Newsletter - 28th April 2018
14th Birthday Edition
My birthday
present to one of you
Celebrate by saving at Findmypast EXCLUSIVE
Get a free LostCousins
subscription
The next phase of the LostCousins
project
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
Dilemma: was it wrong to catch killer with DNA?
Have the deeds to your home been destroyed?
How to find out whether your distant cousin has moved house
All silent on the Eastern Front
Review: Fat,
Bald and Worthless
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
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click here; to find earlier articles use the
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My birthday
present to one of you
The DNA Day sales are over,
and Ancestry's DNA test has gone back up to its normal price (£79 plus £20
shipping in the UK). But, before the sale ended, I bought an extra kit so that
I could give it away as a sort of reverse birthday present.
At the end of May I'm going
to pick ONE of the readers of this newsletter and send them the DNA kit as a
gift - but to be chosen you need to have supported my work by doing ALL of these things:
· Logged-in to your LostCousins
account at least ONCE between now and 31st May
· Entered on your My
Details page EITHER a secondary email address that I can use to get in
touch if your primary address fails OR your full postal address
· Added at least ONE relative to your My Ancestors page between now and 31st
May
· Purchased at least ONE LostCousins
subscription since first joining
This offer excludes members
who live in France, as DNA testing is illegal there.
Tip: you don't need to be an Ancestry subscriber to
test with them, or to view your results, or to contact the genetic cousins you
are matched with. However you cannot view the trees of
other members unless they invite you.
Celebrate by
saving at Findmypast EXCLUSIVE
When I mentioned to Findmypast that the 14th Birthday of LostCousins
was just around the corner they immediately wanted to know how they could help
us celebrate - and I suggested that a discount on subscriptions would be a
great way to reward members.
Until 6th May you can save
10% on a NEW top-level 12 month subscription at Findmypast's UK, Ireland, and Australia sites, and because Findmypast reward loyalty, you'll have an opportunity to
renew at a discount (currently 15%) in a year's time! The subscriptions listed
below all provide access to the same records even though the names are
different:
SAVE 10% on 12 month Pro subscriptions at Findmypast.co.uk
SAVE 10% on 12 month World subscriptions at Findmypast.ie
SAVE 10% on 12 month World subscriptions at Findmypast.com.au
All of these subscriptions include virtually unlimited
access to all of Findmypast's historical records and
newspapers from around the world, including the 1939 Register, their
fast-growing Catholic records collection, military records, migration records,
and parish registers for many counties in England and most of Wales (plus
transcribed records for many other counties). They also have an amazing
collection of Irish records, and an impressive collection of records from
Australia and New Zealand.
Unfortunately Findmypast couldn't offer a
discount on 12 month subscriptions to their US site, but they did come up with
a pretty good offer - 50% off the first month when you buy their top monthly subscription:
SAVE 50% on 1 month Ultimate British & Irish
subscriptions at Findmypast.com
Note: these offers are for new subscribers only
(though I suspect that lapsed subscribers can also benefit); if you have an
existing subscription neither Findmypast's offer nor my
offer below will apply. But bear in mind that if you have an existing 12 month subscription you'll qualify for Findmypast's
Loyalty Discount for renewals (currently 15%).
Get a free LostCousins subscription
LostCousins can only benefit if you use a link that I've provided.
So I'm once again offering a free subscription to
members who go out of their way to take up Findmypast's
offer using my links and ensure that your purchase is tracked - this means that
the total savings you make can be as much as £28. But please read the terms and
conditions below so that nobody misses out - if you qualify you will get a subscription
which last for 12 months or 1 month, depending which Findmypast
subscription you purchased.
To
claim your LostCousins subscription (which will run
from the date of purchase of your Findmypast
subscription, unless you already have a LostCousins
subscription, in which case it will be extended), please forward to me the
email receipt that you receive from Findmypast. Screenshots
aren't sufficient - I need to know the precise time of
your purchase (so write it down, in case the emailed receipt doesn't arrive).
You can use any of the LostCousins email addresses,
including the one I wrote from when telling you about this newsletter.
Terms & conditions:
your free LostCousins subscription will be funded by
the commission that Findmypast pay us; if we don't
receive any commission on your purchase then unfortunately you won't qualify,
so it's up to you to make sure that doesn't happen. For example, if you use an
adblocker the link may not work; if you have disabled tracking in your browser
the link will appear to work, but Findmypast will
ignore it, so won't pay us any commission (this is the most common problem - if
you’re not sure ask for my advice before making your purchase,
afterwards is too late!). Commission isn't paid on renewals,
and may not be paid on upgrades.
