Newsletter - 27th January 2018
Suffolk County Council respond to criticisms
Can you save on Ancestry subscriptions and DNA tests?
British Newspaper Archive OFFER ENDS SUNDAY EXTENDED
Latest research reveals ancient links between Britain
& Ireland
What the DNA experts won't tell you
Is there such a thing as a distant cousin?
Low cost DNA transfers ENDS SUNDAY
New home for Family Tree Analyzer
ScotlandsPeople's annual
upgrade
Stilton cheese-rolling: annual event cancelled
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"If any of you know cause, or just impediment, why these
two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony….."
Most of our ancestors married
by Banns, which would have been read on three different Sundays in their parish
church. Usually this was just a formality, but occasionally someone would come
forward with an objection, as they did when David Dawson and Elizabeth Smith
sought to marry in the parish of Swanton Morley with Worthing, Norfolk in the
autumn of 1789:
©
Norfolk Record Office, reproduced by kind permission of Findmypast
I
don't know if you can make it out the wording in the margin, but it reads:
"Nov 8th 1789 the Banns were forbidden by G
Smith, Father, she being a minor".
This
is the first time I've seen such an entry, so I thought I'd share it with you.
Of course, even if the Banns were read, it doesn’t guarantee that the couple
married. In December 1810 the Banns were read three times for the marriage of
Francis Drison (Driesen),
my 3G grandfather, to Charlotte Cook at St Olave's,
Bermondsey - but the marriage didn't take place. If it had, I wouldn't be here
today - something like this really underlines the fact that every single one of
our direct ancestors is crucial to our very existence!
Suffolk County
Council respond to criticisms
There
is a lot of concern about the closure of the Lowestoft Record Office, which I
mentioned in the last issue, and some have suggested that the council might
also be planning to close the Bury Record Office (which is the one I would
normally use, if I only had the time to research my Suffolk ancestors!). Some
have even questioned Suffolk's commitment to the county's heritage.
In fact Suffolk has long been planning a new heritage centre
called The Hold, based in Ipswich - you can read all about it here. I understand that
the Bury Record Office is safe for the foreseeable future, and indeed it has
just been repainted.
In
the meantime the Lowestoft
Journal has reported that the planned changes at Lowestoft have been put on
hold while Suffolk County Council consult with users - something they should
perhaps have done before?
Can YOU save
on Ancestry subscriptions and DNA tests?
There
are potential savings to be made on Ancestry subscriptions and/or DNA tests if
you live in the UK, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.
Australia & New Zealand
At
Ancestry's Australian site you can buy DNA tests for just $99 (Australian), which
they say is a $30 saving, but I remember them charging $149 not long ago, so it
seems to me more like a $50 saving. The price includes taxes but excludes shipping
(which will probably be cheaper if you order more than one test at the same
time).
The
great news is that, unlike at some other sites, it's not necessary to give Ancestry
the names of the people who will be testing at the time of ordering - so you don't
have to figure out who should test or ask if they’re amenable, Believe me, you won’t end up with unused test kits - there's
always somebody you wish had already tested!
To support
LostCousins please use this link when placing your order
(you may find it necessary to log-out from your Ancestry account before
clicking the link, especially if you have previously purchased a DNA test).
This offer ends at 23.59 AEDT in Sunday 28th January so you will have to act
fast! (I did email members in Australia and New Zealand earlier this week, so
this is just a final reminder.)
When
you buy a DNA test you may be offered
a discounted Ancestry subscription - this is well worth considering, but you
DON'T need to be an Ancestry subscriber to test your DNA or contact your
matches.
UK & Ireland
There's
something here for almost everyone - but you have to bear
in mind the old adage: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Although
there is no DNA offer running at the moment, some people have found that they
can still save 20% by following the link from my October newsletter, which I'm
repeating here
for your convenience - try it and see!
Tip: you may need to log-out from
Ancestry first, especially if you have previously bought a DNA test).
