Newsletter - 22nd August 2018
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British Newspaper Archive EXCLUSIVE
Whatever happened to Baby Jane?
The perfect marriage of DNA & conventional research
Chatsworth staff records now online
Review: Researching
and Writing History
Review: My
History: A Memoir of Growing Up
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Save at British
Newspaper Archive EXCLUSIVE
You might have noticed in the
Stop Press of the last issue that there's an offer
running until 25th August which allows you to save 30% on ANY subscription (but
it only applies to the first payment, which means the Annual subscription is by
far the best buy).
Aware that a lot of people are
on vacation at this time of the year, and not up to date with their incoming email,
I managed to negotiate an exclusive extension for readers of this newsletter -
the offer runs until Sunday 2nd September when you use this special link.
Note: please don't share the special BNA link; however you CAN share the link to this newsletter if you
like.
The hundreds of millions of
articles in the British Newspaper Archive can also be accessed through Findmypast, if you have Pro or World subscription - but as
many keen researchers have discovered, the search at the British Newspaper
Archive site is significantly more powerful.
Most useful of all is the ability
to search for articles added between two dates - this means that you don’t have
to keep ploughing through the same results, which can otherwise be particularly
tiresome, especially if your ancestors had common surnames. Remember, the BNA's
coverage is expanding all the time - tens of millions of articles are added each
year.
I love looking through old
newspapers - and after stumbling across an intriguing 'Medical Notes' column in
one local newspaper I couldn't resist searching for more. For example, these
gems were in the 16th April 1898 edition of the Peterhead Sentinel and Buchan Journal:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
In the Fife Herald of 29th December 1886 there's some sound advice that
still applies today:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
Changing the subject, an
interesting news article appeared in The
Middlesex Chronicle on 3rd August 1940 - it involved three people, two of
them aliens, who appeared in court charged with forgery relating to an identity
card. It's too long and complicated for me to relate, but if you want to know
more you'll find the article at the top right of page 4.
Whatever
happened to Baby Jane?
In 2003 the decomposing body
of a young baby was found in a pond in Gainesville, Florida - at the time no
identification was possible, so the baby was recorded as Jane Doe in the
records.
Now there's a plan to use DNA
testing to identify the child's parents using public DNA databases, according
to this article
in the Gainesville Sun.
Technically it's a homicide
investigation, but I suspect that all anyone will discover is a sad story. If
you've uploaded your DNA results to GEDmatch, do you
feel that this is a valid use of your information?
In 2012, a newsletter story
from Lost Cousins member John Simpson about his Aunt Daisy led to John's
meeting his cousin Iris for the first time, and this year that same article
from the archives has led to Iris making contact with
her brother Alex - for the first time in 70 years! This is the human face of
genealogy - it's not just about long-dead ancestors, but
can also be about re-connecting families.
You simply can't predict what
you'll find out when you search for your 'lost cousins', whether you do it the
traditional way, or using DNA. You might find solutions to the mysteries that
have puzzled you since childhood; you might reveal that one of your ancestors
led a double life. But one thing you can be certain of - you'll discover things
about your family history that you
didn't know (and sometimes things that nobody
has ever known).
Sadly many researchers haven't even got to first base when
it comes to making those wonderful discoveries - it pains me to say that as
many as one in three of the people reading this article haven't entered a
single relative on their My Ancestors
page!
(I assume this indicates lack
of understanding rather than complete indifference, but if you genuinely have
no interest connecting with other researchers who share your ancestors, either
to learn from them, or share your own discoveries with them, please let me know
so that I can close your account.)
Some people seem to think
that because LostCousins uses the 1881 Census to make
connections between 'lost cousins' the site can't help researchers who are
researching in the 16th century - but the reality is that the further you've
researched your tree the more you'll benefit from finding 'lost cousins' (and
the more cousins you'll be able to find). Others assume that because their
ancestors left Britain long before 1881 they won't be able to find any cousins -
but always remember that if your ancestors were British, it's virtually certain
that the vast majority of your living relatives are still
living here (so it's their ancestors
you need to enter from the 1881 Census).
Others think that publishing
their tree on Ancestry is all that's necessary (the "build it and they
will come" fallacy). But there are only between 2 and 3 million Ancestry
subscribers in the entire world - a small fraction of the number of people
researching their family tree - and the more experienced a researcher is, the
less likely it is that they're a current subscriber to Ancestry.