The next phase of the LostCousins project
Whilst it's reassuring to
know that this newsletter is one of the most eagerly-anticipated publications
in the world of family history, it’s important to remember that the only reason it exists is to support and
promote the LostCousins project - to connect family
historians around the world who share the same ancestors.
Since 2004 tens of thousands
of matches have been made, and so far there hasn’t
been a single instance in which our unique matching system has generated an incorrect
match! (Whilst there have been a few dozen incorrect matches they've all
been the result of the wrong person being identified on the census, rather than
a systematic failure.)
There are now over 1.6
million individuals in the England & Wales 1881 census who have been
entered by one or more LostCousins members - that's
more than 6% of all the people in that census (for Scotland 1881 the equivalent
figure is just over 3%). Whilst the main focus will
continue to be on matching entries and identifying cousins, it's now time to
introduce the second phase of the project - one that will further cement the
link between the current generations and our forebears.
Most of you will be familiar
with the Lives of the First
World War project, a collaboration between the Imperial War Museum and Findmypast which aims to remember as many as possible of
more than 8 million men and women who played their part in the Great War. That
project is coming to an end early next year - it will close to new submissions
on 18th March 2019.
The aim of phase 2 of the LostCousins project is somewhat similar - to create a link
between ALL the people who were recorded in the 1881 Censuses and their living
relatives. We've been doing this during the first phase of the project, of
course, however our primary focus hasn't been on the relatives in the census
but on the cousins that we can find. In phase 2 both will be equally important
- and I like to think that by making connections between the late 19th century
and the early 21st century we'll be making history, one relative at a time!
What this means is that EVERY
relative you enter from the LostCousins censuses will
make a difference - EITHER your entry will match with that of another member
who also has a connection to the relative, OR it will be a completely new
entry, helping to get the project closer to our eventual goal.
Note: you won't at see any significant changes on the LostCousins site, at least at first - we'll be using the same
technology, and your My Ancestors and My Cousins pages will continue to be the two
most important pages on the site. Nor am I planning to increase the cost of
subscriptions - it will still be £10 for a single account and £12.50 for a
joint subscription covering two linked accounts, the same as it has always been!
Facebook and
Cambridge Analytica
If you’re a regular reader of
this newsletter you'll know that I aim to be the first
with the news that really matters. Of course, because there usually only 2 or 3
issues per month, I can't be first to report every single press release -
instead I aim to provide a more in-depth look at key issues, even when they're
not obviously related to family history.
For example, just over 5
years ago I told you about technology that had been developed at Cambridge
University which claimed to make highly accurate predictions about Facebook
users simply by analysing their 'likes' - you can read the original article here.
According to an article
in The Guardian this technology was
the forerunner to the infamous app that Cambridge Analytica used to collect
data about millions of Facebook users, data that may have influenced the course
of history through its impact on the democratic
process
My original article was
intended as a warning about the dangers of using Facebook, not because I
foresaw how the technology would be used, but because I knew that family
historians had more to lose than most - in our enthusiasm to help others it’s
all too easy for us to post information that can be misused by fraudsters or
other miscreants. According to a blog
post earlier this month the public profiles of almost all 2 billion
Facebook users are likely to have been stolen - and whilst this data isn’t as
sensitive as the personal data of 87 million users (which was allegedly stolen,
or rather "improperly shared" by Cambridge Analytica), it’s still
somewhat disconcerting to know that our information can be so easily
misappropriated.
Note: in the past week Martin Lewis, the financial
guru who founded MoneySavingExpert.com has announced that he is suing Facebook
because of the continued promotion on the site of adverts which make use of his
name and likeness to promote scams - you can read all about it on his blog here.
You may remember that in January 2017 I wrote
about another scam I encountered on Facebook - unfortunately, as long as there
are people in this world who are gullible or greedy there will be confidence
tricksters seeking to separate them from their cash, but for this to happen at
a website operated by one of the world's most valuable companies is
unforgiveable.
Dilemma: was
it wrong to catch killer with DNA?
If you followed the link in
the previous article to my April 2013 article about Facebook you may have
noticed that in the very next article
I asked "what other memorabilia and police evidence bear DNA samples that
might potentially allow a modern reanalysis of an old case…?"
