currently it's only available in Kindle format, but
previous instalments also came out in paperback format, so I suspect this one
will too.
If, like me, you've been
following Anna Ames you won't need my encouragement to buy this book. If you
haven't, I recommend you start with the first book in the series and read them
in sequence - believe me, once you've read the first one you won't want to stop!
The links below will take you
a page that lists all of the books in the series - the
first is File Under Family. Using the appropriate link will enable you
to support LostCousins - even if you end up buying something completely different.
(Unfortunately Amazon don't allow you to support
LostCousins when you buy from their Australian site - it doesn’t have an affiliate
scheme at the current time.)
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Review:
Women's Suffrage in Scotland
Rather than writing a history of women's suffrage from
a Scottish perspective, Carole O'Connor has taken a refreshingly different
approach. The author devotes a chapter to each of the major cities and regions
of Scotland: she begins with a short history and description from a range of
perspectives (work, education etc), then follows up with pen pictures of the
key figures who played a part in women's suffrage.
Some of the people she writes
about were anti-suffrage, such as the Marchioness of Tullibardine
(later Duchess of Atholl), who despite her views
became the first woman in Scotland to be elected to Parliament. (She also had a
steam engine named after her.)
The book also features women
who, though not actively involved in the suffrage movement, nevertheless contributed
to its progress - and some men who supported the cause, including Keir Hardie.
You don’t need to have a keen
interest in women's suffrage in order to benefit from this book - I suspect
that many researchers with Scottish ancestry will find it useful. It's
available now in the UK, either as a paperback or in Kindle format, but won’t be
released in North America until the fall. The published price is £12.99, but when
I checked there were new copies available through Amazon Marketplace for under
£10 (including postage), and the Kindle version is under £5.
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
The most successful
author you've never heard of?
You've almost certainly seen
books by David Gerald Hessayon - in fact you probably
own at least one of them. And yet few people would recognise the name of this author
whose books have sold over 50 million copies (and no, he doesn’t use a nom
de plume).
Give up? Here's a link to his most famous book......
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 2019
Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or
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