When
you buy a DNA test you may be offered
a discounted Ancestry subscription - this is well worth considering, but you
DON'T need to be an Ancestry subscriber to test your DNA or contact your
matches.
If
you have previously tested your DNA but don't have an Ancestry subscription you
may be able to get one at a bargain price by following this link
- it’s certainly worth trying. And if you haven’t tested your DNA and have no
intention of doing so you may be able to save on a World subscription using the
link in my June newsletter, which is repeated here.
Tip: some Ancestry subscriptions are for
6 months and some for 12 months - make sure you know what you're buying, and remember that if you allow your subscription to renew
you will pay the full price. Existing subscribers are not eligible, I'm afraid.
British Newspaper
Archive OFFER ENDS SUNDAY EXTENDED
The
generous offer I wrote about in the last newsletter has been extended to Monday 5th February - you'll
find all the details here (the link has been updated).
Latest
research reveals ancient links between Britain & Ireland
Just
out this week is an interesting paper from researchers at Trinity College
Dublin, the Sanger Institute, and University College London which, in effect, builds
on the findings of the Peoples of the
British Isles study which I wrote
about in April 2015. There's a summary of the findings in this Irish Times article,
but you can read the full paper here.
What the DNA
experts won't tell you
When I first started writing
about DNA over a decade ago I was highly critical of the way that tests were
marketed - the firms who sold the tests tried to convince us that we wanted (needed?)
to know about where one of our ancestors was 30,000 years ago, even though
every single one of us is descended from every person on the planet 30,000
years ago (or, rather, from all of those who have any living descendants). Those
tests (Y-DNA and mtDNA) are still around today, and
whilst they have their uses, for most people they prove an expensive
disappointment, mtDNA tests especially.
Why are Y-DNA and mtDNA tests of relatively little value to family historians
compared to autosomal DNA tests? Because their strengths are also their
weaknesses. They each look at a single ancestral line (your direct paternal
line or your direct maternal line), so you know which line to focus on when you
find a match - but the chances of getting a close match are quite low, for the
simple reason that whilst you have millions of cousins whose connection to you
can be shown through DNA tests of one sort or another, only a minute fraction
of those cousins will share a specific ancestral line, and only a small
percentage of them will have taken the same DNA test. And even if you get a
match with someone who has identical DNA on every marker it still won't tell
you who your common ancestor was, or how long ago they lived.
Tip: even if you test your entire mtDNA
sequence and get an exact match the common ancestor could be more than 500
years back, before parish registers started. Even if you have a match in the
last 500 years your chance of identifying the common ancestor is small because
tracing your maternal line is challenging, since the surname changes with every
generation. On your paternal line you only need to find your ancestors'
baptisms; on your maternal line you must find their marriages too (it reminds
me of the saying about Gingers Rogers having to do everything that Fred Astaire
did, but "backwards, and in heels").
It's rare to find one of the
experts writing that such-and-such a test is a waste of money, but you'll hear
it from me time and time again - I know that there's a limit to how much most
of the people who read my newsletters are willing (or able) to spend on their
genealogical research, because I too have a limit. So
what you'll hear from me is very much focused on getting the best results for
the least expenditure and the least effort. (Don’t underestimate the
time it takes to make sense of your DNA results, nor how important it is to
have an efficient and effective strategy for analysing your matches.)
I'm a great believer in
focusing on the low-hanging fruit, both in my orchard and my research - the
fact is, while you're doing the easy bits the difficult pieces often fall into
place, like windfalls landing on the grass, or come within reach as the branch
bends under the weight of evidence.
In other words, it’s not just
what you do, but the order in which you do it. So if you're up against a really tough 'brick wall', why
keep banging your head against it when there are other 'brick walls' in your
tree that can be more easily knocked down (or stepped around)? New record sets
are becoming available online all the time: something that you could waste
hundreds of hours on - and still not solve - this year might be resolved in 5 minutes
if you leave it until next year, or the year after. Maybe the solution will
come from new records, and maybe it will come from a DNA match - it doesn't
matter - the key thing is to do things in the right order.