This week we've heard about a
suspected serial killer and rapist who was apprehended after DNA from recovered
from crime scenes 30 or 40 years ago was analysed and submitted to a genealogy
website, widely believed to have been GEDmatch:
DNA expert Debbie Kennett,
writing on Twitter,
agrees that the action taken by police is not against the Terms of Service of GEDmatch, but argues that it isn't something that GEDmatch users would be expecting to happen when they
submitted their own data - she suggests that the police acted unethically. Indeed,
it could be argued that what seems to have happened
in this case is equivalent to what is alleged to happened in the Cambridge
Analytica case - in each instance the data on the platform was mined in order
to produce results that none of the users of the platform could reasonably have
anticipated (unless, perhaps, they were readers of this newsletter!).
At the same time there are
some clear differences - in one case the action was taken for the public good, in order to bring a serial killer to justice, and in the
other it was taken for private profit and (it has been alleged) in order to
subvert democracy. Nevertheless, questions of ethics are always difficult to
answer and even when you do think you have an answer it can be undermined by a
change in the frame of reference. The 'trolley problem' is a wonderful example
of an ethical dilemma - see this Wikipedia article for a
discussion of the issues.
But whatever you think about
the ethics of the case, it isn't a reason not to test your DNA. Nobody who
tests their DNA has to upload the results to the GEDmatch website, and even if you do, you don't have to attach
a GEDCOM (indeed, I deleted my own GEDCOM file some time ago, because I was
concerned that any GEDmatch user could view it,
whether they were related to me or not).
It's also worth noting that GEDmatch isn’t just about finding more cousins, or
providing more detailed analysis on matches you've made at other sites - it
offers all sorts of added features such as "Predict eye color", "Are your parents related" and
"Archaic DNA matches", where your DNA is compared against that of
ancient humans whose remains have been discovered.
Would it be unethical to use
the "Are your parents related" feature without first asking your
parents' permission? Should we be allowed to compare our DNA against that of
ancient humans without first consulting their descendants? And if you think
that last question is ridiculous, there are many cases where native American
tribes have tried to prevent DNA analyses of ancient remains (see, for example,
this newsletter article
from 2015), and the Navajo Nation has banned DNA research according to this
2017 article
at History.com
Personally I think it is wonderful that a suspect is now in jail
thanks to the ingenuity of a 'cold case' team, and I hope it helps to bring
closure for victims and their families. As I understand it the DNA Doe Project also uses GEDmatch to help solve cases where a body cannot be
identified, but I'm not sure that anyone has objected to GEDmatch
being used in that way - so far, at least!
In the last issue I drew
attention to the fact that data protection legislation doesn’t stop data being
destroyed - indeed it encourages its destruction. I start from the position
that personal data rightfully belongs to the person concerned and it's worth
noting that data protection legislation recognises this in a
number of ways:
- the right to obtain a copy of what is held
- the right to demand corrections or deletion
- the need for permission
However it doesn't give us any rights when the organisation holding our data decides that it
is no longer needed. Public bodies are expected to
take into account the historical value of documents, but lots of things that I
regard of historical value probably wouldn't be thought of that way by someone
else (not even my wife!).
Just look at the range of
records that are already online for family historians - as diverse as passenger
lists, dog licences and tax records. Who can say what will or won't be useful
in the future? Perhaps Tesco's Clubcard records will tell more about how people
really lived in the 21st century than anything else?
Most of us have problems
remembering what happened when we were younger, in particular
when it happened, and in which order things happened - so even the smallest
clues (a theatre ticket, a hospital stay) can help us reconstruct our lives. We
try to do this for our ancestors - we certainly ought to be able to do it for
ourselves!
I appreciate there are
practical problems in giving individuals a right of veto over the destruction
of information that relates to them - but we should still try. Since the last
newsletter was published several LostCousins members
have written to their local MPs to express their concerns that with the introduction
of GDPR next month it will be even more likely that unique records will be destroyed
- if you want to add your support feel free to include any relevant articles
from this newsletters.
Have the deeds
to your home been destroyed?
Earlier this month there was
a flurry of correspondence in the Daily
Telegraph after one of their readers wrote to complain that his mortgage
provider had destroyed the 500 year-old deeds to his house - you can read about
it here.
Once again this incident wouldn't have been a surprise to regular readers of
this newsletter, because I wrote
about this topic in 2014, and mentioned
it again in February of this year.
Although property deeds might
not be classed as 'personal information' under data protection legislation (even
though they invariably include the names of individuals) this is an excellent
example of somebody destroying information because it was no longer of any use
to them, even though the records were clearly of historical value, at least to
the owner of the property.
How to find out
whether your distant cousin has moved house
All too often I lose touch
with LostCousins members because they forget to
update their My Details page when
their address changes. I don’t immediately take action
when this happens for the simple reason that if I did, I would have no time to
do anything else - but if another member is subsequently matched with them I
move heaven and earth to track them down.