There are even a few people
who believe that they know all of their cousins (!) or
even that they don't have any cousins (!!!!). Poppycock and balderdash, of
course, as anyone who has taken a DNA will know - we all have millions of
living cousins, although we'll probably never be able to name more than a few
thousand of them.
The perfect marriage
of DNA & conventional research
I've written many times that
taking a DNA test isn’t a substitute for conventional, records-based, research
- instead it offers us the opportunity to fill in the fairly
rare, but exceedingly annoying, gaps in the surviving records.
You may recall that LostCousins member Muriel won an Ancestry DNA test in our Birthday
Competition - recently she wrote to tell me about her successes, and said "I'm
now pleased I researched branches, twigs and leaves as some of the matches have
been easy to trace".
I often get emails from
members who have recently received their DNA results and want to know what to
do. The answer is, they should do what they should have done while waiting for
their results, ie follow the advice in my Masterclass.
If you've tested with
Ancestry, but aren't working your way through the Masterclass
you should be - the reason I write Masterclasses is to ensure that everyone can
get the same excellent results that I do. If you don’t read them at the right
time, or don't act on the advice, you're not only setting yourself up for
disappointment, you’re likely to be wasting time and energy too.
Tip: there are Masterclasses on a whole range of
topics - just search for 'Masterclass' using the customised Google search at
the top of any newsletter. Or, if you're a LostCousins
subscriber, log-in and go to the Subscribers Only page, where there are links
to all of the Masterclasses.
I've written many times about
cousin marriages and the increased risk of hereditary diseases being passed on,
not least because understanding how and why the risk changes helps us to get to
grips with the way that DNA is inherited. In the 21st century it's impossible
for family historians to ignore DNA, even if they want to (and I know some of
you do!).
So I was interested when DNA
expert and LostCousins member Debbie Kennett
highlighted an article
that briefly summarises the current understanding of the risks. Basically, the
chance of a given child of two 1st cousin parents inheriting certain diseases
or disabilities is doubled, from around 3% to about 6% - pretty good odds if
you’re only going to have one child, but not so good if you plan to have 10.
Cousins (and sometimes closer
relatives) have been procreating since the human race
began - though marriages, in the sense of a ceremony uniting a man and a woman
may go back less than 5,000 years. This article from The Week suggests that the first
recorded marriages were in Mesopotamia around 2350BC - but another article
describes marriage as being "as old as civilization itself", which
pushes the date back further (depending, of course, on how you define
civilization!).
The one fact that everyone
knows about cousin marriages and inherited diseases is that many of Queen
Victoria's descendants inherited haemophilia - but though Queen Victoria did
indeed marry her 1st cousin, the haemophilia that some of her descendants
suffered was not the result of her marriage to Prince Albert. You can read more
about this topic here.
Of course, it doesn't need to
be a gamble, because these days cousins who intend to marry can have their DNA
tested in advance - they can then make an informed decision. It's not clear
whether in the UK such testing is available through the National Health
Service, but this page
would be a good place to start if someone you know plans to marry a cousin (or
has other reasons to be concerned about passing on an inherited condition).
For me one of the great
advantages of having access to the British Newspaper Archive, either directly
or through Findmypast, and to other historic
newspapers through my library, is the ability to check out stories. These days
it is more important than ever to distinguish between true stories and 'fake
news'.
For example, a recent Twitter
posting suggested that the top hat was invented by one John Hetherington, and
that it caused great alarm. Whilst that may or may not be true, the assertion
which followed certainly wasn't - the article claimed that the incident had originally
been reported in The Times of 16th
January 1797, and that certainly wasn't the case (like many in the UK I have
access to The Times through my local
public library - even when I am at home).
What I did discover, however,
is that in 1899 the Huddersfield
Chronicle reported the same story, but instead of attributing it to The Times, said came from "an old
journal" - you can see the article here
in the British Newspaper Archive blog. I found a website which suggests that
the 1797 article was published in the "St James' Gazette", but only
publication I've find with a similar name is the St James's Gazette, which was
not established until 1880.
