Newsletter
- 24th April 2016
We'll
be 12 years old on Sunday!
What it's
all about - Mary's story
Let's
celebrate with 33% off at Findmypast EXCLUSIVE - ENDS
SATURDAY
....and
get a FREE LostCousins upgrade
Australian
census data to be retained
Nearly
400,000 Yorkshire BMD announcements indexed online
Why
autosomal DNA tests are so powerful
Time to take a DNA test? ENDS
TUESDAY
LostCousins
is FREE next weekend
Family Historian v6
adds record matching at Findmypast
Were
you born in early March 1946 or 1958?
Competition:
win a signed copy of Steve Robinson's latest book
Ancestry
reports increased profits
Get a
sneaky peek at Ancestry's records
Peter's
Tip: searching for past articles
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 17th April) click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it only searches these newsletters, so you
won't get spurious results):
Whenever possible
links are included to the websites or articles mentioned in the newsletter
(they are highlighted in blue or purple and underlined, so you can't miss
them). If one of the links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're
using adblocking software - you need to make the
LostCousins site an exception (or else use a different browser, such as
Chrome).
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!
We'll be 12 years old
on Sunday!
Sunday 1st May will be the 12th
anniversary of the day in 2004 that the LostCousins website went live - but it
will be our first birthday since passing the 100,000 member mark last
September.
Whilst I know that this newsletter is
extremely popular amongst family historians, we mustn't forget that the main
reason LostCousins exists is to connect cousins across the globe - so it was
appropriate that Mary wrote to me this week from South
Africa.....
What it's all about - Mary's
story
Mary is a fairly new member - she joined
last September - but she didn't have very long to wait for her first success.
Here's an extract from the email she sent me on Tuesday:
"First of all I would
like to say how much I enjoy reading your newsletters, secondly I have been
meaning for some time to write to you to let you know how well Cousin Patricia and
I have been getting along; apart from being able to share our family
information and current research we have become friends, it is as if we have
always known each other.
"We have been able to
add another cousin to our research. I remembered a family I met when I was a
child, they had a son a few years younger than I, and Patricia was able to find
him. He in turn belongs to the North West Kent Family History Society, and has
done so for many years. As Patricia says, we have become a very good team...
"Thank you Peter for
all the enjoyment we are experiencing!"
One-third of all the matches at
LostCousins involve members who live on different continents, something that I
find amazing in so many ways. Even a generation ago there would have been
little chance of making connections like these - Mary in South Africa, and
Patricia in England - but now, thanks to
the Internet, we can bring together families that have been separated for generations,
if not centuries!
Let's celebrate with
33% off at Findmypast EXCLUSIVE - ENDS SATURDAY
Findmypast are sponsoring the
pre-birthday party. Until the end of April you can join in the celebrations when
you buy a new 12 month World subscription and take advantage of an extremely
generous discount offer that is absolutely exclusive to LostCousins members.
There was a unique discount code in the
email that alerted you to this newsletter - simply follow the appropriate link
from the list below to save an amazing 33% on a 12 month World subscription. You'll SAVE OVER £50 at the UK site, and there
are similarly generous savings at the other Findmypast sites.
All
World subscriptions are the same, whichever site you subscribe through, and
once you have your subscription you can use it at any of the sites. However,
your unique discount code will only work at the site specified in the email you
received (this was chosen based on your address in my records).
You can't do better than a 12 month World
subscription - it offers unlimited access to ALL of Findmypast's 8 billion worldwide
records and newspaper articles, including the 1939 National Register for
England & Wales, Catholic parish registers for the whole of Ireland, parish
registers for most of Wales and several parts of England, the National Burial
Index, a massive US marriage collection, military records, migration records,
censuses - the list goes on and on.
Of course there are some records, such
as censuses, that are also available at other sites but most of the 1800 record
sets are ONLY available at Findmypast - for example, parish registers for Cheshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, Plymouth & West Devon, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Westminster, most of
East Kent, large parts of Yorkshire, and much of Wales are exclusively
at Findmypast. Findmypast also has partly indexed register images for Lincolnshire, whilst Leicestershire and Rutland parish registers will
also be going online at Findmypast later this year.