The last resort is to send
them a letter - assuming they've provided a postal address,
or have such a rare name that I can identify them in the Electoral
Register - but if they're in the the UK then before drafting
the letter I carry out a quick check to see whether they have moved house. It's
very simple - I just put their postcode into Google, and
look through the results for one at the Rightmove website.
It’s an amazingly quick and
easy way of checking whether a home has been sold - and you might find it useful too, especially if you're thinking of writing
to a cousin you haven't spoken to for many years, or who you've found in the
Electoral Register. The information at Rightmove comes from the Land Registry,
in case you’re wondering, so it’s public information.
Tip: the 2002-14 Electoral Registers for the UK can be
searched at Findmypast;bear in mind that
after 2002 it was possible to opt out of the published register, and about 40%
of us did. But if you find someone in 2002 you can always make use of the tip
above to check whether they've moved in the intervening years.
The forenames in my family
tree are pretty conventional, though my great-grandmother
was a sister of Mercy (Ellen Mercy, to be precise), and of course there are the
occasional surnames that have been repurposed, though almost always as a middle
name, rather than as a first name.
But many names we now regard
as conventional were once new: according to an article in the May 2018 issue of
The Oldie by Johnny Grimond the forename
Clive was a tribute to Robert Clive of India, whilst Percy was the family name
of the dukes of Northumberland (to whom Percy Bysshe Shelley was distantly related).
Cecil, Howard, and Nevill were also the surnames of aristocratic
families.
Florence Nightingale was
named after the city where she was born; her sister Frances Parthenope was not as
fortunate in her birthplace! Some children might be thought as unfortunate in
their parentage - the four children of the musician Frank Zappa were named Moon
Unit, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan,
Diva Muffin, and more conventionally Ian Donald Calvin Euclid (though he is
known as Dweezil). Similarly
the many unconventional forenames of the children of politician Jacob Rees-Mogg include Alphege, Wentworth,
Dunstan, Anselm, Wulfric, Pius, Sixtus and Boniface.
So the news that the new prince - who is 5th in line of
succession to the British throne - has been named Louis Arthur Charles is
slightly reassuring.
All silent on
the Eastern Front
Most of the film footage of
the Great war that I've seen was shot behind British lines, so I was very
interested to learn from LostCousins member James
Castellan that he knew of a documentary shot by an American team behind the
German lines in 1915, when the US was still neutral. I got even more interested
when I discovered that he had a family link to the film - but let me hand you
over to James……
As genealogists we often resort to researching the FAN club (Friends, Associates, Neighbours) of our ancestors when direct vital records for them can’t be found. We also research important historical connections of our family members to hang “flesh” on their bones. However, most family historians would not divert time to researching a non-family member’s history. But my indulgence in researching another individual and his family whose life briefly intersected my grandfather’s led me on a diversion lasting a decade which resulted in the recovery of a lost historic WWI film in which my Grandfather Oswald Schuette appears, a film of which no residual memory remained in either family after less than two generations.
Upon retiring I began helping an
uncle gather WWI correspondence of my Grandfather Oswald Schuette, who reported
from
As I began writing, I learned
from Kevin Brownlow that someone had just published an article about Durborough and his film beginning: “In the nitrate vaults
of the Library of Congress in
I contacted the author, we shared research, resulting in my being asked to join this recently retired curator of film, Library of Congress, and a Dutch film scholar in writing a book on American WWI cinematographers. Our book research synergy determined the film’s detailed content and located the missing film scenes for this film enabling the Library of Congress to reconstruct it in 2015.
Notable scenes in Durborough’s 1915 WWI film, “On the Firing Line With the Germans”:
1) The scene with Jane Addams, Dr. Aletta Jacobs and Dr. Alice Hamilton at the Brandenburg Arch. [The only film of Addams in her prime doing the work for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the ONLY film of Dr. Jacobs, the Dutch feminist and co-chair with Addams at the Women’s International Peace Conference at the Hague, Dr. Hamilton was the first female Harvard faculty member and the “Mother” of occupational medicine.] 6:50 – 7:05
2) Scenes of hospitals filled with casualties, an amputee with no hands demonstrating his use of hand tools 7:38 – 10:35
3) POW Camp 12:14 – 15:20
4) Kaiser Family Scenes 17:40 – 19:40
5) Mounted Cavalry with lances 21:35 – 22:20 (soon to be obsolete)
6) Road repair and hay supply 35:59 – 36:36 (all those horses needed a LOT of hay!)