If you search the Internet
you'll find many stories about the 'riot' that John Hetherington caused with
his outrageous headwear - all referring back a 1797
story, which may or may not have been published by a journal which may or may
not have existed, describing an event that may nor may not have happened.
So don’t take things at face value - do what you can to
verify stories by going back to the original source!
Chatsworth
staff records now online
A couple of years ago I
reported that historic staff records for Harewood House had been made available
online - prompting much correspondence from members whose relatives worked
there - and now I've discovered that records for another of our stately homes,
Chatsworth, have gone online.
LostCousins member John pointed out this new resource to me, and
kindly contributed this short article:
"We knew my
mother-in-law had worked at Edensor on the Chatsworth Estate when she was 16
years old as Tricia had spent childhood holidays visiting relatives in Pilsley, another estate village. Our family history
research, which had included a visit to the Estate archives had then traced the
family’s association with the Devonshires back
through another five generations to the 18th century. We have been pleased to discover that
recently the Chatsworth estate has released on its website a database of many
staff who had worked on the estate since the 1700’s.
"The details captured by
students from the University of Sheffield have been taken from entries made in
the estate archives over the period and are, currently, held alphabetically by
surname in three databases. Where possibly there are dates, occupation, trade
and where the information was found, and in line with the 1939 Register, no one
born after 1918 is currently shown. If, like Tricia, different ancestors were
blessed with the same Christian name, these might be difficult to separate at
times, however most things are possible.
"Most are the names of
the men - Tricia’s grandmother, known to have trudged down to the ‘big house’
from Pilsley in the snow carrying her sewing machine,
is not currently found. Additional information for some, such as the detail of great-great-great
uncle, Sampson, being the estate’s Grotto Keeper, recorded in one of the books
by the late Duchess, has yet to find its way into the database. But a wealth of
information is already there."
You'll find the Chatsworth
staff records here.
When I was a boy we had our
main meal of the day at lunchtime, and around 6 o'clock we'd have tea, which
could have been anything from bread and jam to slices of home-made brawn with
salad.
Very occasionally we would
have a cooked tea, which was referred to on those rare occasions as 'high tea',
and I used to think of it as an equivalent to the nursery teas that I read
about in books (in my day most children's books seemed to be about middle-class
families with cooks and governesses, and children who rarely saw their parents
- and certainly didn’t eat with them).
More recently the term has
become misappropriated, and applied to 'afternoon tea'
when served in the grand fashion, with silver-plated teapots, multi-tiered
cake-stands and finger sandwiches. It's rather like the way that the term
'silver service' is regarded as being 'posh', when it's really
rather down-to-earth.
There's a lot of information
about what poor working class families ate in Round
About a Pound a Week, perhaps
the most compelling book I've read since I began researching my family tree. If
you can pick up a copy at a reasonable price it's an amazingly revealing read
for anyone whose ancestors were struggling to get by around the time of the
1911 Census. I've provided some links that might help you track down a copy:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Tip: it may be out of copyright where you live, but in
the UK it will be in copyright until 2024.
Review: Researching and Writing History
You might think that a book
sub-titled "A Practical Guide for Local Historians" isn’t relevant to
family historians, but if so you would be wrong - there's hardly a paragraph of
David Dymond's work that doesn't apply equally to us!
This book was republished in a new edition in 2016,
but my copy is of the 1999 edition. Writing just before the start of the new
millennium he makes one of the points I've made time and time again in these
newsletters "At the beginning of the 21st century our society produces vast
quantities of paper, film, and tape, but it also destroys evidence on an
unprecedented scale".
(It's worth noting that he
was writing before the Data Protection Act wreaked havoc - things are
far, far worse now.)
He goes on to say "Many aspects of contemporary local life will have
no record unless we make it now", a warning that can surely be applied
equally to family history. We delight in the records and ephemera that our
ancestors preserved for our benefit, but what are we doing to record our own
lives? Our texts and emails won't be around in a century's time - most of us
don’t even have them from a decade ago - and few of us write letters any more, or keep diaries.
But going back to writing
history, he reminds us that the events of the past need to be seen in the
context of the time in which they occurred. He deals with the different sources
of evidence, both primary and secondary - all as relevant to family historians
as to local historians (after all we share the same sources) - then considers
how we should analyse and assemble that evidence.