Here's an example that really
brings this home: this week I had an email from a member who had purchased an
Ancestry DNA test: "Should I test myself, or should I ask my son to test,
so that we can find out about my late husband's ancestors?"
It’s a very, very common
situation. But the answer isn't simple, nor is the best strategy intuitively
obvious. If the only objective is to
find out about her husband's ancestors then the best person to test will be a
surviving brother or sister-in-law, because they will share the same ancestors,
and only those ancestors. Testing the
son will only confuse matters because thousands of matches from his father's
side will muddled up with thousands of matches from his mother's side, making
the task far more difficult than it needs to be. (It will also limit the
opportunities for finding his father's cousins, since he's an extra step away
from them compared to his paternal uncles and aunts.)
In reality
it's more likely that the aim is
to eventually find out about relatives from both sides of her son's tree. In that
case, doesn't it make sense for the son to test? Only if funds are so limited
that his mother will never test. If there is a reasonable prospect of funding
two tests then the best people to test are the mother
and a paternal uncle or aunt; if there no are no surviving brothers or sisters
then the son should test instead. In the former case it doesn't much matter who
tests first (assuming both are healthy), but who should test first in the
latter case?
It seems intuitively obvious
for the son to test first, to get immediate access to cousins from both sides
of his tree - and yet, this answer is as wrong as wrong can be! Why? Because much
of the time would be spent trying to figure out which cousins are from which
side - and that time would be completely wasted, since when the mother
eventually tests it will be obvious which matches are from her side. So clearly
it makes sense for the mother to test first (or for both to test together).
Most of you reading this will
be in a similar situation - whether you are the child, the parent, or the
in-law the same logic can be applied to determine who should test, and which of
you should test first.
The vast
majority of the people in the world who have taken genealogical DNA
tests live in the US, so you won't be surprised to learn that most of the DNA
experts who write and blog about genetic genealogy are American. Anyone who
writes about DNA testing is likely to do so through the filter of their own
experiences - I certainly do, though I also take into account
what I am told by the many LostCousins members who
write to me about their own DNA highs and lows. Where your ancestors came from
can make an enormous difference to the number of cousins you find when test
your DNA - the figures I quoted recently of 1,000 matches at Family Tree DNA
and 10,000 matches at Ancestry were deliberately pitched at the lower end, to
avoid disappointment, but there are many who have two or three times as many
matches, sometimes many more.
There are two key reasons why
you might get lots more matches. One is because you genuinely do have more
cousins than most - this is likely to apply to those from cultures where the
norm was to have large families and for most of the children to survive into
adulthood. The other is because distant cousins share more DNA with you than
would normally be the case, as a result of which the
number of close matches will appear
to be higher. LostCousins member and DNA guru Debbie
Kennett posted a very interesting article
on her blog this week - it's well worth reading, as indeed are all of her
articles on genetic genealogy.
Is there such
a thing as a distant cousin?
I received an email this week
from a member who was seeking my advice on an important topic. She wrote:
"My family tree has quite a lot of people in it
who have very tenuous links. When it comes to 'first cousin three times
removed' or 'second cousin twice removed' is it really worth
keeping them in my tree? I would appreciate a bit of expert advice on how far
to research."
To someone other than a
genealogist those relationships do sound quite distant, don't they? But they're
certainly not tenuous - nobody who shares your ancestors (and therefore your
DNA) can be described as having a tenuous relationship. If even one of your common
ancestors hadn't lived long enough to have children neither of you would have
been born - how can a relationship like that be tenous?
And to me, as a family
historian, those relationships don’t sound distant either. Most of the cousins
I'm collaborating with are 3rd cousins, whilst the cousin who I've worked with
most closely over the past 15 years, exchanging over two thousand emails, is a
half 4th cousin (we share the same 3G grandfather, but are descended from
different wives).
