Newsletter
- 10th June 2016
Save
on Ancestry DNA tests ENDS 19TH JUNE
How
to download your DNA results
Why your
family tree is like a Patek Philippe watch
Public
vs Private trees: the debate continues
Online trees: where Ancestry get it wrong
Ancestry
add 100 million Netherlands records
Free
online course starts in July
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 26th May)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it only searches these newsletters, so you
won't get spurious results):
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To go to the main LostCousins website
click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a member,
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Whilst the 2021 England & Wales Census
will ask respondents to provide their country of birth (just as they were in
1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, and 2011), as you'll know from my last
newsletter, the Office for National Statistics is adamant that they won't be
asked to enter their birthplace as they were in 1951 (see the extract below):
The demand from policymakers for more
frequent (though less accurate) statistics means that in 5 years' time we may
be the last Britons ever to complete a census return - so this could be last opportunity
to capture this vital information.
We have enough trouble dealing with
ancestors who only appear on the 1841 Census - can you imagine how future
generations will manage? And can you also imagine what they'd think about us if
we didn't try our damnedest to force the Office for National Statistics to
change their minds?
Fortunately, like Sir Tony Robinson's
Baldrick, I have a cunning plan - one that I will reveal once the EU referendum
is out of the way and politicians are able to focus on something other than
Europe.....
I received £40 for acting as an
enumerator in 1971, so I was interested to learn that LostCousins member Gwyneth
has put together a very useful summary of the pay scales for enumerators,
registrars, and superintendent registrars for each of the censuses from 1841-1901.
You'll find a PDF version here.
There's also some information in
Gwyneth's document about how much the census cost - it was £86,727 18s 8d in
1841 (compared to an estimated £480 million in 2011) - and also the penalties
for non-compliance. But best of all is the story about the Scottish schoolmistress
who claimed to be 29 years old.....
Tip:
if you're a member of the Society of Genealogists don't miss Gwyneth's article
about George Rose's Act of 1812 in the latest journal (June 2016).
Save on Ancestry DNA
tests ENDS 19TH JUNE
Sunday 19th June is Father's Day in the
US, and it's traditionally a time of the year when DNA testing companies offer
discounts.
Ancestry are first out of the
blocks this year with a £10 discount for UK customers, bringing the price down
from £79 to £69 (plus £20 shipping). This is still more expensive than the
regular price at Family
Tree DNA (the company I've used for myself and my cousins), but you might
prefer the way that Ancestry take charge of the matching process. The fact that
Ancestry have a much larger database could also work
to your advantage, though because most people who have tested are in the US,
you're most likely to benefit if you have relatives who migrated to the US in
the last couple of centuries.
However, you must be aware that should
you cease to be an Ancestry subscriber, you'll no longer be able to view the trees of the
people you've been matched with - by contrast Family Tree DNA have no ongoing
fees. Furthermore
Ancestry currently don't provide any tools, not even a chromosome browser, so you are
almost totally reliant on them to decide which of the hundreds or thousands of
matches are worth investigating.
On the other hand, whichever company you
test with you can upload your test results to the mostly-free GEDmatch site,
and you've also got the option of uploading your Ancestry DNA results to Family
Tree DNA, where for $39 you'll get full access to your matches and to the tools
they offer.
Tip:
whichever company you test with, you can support LostCousins by using the
relevant link above when you place your order.
In May I explained how you can use the
X-DNA results from your Ancestry DNA or Family Finder test to knock down 'brick
walls' (you can read the articles again if you follow this link).
The chart I provided has proved incredibly useful, not least for me and the
cousins I've been matched with through my X-DNA, so I hope you've also found it
of benefit.
Note:
I am still working on the second chart, for females who have tested - I hope
this will be ready in time for the next issue.
What I should have made clearer last
month is that to fully investigate your X-DNA matches you need to upload your
results to GEDmatch - though, of course, that's something you should be doing
anyway, because relying on the basic tools provided by Ancestry and Family Tree
DNA is like driving a Ferrari in 1st gear.
How to download your DNA
results from Ancestry
To upload your DNA results to GEDmatch
(or any other site) you must first download them from Ancestry or Family Tree
DNA. This is very easy to do, but if you haven't done it before, this brief
guide for Ancestry users will prove invaluable.