There's quite a bit about the
style of writing we should aspire to, and the unhelpful habits we should aim to
avoid, or minimise. I recognised several of my own failings! There are many
examples, some good and some bad, to help us appreciate why some ways of doing things
are better than others.
Everyone who reads this book and
takes the lessons to heart will end up a better writer, but I suspect that
we'll also end up better readers and better researchers too! All in all it's one of the most invigorating works of non-fiction
that I've read - I only wish I'd discovered it years ago.
I mentioned earlier that I
read the 1999 edition - which I picked up at a bargain price - but I wish now
that I hadn't been such a cheapskate, because I'm sure the 2016 edition is even
better. As usual you can support LostCousins if you
use the links below (even if you end up buying something completely different).
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca The
Book Depository
Review:
My History: A Memoir of Growing Up
I'm not a great fan of autobiographies, but I was
tempted to buy Antonia Fraser's memoir because I wanted to understand why she, the
daughter of a Labour peer, and regarded as one of the most beautiful women in
England, had ended up marrying a much older Tory MP, one who seemed to me to be
rather boring.
The story begins in the 1930s
and there's a lot about the author's childhood. Isn't it strange how no matter
how much we have as a child, we always want more? The Pakenhams
may not have been a particularly well-orff family by
middle class standards, but they were jolly lucky compared to the average
family!
A strange thing happened - as
I was reading the book I had a picture in my mind of the young Antonia, not the
85 year-old grandmother who autographed my copy of the
book a couple of months ago (she'll be 86 on Monday). Was it wishful thinking
on my part, or was it testimony to the way that she wrote? Perhaps a bit of
each.
One thing was clear - if you
want to become a published author, a good way to achieve your goal is to work
for a publishing company. Antonia got a job with George Weidenfeld, co-founder
of Weidenfeld & Nicolson - and he was still her publisher when this book
was written in 2014 (he died in 2016 at the age of 96).
The book ends with the
publication of the author's first history, Mary,
Queen of Scots in 1969 - by which time she had 5 children, but we learn nothing
about them and virtually nothing about their father. So
I still don’t know how the two of them came to marry!
In an age when so-called
celebrities publish their autobiographies in their early 20s it’s refreshing to
read one written by an accomplished author who has waited more than half a century
to tell the tale. And whilst not billed as a family history, in many ways it is.
LostCousins member Edward spotted a marriage announcement in the Leeds Times of 8th April 1837:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
Sometimes it's impossible to
verify such 'interesting' entries, but in this case I
was able to find the marriage at Findmypast (despite
the vicar's unusual spelling of the groom's surname):
Reproduced with the permission of The East Riding Archives
& Local Studies Service, East Riding of Yorkshire Council and Findmypast
The register entry
states that the marriage was by banns, so the couple did at least have a couple of
weeks to reconsider their decision!
This week's New Scientist has an article about Easter
Island - the small Pacific island famous for its statues - which suggests that,
contrary to previous assumptions, society on the island didn’t collapse after
the 17th century.
This would not have been news
to the parishioners of St Mary, Rotherhithe - where on 30th October 1811 the
following baptism took place:
All rights reserved. Reproduced
by kind permission of the London Metropolitan Archives and Ancestry
In case you can't read it,
the entry states: "Henry Easter, Said to be the
Son of Crangalow, King of Easter Island, in the
Pacific Ocean, about 22 years".
A Google search for 'Crangalow' found a book which reports that Henry was brought
from the island in 1806 by Captain Benjamin Page of the whaling ship Adventure, and suggests
that he returned to his island home not long after his baptism.
Well, as foreshadowed in the
last issue, I've been busy picking fruit and making jam - not only a second
batch of Spiced Blackberry & Apple, but two batches of Plum (one enhanced
with a little cinnamon), and two of Blackberry & Elderberry.
After the holiday weekend it should
be time to pick the bullaces - we're just eating our last jar of Shepherd's Bullace
jam, so really need to re-stock.
Although I tend to spread jam
quite generously I use far less sugar than most recipes suggest, so it's
relatively healthy. It may not keep for years and years (sugar acts as a
preservative), but then there's not much chance of that in this household!
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......
In the next
newsletter I'll be writing about Deceased Online, one of my favourite sites…..
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2018
Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or
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granted in the most exceptional circumstances. However,
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instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?