You can see a list of all
the record sets if you click the Search
tab at any Findmypast site, choose A-Z of
record sets from the drop-down menu, then click Show list of everything.
....and get a FREE
LostCousins upgrade
When you purchase a new 12 month Findmypast
subscription using the links above you'll be supporting LostCousins. So I'm
going to return the favour by giving you a free 12 month subscription to
LostCousins (worth up to £12.50) - this will run from the date of your purchase
unless you’re already a LostCousins subscriber, in which case I'll extend the
expiry date by 12 months.
Simply forward a copy of your email
receipt from Findmypast, making sure that it shows the precise time and date
(and the timezone, if it isn't London time). I
recommend you also make a note of the precise time you conclude your purchase
just in case the receipt doesn't arrive - sadly some email providers are less
than reliable (and I'm talking about some of the biggest names). I don't
publish my email address online, but you can use any of the LostCousins
addresses, including the one in the email that told you about this newsletter -
all emails come to me.
IMPORTANT:
your LostCousins subscription will be paid for by the commission we receive
from Findmypast, which means that you must use the appropriate link in the
previous article (and it must be the last link you click before you make your
purchase). Unfortunately using the special discount code isn't
sufficient. If you've configured your browser to prevent tracking, or if you
use two different devices (or two browsers) during the process, then sadly your
purchase won't be credited to LostCousins, and you won't get your free
subscription.
Over the past few months many of us have
been frantically adding to our family trees using the wonderfully-detailed
information in the 1939 National Register for England & Wales - I for one
have solved a few mysteries, updated hundreds of records to show occupations,
addresses, and birthdates, and added scores of marriages and children of which
I was previously unaware.
There's loads of information about the
1939 Register in my special newsletter, which you'll find here. The
article Extending your tree beyond 1911
using the 1939 Register explains the key techniques I have used (and
continue to use - I've only explored a handful of branches so far).
Anne recently wrote to remind me that
because it's possible to search the 1939 Register by address, electoral
registers can be useful; phone books are another handy source, although only a
small minority of households had a telephone before the war.
However I find that name searches using
wildcards can be very effective, even the name has been badly transcribed, and
if you know the date of birth of someone in the household then that usually
means they're very easy to find.
But please bear in mind that not all of
the records relating to people born after 1915, but now deceased, have been
opened - however, since we're fortunate that we can see any of these records we can hardly complain.
Australian census data
to be retained
In December the Australian Bureau of
Statistics announced that it had been decided to retain names and addresses
collected during the 2016 Census, which will be conducted in August.
Since census data has never been
publicly released and the ABS are committed to never releasing identifiable
census data it's not clear what benefits there might be for the family
historians of the future, but the fact that the information will be retained at
least keeps various options open. You can read more about this topic here, and also here.
Many thanks for Luke to alerting me to
this news, which I and most others seem to have missed.
Nearly 400,000
Yorkshire BMD announcements indexed online
A 6-year project by volunteers at the
Central Library in Halifax has enabled indexes to 394,000 names from birth,
marriage, and death announcements published in the Halifax Guardian between 1832-1921 to be made available free online
on the Calderdale Council website - you can download the indexes, which are in
PDF format, here.
Why autosomal DNA tests
are so powerful
This week there has been a ongoing discussion over at the LostCousins Forum which
has made it clear that almost all of us have 'brick walls' in the last 5 generations
(ie going back as far as our 32 great-great-great
grandparents).
Fairly recent 'brick walls' like these
can be the most frustrating, because they bar access to such a large part of
our ancestry - for example, I cannot find the birth or baptism of one of my
great-great grandmothers, even though she was (supposedly) born just after
civil registration began. This means that one-sixteenth of my tree is
effectively out of bounds - that fact that on her husband's line I'm back to
someone who died in 1605 just rubs salt in the wound!