When you’re relying on
records to research your ancestors you have to seek
out cousins from distant branches, because if your branch didn’t inherit the
family Bible, one of the others did. If your great-grandfather didn't inherit
the family photo album from his parents, the chances are that one of his
siblings did. The same is true when you're researching using autosomal DNA
(such as Ancestry DNA, or Family Tree DNA's Family Finder) - but in this case you’re looking for the genes that both of you
inherited, and the distant cousins that you both match with.
Finally, if you are a
great-grandparent (as many readers of this newsletter are), consider this: only
one-eighth of your great grandchildren's DNA was inherited from you, and only
one-eighth of their family tree is shared with you. That is precisely the same
proportion of your tree that you share with each and every
3rd cousin!
3rd cousins don't seem so
distant now, do they?
Low cost
DNA transfers ENDS TOMORROW
(SUNDAY)
Not so long
ago Family Tree DNA charged $39 for someone who had tested with another
provider to transfer their results and access all of the Family Finder
features, including the Chromosome Browser (which shows you where on your DNA you match your
cousins). The price was cut to $19 last year, but until midnight (Houston time)
on Sunday 28th January you can save $9 by using the code ATULJAN18 when you check-out.
The first step is to download
your results from Ancestry and upload them to FTDNA - this part is free (see
this article
from last August for simple instructions). If you have tested with Ancestry
recently it's possible that the file you download won't be in quite the right
format for FTDNA, but don't worry - there's a solution in my October newsletter
here.
A free transfer gives you
access to your matches, but it’s worth spending $10 to get full access - and if
you use this link
then LostCousins should benefit.
New home for
Family Tree Analyzer
If you're a user of Family
Tree Analyzer, a handy utility written by one of LostCousins'
cleverest members, you will know that when you run the program it automatically
checks for updates. However because FTA has recently
moved to a new host site your version won't be updated - instead you'll need to
visit the new site and download the latest version (from then on it will update
automatically).
You'll find links and any
other information you need to know here
on the LostCousins forum. You don't need to be a
member of the forum in order to access that page, but
if you use FTA the chances are you've been invited to join (check your My Summary to find out whether there's
an invitation waiting there).
ScotlandsPeople's annual upgrade
In January each year ScotlandsPeople add 12 months' worth of births, marriages,
and deaths to their collection of historic registers - in 2018 the new releases
are births for 1917, marriages for 1942, and deaths for 1967.
This year Scotlandspeople
have also upgraded their Name Variants search to include variants of around 100
forenames, used in nearly half a million entries - you can read more about this
change here.
Stilton cheese-rolling:
annual event cancelled
In a former life I rented a
small warehouse north of Peterborough, so often drove past the village of
Stilton in Cambridgeshire, which is generally acknowledged to have been the
origin of the eponymous blue cheese. But strangely
cheese made in Stilton - or, indeed, anywhere in Cambridgeshire - cannot
legally be described as Stilton. Nevertheless, this didn't discourage the
villagers from inaugurating an annual cheese-rolling competition in 1959 when
the A1 highway was re-routed to bypass the village.
However, according to this article
on the BBC News website, the 2018 event has been cancelled, owing to a lack of
interest - apparently only two teams entered last year, whereas the organisers
reckon that "To make a real contest we need 12 to 16 men's teams and eight
to 12 ladies teams. We have not come anywhere near these targets for four years".
Closer to home, the Dunmow
Flitch Trials date back to mediaeval times - the earliest recorded claimant
dates from 1445, but the Dunmow Flitch is referred to in Chaucer's writing a
century earlier, and some reckon it originated as far back as 1104.
In modern times the trials have
been held every four years and are open to married couples from all over the
world who can satisfy the Judge and Jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that in
'twelvemonth and a day', they have 'not wisht
themselves unmarried again'.. If you want to take part
in the next event, scheduled for 2020, you can find more details here.
Note: this coming Wednesday is the 25th anniversary of
the day I met my wife - and the next trials are to be held on the 23rd
anniversary of the day we moved into our house; perhaps I should propose that
we enter?
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
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not invite other family historians to join LostCousins instead, since standard
membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?