First look for the Settings link at the top right of your DNA home page:
When you click the button you'll be
taken to the Test Settings page -
look for the Download Raw DNA data area
on the right:
When you click the button Ancestry will
ask you to enter your password: they'll then email you a link that will allow
you to download your data. It will be downloaded as a ZIP file, but there's no
need to unzip it, as GEDmatch will only accept the data as a ZIP file. (And, by
the way, you certainly don't need to understand the data!)
Uploading your results to GEDmatch is
easier - simply register or login, then click the AncestryDNA
link under File uploads. You'll need
to know where the file you downloaded from Ancestry has been saved - usually it
will be in the Downloads folder, and the filename will look something like this:
dna-data-2016-06-10.zip
It's more straightforward
to download your test results from Family Tree DNA: look for Download raw data
in the Family Finder section of myFTDNA; click the link, then choose Build 37
Raw Data Concatenated from the available options.
Why your family tree is
like a Patek Philippe watch
I'm sure you're familiar with the
long-running advertising campaign which includes the immortal line "You
never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look
after it for the next generation".
Have you ever considered that this also
applies to our family trees? Enjoyable though our hobby is, if we don't find
some way of preserving our research for the benefit of future generations we
might as well be solving Sudoku puzzles or crosswords.
Some of us can relax, knowing that our
children or grandchildren will continue our work when we are gone. Sadly I'm
not in that position - since I don't have any children - and I know that there
are many other readers of this newsletter who are uncertain how they can ensure
that their efforts can be preserved.
Fortunately there IS a simple answer -
we can share our research with our cousins. Not the cousins we grew up with,
but the ones we've discovered through our research - our 'lost cousins'. The
great thing about discovering new cousins is that when we find them through a
family history site like Ancestry, Genes Reunited, or LostCousins we know from
the very start that they share our interest in family history.
Of course, sharing our interest isn't
the same as sharing our motivation - the chances are that our cousins will,
like most researchers, be biased towards their parents' paternal lines, which
they may not share with us. But that's not really a problem - in fact, it's
this difference in emphasis that means we're able to reap such rich rewards
when we do establish contact with 'lost cousins'.
And how should we go about finding those
cousins? Some people turn first to the telephone directory and the electoral
register, which can be useful sources - but of course, even if our search is
successful, there's no guarantee that the cousins we find in this way will
share our interest in family history (indeed they very probably won't - though
some will know of a mutual cousin who is
researching).
No, the best way to find new cousins is
through genealogy sites, especially sites which were designed specifically for
this purpose, like Genes Reunited and LostCousins. Neither site allows users to
publish their trees online - information entered is searchable, but when you
find someone who shares your ancestry it's necessary to contact them in order
to find out more, which maximises the chance of cousins connecting.
You can use the same approach at
Ancestry - by creating or uploading a private tree,
and allowing the relatives you've entered to show up in search results.
However, more than half of Ancestry trees are public trees, allowing other
subscribers to copy the information without ever contacting the tree owners -
whether they're cousins or not.
Tip:
if you have someone who will be taking over your research 'when the time comes'
do please enter their email address on your My Details page - otherwise all the
information you've entered could be lost.
Public vs Private
trees: the debate continues
Whenever I write about online trees
there's always a flurry of correspondence that follows - half from researchers
who regret ever publishing their tree online, and half from researchers who
wouldn't do it any other way.
When I make a decision I always look at
the pros and the cons - which in the case of online trees means
balancing the risks against the rewards. All of us have different attitudes
towards risk, but there's a big difference between being risk-averse and being
risk-aware. If you're risk averse - like me - you'll avoid unnecessary risks,
but might take some risks if the potential rewards are sufficiently high.
It's inevitable that some of us will be
more risk-averse than others, and I would never attempt to change how someone
feels about risk. Instead, my aim in writing about the risks of posting public
trees at sites like Ancestry is to ensure that all readers of this newsletter
are aware of the risks they are taking when they publish their research online.
Paula, whose unfortunate experience I wrote about
in the last issue, is just one of many researchers to have contacted me because
their research has been taken and misused. There are just as many people who
believe they have benefited from publishing their trees, because of the cousins
they've found and the information they've discovered - but most of them have
never had a private tree, so I'm not sure that they're in an ideal position to
judge which produces the most contacts from cousins.
The two biggest risks of a public tree
are these:
For those of us who care about the
heritage we're leaving behind, the prospect of our careful research being
shoehorned into a tree where it doesn’t belong is - or should be - horrifying. Imagine
that you're preparing a dish for the first time, and that you inadvertently
turn over two pages in the cookery book instead of one, so that half the
ingredients come from a savoury dish and half from a dessert. It would be a
recipe for disaster!