Fortunately this is the part of our tree
that's within the range of autosomal DNA tests, the newest and in many ways the
most powerful tests, because they look at hundreds of thousands of sites on our
genome (earlier tests looked at a small number of markers - sometimes as few as
12 or even 4). Equally importantly, they're looking at the DNA we inherit from
both our father and our mother (who in turn got from their parents, who got it
from their parents, and so on.....).
On average we have inherited about 3% of
our DNA from each of our great-great-great grandparents. It doesn't sound like
a lot until you consider that there are over 3 billion base pairs in our DNA -
so that 3% is actually an awful lot of base pairs. Of course, most of us can't
afford to test our entire genome, but a typical autosomal test looks at around
600,000 sites, which means that 3% is still a pretty big number.
Cutting a long story short, an autosomal
test can produce matches on any of our family lines from the last 5 generations
- although, because of the way that DNA is inherited it might be possible to go
back a bit further on some lines than others (as in the example I describe
below). Armed with this information you would probably expect to get about 32
times as many matches as from a test that only looks at one line, such as Y-DNA
test.
Actually it's a lot better than that -
because the people we're being matched against are also getting matches on 32
lines. So in theory you might get 1000 times (32 by 32) as many matches - it's no
wonder Family Tree DNA call their autosomal test Family
Finder!
In practice the testing companies don't
tell us about all of our matches, only the closest matches - for example, I've
got just over 720 matches at the moment. Inevitably there are many more distant
matches than close matches, simply because we have many more distant cousins
than we do close cousins, and it usually makes sense to start by looking at the
closest matches.
Lots of matches sounds like a good thing
- and it is - but actually pinning down how we are related to each of our
matches is quite a challenge, especially if you're the only person in your
extended family who has tested. So
I've done what many other family historians have done, and persuaded some of my
distant cousins to test as well.
There are two key benefits from this
approach - first of all, the fact that my DNA matches my cousin's DNA validates
our research to date as far back as our common ancestors. After all, as the
recent example of the Archbishop of Canterbury demonstrates, the paperwork
isn't always right.
This week I found a DNA match with
someone who shares my great-great-great grandfather (born in 1794) - but is
descended from his first wife, whereas I'm descended from his second wife.
Discovering that my new half 4th cousin once removed shares my DNA proves that
we've both done our research correctly, even though it stretches back
222 years and 5 or 6 generations.
The second advantage - and this is the
big one - is that when my cousin and I both test our matches are going to overlap,
and where they do overlap we can be fairly certain that those matches are on
the lines that we share. This makes it much easier to work out how we're
related to our 'new' cousins.
Although it has been around for 30
years, DNA testing is still in its early days - even now only a small
percentage of researchers have tested their DNA. Nevertheless there are well
over 2 million who have taken autosomal tests, and the
numbers are growing rapidly, the potential for finding DNA cousins is enormous.
DNA testing isn't a substitute for good
old-fashioned paper research, but it complements it extremely well. Paperwork
can be lost or falsified, but DNA can't be faked - it's like a watermark that
runs through the generations.
Tip:
the reason why testing companies only tell us about the closest matches is
because the less DNA we share with another person, the more likely it is that
it matches purely by chance. However, if you want to investigate further, you
can upload your results to the free GEDmatch
website and adjust the parameters yourself. Incidentally using GEDmatch has
another big advantage - it allows you to match your results against those of
people who have tested with different companies (which is why price is the most
important factor when deciding who to test with).
Time to take a DNA test? ENDS TUESDAY
Until Tuesday 26th April there are big
savings to be made on DNA tests from Family Tree
DNA, the ONLY big company to provide ALL of the different tests that
genealogists are most likely to need.
However for most researchers an
autosomal test is the best option, for the reasons I've explained in the
previous article - and, perhaps surprisingly, autosomal tests are also the cheapest
meaningful tests. Family Tree DNA's regular price is $99, but during the sale
you'll pay just $79 (for someone in the UK it works out at around £65 by the
time postage is taken into account).