7)
Jewish Quarter of
8)
“Schuette is some mechanic ….” 1:16:30 – 1:17:20
(and sends greetings to his
9) Entire peasants on wagons returning “home” 1:41:55 – 1:46:50 Poignant! (and relevant with our current massive world refugee problems)
You can see a frame by frame
capture of a war casualty caught on film from the film’s “Bloni sniper
scene” if you follow this link.
Book referenced:
Early war cinematographers were a collection of fearless adventurers, felons, & fast talkers…..
James W. Castellan, Ron van Dopperen, Cooper C. Graham, American Cinematographers in the Great War, 1914-1918, London, John
Libby, 2014
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca The
Book Depository
Review: Fat, Bald and Worthless
This book is a curiousity - it tells the stories behind the nicknames of
noble (and not so noble) historical figures. I bought my copy in January 2007,
but it's only recently that I began reading it, inspired by the puzzle
I set for you last month. You may recall that I asked you to tell me which of
the marriages shown in this snippet from the GRO indexes is particularly
interesting:
It was, of course, the
marriage between Genista Philpotts
and Kenneth Broom - because Genista is the Latin name
for the plant we normally call Broom. Only 16 people called Genista
married in England & Wales between 1837-2005, so it is quite a coincidence
that one of them married a Broom, hardly one of the most common surnames in
Britain (less than one person in a thousand was called Broom in 2002, according
to the Electoral Register). Or is it really coincidence - were they, perhaps,
attracted to each other because of their names? Or did they seek each other
out?
Anyway, I digress. The second
part of the puzzle was to name the Royal house that was in some way connected
to the marriage - and, of course, the answer was Plantagenet, derived from planta genista.
According to the book Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, was given this name because
he liked to wear a sprig of broom in his cap - and his son, nicknamed Curtmantle on account of the
knee-length cloaks he favoured, became Henry II of England in 1154 on the death
of Stephen. Plantagenets were to rule England until 1485 when Richard III
(nicknamed Crookback) died at the Battle of Bosworth, ending the Wars of the
Roses.
There are hundreds of entries
in the book, and as I dipped into it I couldn't help learning snippets of
history that had previously passed me by (perhaps not surprising considering
that I failed History O-level). It's not an essential purchase, but with used
copies available for as little as 1p (excluding shipping), and new copies of
this gold-embossed hardback for a little more, it's well worth considering for
a bit of harmless fun. And like me, you might learn something!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Abebooks.co.uk
Last July I reviewed
Herding Hemingway's Cats: Understanding
How Our Genes Work by Kat Arney, a fascinating
tale of how our understanding of genetics has progressed over the past 60-odd years since the structure of DNA
was discovered. That book took the form of interviews with key people in the
field, and as I said in my review I didn't understand everything..
You might think that Kat Arney's follow-up, How
to Code a Human, would be a comparatively easy read given the lavish colour
illustrations - but it has actually taken me over 6
months to finish, admittedly with some well-earned breaks. The problem is, I
wanted to understand everything, and I eventually came to the realisation that
even if I did understand each section as I read it, there was simply too much
information for me to internalise it all! Those of you who are younger than me
may well find it easier.
Fortunately we don't need to understand how everything works in
order to use DNA to supplement conventional family history research - we just
need to know how DNA is inherited. It's when we want to understand why humans
differ from each other, and how our genes can affect our health, that it's
necessary to fiddle around 'under the bonnet', to continue the analogy from the
previous review. But whilst some forms of a few diseases can be attributed to
differences in specific genes, the reality is that we're a long way from
determining precisely what causes most afflictions, and even further from
coming up with a 'fix'.
So whilst there is a lot of information in this book, it's
only a small part of the story - after all, it's only 15 years since the first
human genome was sequenced, which is not a long time to unravel a process that
evolved over billions of years. Reading How
to Code a Human underlined for me both how much we know and how little we
know: we are the most complex creatures ever to have walked the Earth, and
almost certainly the only ones capable of understanding our origins, yet we
have fewer genes than an apple or a grain of wheat!
Only available as a hardback,
this book has a recommended retail price of £16.99, but you should be able to
purchase it more cheaply by following the links below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Abebooks.co.uk
This is the first year we've
forced some of our rhubarb - under a deep plastic composting bin - and what an
improvement! The stems are more tender, and require less sugar to be added - delicious,
especially when cooked with ginger and served with natural yoghurt (low-fat, of
course). Although we usually have fresh fruit for breakfast I'm very happy to
have stewed rhubarb in season.
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 2018
Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or
republish any part of this newsletter without permission - which is only
granted in the most exceptional circumstances. However,
you MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for
permission - though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins
instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?