Of course, in this example you'd realise
your mistake the moment you tasted the food - but things aren't as simple when
it comes to family trees, especially when they are very large trees.
Because of the way the Internet works incorrect
information can spread like wildfire (rather like Boris Johnson's erroneous
assertion that, according to EU rules, bananas can only be sold in bunches of 2
or 3). This is because most people aren't experienced researchers like you and
me - they tend to accept things that fit their vision of the world without
first checking. For example, if someone new to family history comes across a
large tree that includes their grandparents they're likely to assume that the
information is correct.
[Both of my grandfathers married twice,
in each case after the death of their first wife - but I came across my
maternal grandfather on a public tree at Ancestry where he was shown as
marrying just once, to a woman I'd never heard of. This error was easy for me
to spot, even though there was a 'source' quoted for the marriage, but it
clearly wouldn't have been so easy for others - and that's where the danger
lies.]
A small proportion of the incorrect
trees at Ancestry belong to 'name collectors', people who are more interested
in the size of their tree than the quality of the information. By their nature
these trees tend to be very large, so whilst they may be small in number they
show up frequently in search results - so the erroneous information is very
likely to be copied time and time again.
Online
trees: where Ancestry get it wrong
I'm sure that Ancestry would like us all
to have public trees - because they certainly go out of their way to push us in
that direction. Here's the Search
menu:
Some users are inevitably going to
assume that it isn't possible to search private trees - because the menu doesn't
mention them. But in fact, if you choose Public
Member Trees from the menu and carry out your search you'll get a page that
looks rather like this:
If you now click the Family Trees link at the left, you'll
find out how many private trees have matching entries:
As you can see, in this case there are
almost as many private trees as there are public trees. To see the results from
private trees just click the Private
Member Trees link:
There isn't quite so much detail, but
it's obvious that these three trees are well-researched - so you would
definitely want to contact the tree owners. When you click the name of a tree
you'll find out how many people there are in that tree - though since many
people have more than one tree, or keep their main tree offline, you shouldn't
assume that a small number necessarily indicates inexperience.
In my view Ancestry shouldn't push their
subscribers into making their trees public by making it more difficult than it
needs to be to search private trees.
Note:
living people are not shown at Ancestry, even if the tree is public - although
it's often possible to deduce what the hidden names are by searching the GRO
indexes.
There are many people who value their
privacy, and wouldn't dream of posting personal information about themselves or
their family where everyone can see it. Some of those people are my cousins,
and some of them are your cousins - but how could you and I hope to connect
with them online given their concerns?
It was because of this conundrum that, when
I was inspired to start LostCousins back in 2003, one of my key aims was to design
a site where cousins could meet without the privacy of either party being
compromised. I'm glad to say to say that it has worked amazingly well: in more
than 12 years, during which tens of thousands of members have been matched,
nobody has ever complained that their privacy has been breached.
Ancestry add 100
million Netherlands records
Ancestry have added indexes to over 100
million birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial records from the
Netherlands, many of which have previously only been available at the WieWasWie ("Who was
Who") website, which is a collaboration between more than 20 Dutch
archives. If you find a record of
interest you'll have to follow a link to see the image - the images are not
hosted at Ancestry.
These links will take you to the
relevant search pages:
Netherlands,
Birth Index, 1787-1915
Netherlands,
Baptism Index, 1569-1879
Netherlands,
Marriage Index, 1570-1938
Netherlands,
Civil Marriage Index, 1795-1950
Netherlands,
Death Index, 1795-1965
Netherlands,
Burial Index, 1546-1821
Review: The
British Almshouse
As much a book for local and social
historians as for family historians, The
British Almshouse (edited by Nigel Goose,
Helen Caffrey, and Anne Langley) has 400 pages
crammed with information about every aspect of almshouses,
from their foundation and funding to their role in society, from their rules
and regulations to the clothing and stipends afforded to beneficiaries - and
much more besides.
Almshouses were never able to look after more than a small
percentage of the poor and infirm, but unlike workhouses, most of which have
long since been demolished or turned into hospitals (or apartments), many almshouses survive to this day (although the book only
covers the period from 1400-1914). Many of us will have also encountered that
fictional establishment, Hiram's Hospital which - though an invention of
Anthony Trollope - is thought to have been based by him on St Cross in
Winchester. In The Warden we read that whilst the
almsmen received just 1s 4d a day (under £25 a year), the Rev Septimus Harding was entitled to the rest of the income,
amounting to some £800 a year.