This is a significant amount of money,
but it's about half what you'd pay for a Y-DNA test (which only looks at your
direct paternal line) - and you're guaranteed to get lots of matches, whereas a
Y-DNA test might produce none at all, as I know to my cost. As for mtDNA tests - well, don't get me started.....
What does a DNA test involve? Either
you'll provide a sample of your saliva, or a scraping from the inside of your
cheek - depending on the instructions that come with the kit - so it's not
complicated or painful. DNA tests from Ancestry DNA
and Family
Tree DNA don't provide any health-related information, so there's no
possibility that your health insurance costs will go up (or down) as a result
of testing.
However, there is one circumstance in
which I'd find it hard to recommend taking a test, and that is if you have
British ancestry, but haven't completed your My Ancestors page. That's because it's much quicker, far easier,
and infinitely cheaper to find cousins using the LostCousins site!
LostCousins is FREE next
weekend
Because it's our birthday, next weekend
the LostCousins site will be completely free - it's a great opportunity to
contact the cousins you've already found, and to find new cousins. The offer
runs from Friday 29th April to Monday 2nd May.
Of course, you don't have to wait until
then to complete your My Ancestors
page - in fact, if you've got half an hour to spare you may as well start right
away (see the illustrated Getting Started guides on the Help & Advice
page if you haven't entered anyone before).
How
to find more cousins
Whilst it makes sense to start by
entering your direct ancestors and their immediate families, it's actually the
members of their extended families who are most likely to provide the vital
links to your living cousins. When you enter your ancestors' 1st cousins you're
extending the reach of your search by two generations, so that instead of
limiting your search to your own 2nd and 3rd cousins you're extending it to
include your 4th and 5th cousins as well.
Tip:
more members have entered more relatives from 1881 than any of the other
censuses we use, so enter as many blood relatives as you can from this census,
even if they seem quite distantly-related.
Family Historian v6 adds record matching
at Findmypast
The family tree program I aspire to use
for my own research is Family Historian, which has been on my
computer since version 2 (it's now up to version 6.2). It's not only incredibly
powerful, it was developed here in Britain, which puts it right up there with
Dyson vacuums, Stilton and Eccles cakes in my estimation.
Whilst I'm still using the program I started
with in 2002 as my main program, every now and again I export a GEDCOM file then
import it into Family Historian - and
so I was very excited to hear that Family
Historian will now automatically match against records at Findmypast.
I've been very impressed so far with
this new feature, and whilst you obviously need a Findmypast subscription to
look at the records themselves, this is going to be a great timesaver for many
people.
Note:
I'm about to start reading Getting the Most
from Family Historian 6, by Simon Orde, the
developer of Family Historian - it has only just been launched, and sold out at
the recent show. I'll be reviewing it in a future newsletter - but don't expect
to see the review any time soon, because the book is absolutely crammed full of
information about features that I didn't even know existed!
Were you born in early
March 1946 or 1958?
Were you (or was a family member) born
in the week of 3rd-9th March 1946? Or in the same week of
March 1958?
In 1946, before the foundation of the
National Health Service, the first national maternity study surveyed all of the
mothers who gave birth in England, Wales or Scotland during that week. It was
ground-breaking research into the social and economic costs of giving birth
that was inspired partly by the falling birth rate - health visitors asked each
mother a whole range of questions about her family, her home, the confinement,
and the amounts of money spent on clothing for herself and the baby.
About one-third of the children in the
1946 study continued to be followed - which is why I wondered whether any of
you might have taken part in the studies. You can read more about the 1946
study here, and
about the 1958 study here
(both studies are still continuing!).
If, like me, you're fascinated by
projects of this type you might be interested in Helen Pearson's book The Life
Project, which I'm currently reading.
This thin (31 page) book by Lynn Assimacopoulos describes her true-life search for the birth
parents of Ryan, a friend of her son, who had lost both his adoptive parents in
a car crash. It's well written but, perhaps because I could read it in less
than hour, it didn't entrance me in the way that The Daddy of All Mysteries,
the true story of Jess Welsby's search
for the father she never knew, did.
Not knowing anything about the adoption
system in the US, it was also difficult for me to gauge how challenging the
search was, or what the chances of success were at the outset - but I suspect
that family historians who live in America will possess more insight into the obstacles
that confronted the author.
Separated Lives is available from Amazon.com
(but they will ship to Europe).
Competition: win a
signed copy of Steve Robinson's latest book
The reviews for Kindred are amazing, with 27 out of 30 reviewers at Amazon.co.uk giving it 5 stars out of 5, and
an average rating of 4.6 out 5 at Amazon.com
Most of you will have bought Kindle
copies, I'm sure - but wouldn't you love to have a paperback copy signed by
Steve Robinson himself? I know I would, but sadly I'm not allowed to enter the
competition.
All you need to do to enter the
competition is send me an email which lists Steve's 5 Jefferson Tayte novels in order of publication, and tell me (in no
more than 40 words) which is your favourite and why. You don't need to have
read them all - though how anybody could read one and not read them all beats
me!
The member I judge to have sent in the
best answer will win the prize (though I may ask for Steve Robinson's help with
the judging). You can use any of the LostCousins email addresses, but please
use 'Competition entry' as the subject so that I can file it away until Judgement
Day.
The closing date of the competition is
Friday 6th May (which would have been my father's 100th birthday); entries
received after that date may be read, but won't be considered for the prize.
My father didn't have a Facebook page
when he was alive, but he acquired one after he died in 2011. Apparently there
are millions of Facebook users who are now deceased, and it's possible that at
some point in the future there will be more deceased users than living ones -
according to this BBC Future article
which was spotted by LostCousins member Elaine.
Often users live on digitally for the
simple reason that their log-in details died with them - even today few
websites allow users to nominate a beneficiary, as LostCousins has since 2004.
Mind you, very few LostCousins members
have taken advantage of this feature - though whether that's because they think
they're going to live forever or because they're not aware of it, I'm not sure.
Perhaps you'll log-in and update your My
Details page now that you know the option exists? I certainly hope so.
Ancestry reports
increased profits
You may have read recently that Ancestry
has been taken over (again) although it's difficult to find out exactly how
much of the company is owned by which investors.
But whoever owns Ancestry, their
investment seems to be flourishing - the number of subscribers increased by 5%
in the first three months of 2016, and sales were up by over 20% compared with
the same period of 2015.
People keep saying to me that interest
in family history seems to be declining but if Ancestry - the market leader -
is growing, then the number of serious researchers is clearly continuing to
rise. Perhaps the reality is that there are fewer people with a casual
interest, but more like you and me? If so, that can only be a good thing!
Note:
you can read Ancestry's detailed announcement on their corporate website here.
Get a sneaky peek at
Ancestry's records
Unlike Findmypast, Ancestry doesn't usually
give out very much information with their free census searches - you normally
have to be a subscriber to find out very much.
But an eagle-eyed member (who has asked
not to be named in case of reprisals) pointed out to me that if you allow the
mouse pointer to hover over the View
record link the transcription appears in a pop-up window, as you can see
from this screenshot:
But for the fact that the page number is
missing, it's all the information you'd need to enter this family on your My Ancestors page (they're not relatives
of mine by the way - at least, not as far as I know).
Peter's Tip: searching
for past articles
Did you realise that the customised
Google search near the top of all my recent newsletters will search ALL of my
online newsletters going right back to February 2009? And nothing else - apart
from a couple of adverts put there by Google, you'll ONLY
get search results from my newsletters.
As with a normal Google search you can
use quotes around phrases, eg "parish
registers", or use AND to restrict the results, eg
"parish registers" AND Sussex.
In fact, it's so easy to find articles
this way that I do it myself - I don't have an index or master list of past
articles, because I simply don't need one.
ScotlandsPeople are offering users a chance to renew their expired credits - log-in, click Buy more credits then enter spring2016 in the voucher codes box.
That's all for this issue - I'll be back
soon with more news from the wonderful world of family history..
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives without
asking for permission in advance - though why not invite them to join
LostCousins instead as standard membership, which includes this newsletter, is
FREE?