Chapter 16 provides a real-life example:
St John's Hospital in Barnard Castle, County Durham reduced the number of almswomen
from 3 to 2 in order to increase the stipends to a measly £3 a year, yet the
Master, the Rev William Lipscomb - who
had no duties to perform, according to the Charity Commissioners - received a
total of £461 between 1790-96.
Faced with such a heavyweight work I was
initially quite daunted by the prospect of reading and reviewing this book, but
once I started I found it quite fascinating. Thoroughly
recommended for anyone who, like me, has often wondered about the role of almshouses in British society.
I don't get much chance to read fiction,
and when I do it's usually genealogical mysteries - but I greatly enjoyed Ian
McEwan's The
Children Act, which focuses on a judge in the Family Division of the
High Court, and the decisions she has to make, both in her work and her life.
I read the 224 pages in just over a day
- I simply couldn't put it down!
In December I wrote
about the Dorset cemetery inscriptions to Fly, Tango, and Twinkle which seemingly referred to
pets - as a LostCousins member was able to confirm
in March of this year.
Surprisingly nobody mentioned Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier who is said to have stayed by
the graveside of his late master in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, for 14 years until the dog himself
died in 1872. Several books and films have
been inspired by the story, and there was even a series of comics.
Earlier this month LostCousins member
Liz Loveland was in Edinburgh, and she took this photograph of the memorial
headstone, which was erected in 1981 by the Dog Aid Society of Scotland, and
unveiled by no less a personage than the Duke of Gloucester, a 1st cousin of Queen
Elizabeth II.
Note the sticks, left for Bobby to fetch
by visitors to the cemetery. The inscription reads "Let his loyalty &
devotion be a lesson to us all".
Perhaps inevitably it's difficult to
draw the line between fact and fiction: if you refer to the Wikipedia entry for Greyfriars Bobby you'll see that there has long been doubt
as to the veracity of the story.
Free online course
starts in July
Strathclyde University are repeating
their highly successful genealogy course at the FutureLearn
site - it runs for 6 weeks starting on 18th July. The first presentation attracted
an amazing 26,000 people, and whilst it's designed to be accessible by
beginners, there are many experienced LostCousins members who found that it
offered a useful refresher.
You can find out more here - and it really is
free!
Tip:
whilst the time commitment is quoted as 4 hours per week, the course materials
stay online, so it doesn't matter too much if you fall behind.
The decline and fall of British Home
Stores has been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons, but department
stores have been closing for as long as I can remember. When I was a boy, Gamages in Holborn was still a big name, but it closed in
the 1970s after the company was taken over by a property developer.
So when I noticed that I could buy a
facsimile of Gamages
1914 Catalogue for a few pounds I couldn't resist - and leafing through I
was amazed how some of the prices have changed. Obviously prices were far lower
in 1914 - on average retail prices have increased by a factor of 87 since then
- but some things have gone up far more than others. For example, a
reconditioned typewriter would have cost about £12 in 1914, or over £1000 in
today's money - goodness knows how much a new one would have cost! Yet a wooden
summerhouse on a revolving base was just 10 guineas.
Gamages also had a range of badminton sets from 17s 6d up to
£2 5s (for the "GB" Special Association Set) - I bet the quality far
exceeded that of the so-called "Professional Badminton Set" I saw on
sale at eBay recently for £9.99!
The saying "There's a sucker born
every minute" has often been attributed to the showman P T Barnum (though
there seems to be no contemporary evidence that he ever said it), and clearly
Messrs Harrington & Byrne, self-styled gold and silver experts, reckon that
most of them are readers of Saga
magazine. In the latest issue they're offering Quarter Sovereigns to commemorate
the Queen's 90th birthday - however, only if you look at the (very) small print
will you discover that they're issued not by the Royal Mint but by the islands
of Tristan da Cunha (total population 271 in 2007).
I've always believed that you should never
invest in something you don't understand - which is why I always steered clear
of endowments, which always seemed too good to be true (and so it turned out).
There's certainly something to be said for playing it safe when you get to my
time of life!
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
That's all for now - I hope you've found
something to pique your interest!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
Please
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