Newsletter
- 23rd July 2016
Somerset
parish registers online at Ancestry NEW
Find
cousins who share your Somerset ancestors ENDS TUESDAY
Norfolk
parish registers now also at Ancestry
How
much did vicars charge their parishioners? EXCLUSIVE
Privacy
groups up in arms over Australian census
Fraudsters
use social media to target victims
The
ferry captain executed as a terrorist
Old
soldier was the last of his line
Army
service records now browsable at Findmypast
Overcoming
your 'brick wall' GUEST ARTICLE
Is the
noose tightening for Dr Daly?
Woman
loses brother - but finds sister
English
tree undergoes ultimate pedigree collapse
A
street-full of cousins GUEST ARTICLE
Endogamy
and the implications for DNA matching
In-breeding
in the Royal Family
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Somerset parish
registers online at Ancestry NEW
Last week Ancestry.co.uk uploaded
Somerset parish registers with more than 7 million entries - it's a major boost
for anyone who has ancestors from that part of England:
Somerset,
England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1531-1812
Somerset,
England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1914
Somerset,
England, Marriage Registers, Bonds and Allegations, 1754-1914
Somerset,
England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1914
Somerset,
England, Church of England Confirmations, 1843-1913
Also included in this release are 47,000
entries from Somerset school registers, and 101,000 entries from gaol
registers:
Somerset,
England, School Registers, 1860-1914
Somerset,
England, Gaol Registers, 1807-1879
Find cousins who share
your Somerset ancestors ENDS
TUESDAY
To celebrate the addition of this
important new Ancestry collection I've come up with a special offer for members
with ancestors from Somerset. Between now and midnight on Tuesday 26th July
you'll be able to initiate contact with LostCousins members who share your
Somerset ancestors even if you're not a LostCousins subscriber.
Simply add to your My Ancestors page all the relatives you can find living in Somerset
on the 1881 Census, remembering that it's the members of your ancestors'
extended families (their cousins, in other words) who are most likely to
provide the vital connections to your living cousins. You don't need a
subscription to any site to enter
relatives from the 1881 England & Wales census - the transcription of this
census is always free online at both Ancestry and Findmypast.
Tip:
you can take advantage of my offer even if your direct ancestors migrated away
from Somerset before 1881, because the Somerset parish registers at Ancestry will
make it much easier to track what happened to your ancestors' siblings and
cousins. Remember, all of your cousins are descended from collateral
lines - indeed, that's what makes them cousins!
Norfolk parish registers
now also at Ancestry
Last month I reported that The
Genealogist had added 6 million parish records for Norfolk, taking their
collection to 10 million records from the county - this week I learned that Ancestry.co.uk
have just added over 8 million Norfolk records, a collection that must
inevitably overlap considerably with that at The Genealogist:
Norfolk,
England, Church of England Baptism, Marriages, and Burials, 1535-1812
Norfolk,
England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1915
Norfolk,
England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1940
Norfolk,
England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813-1990
In the past The Genealogist and Ancestry
have worked together on certain projects, notably the 1911 Census - this might
be another example of their co-operation.
How much did vicars
charge their parishioners? EXCLUSIVE
I've always wondered how much my ancestors had to pay to have their children
baptised, to have the banns of marriage called, or to bury their loved ones -
but finding these statistics is remarkably difficult.
So I was delighted to discover that in
the front of the 1707-1787 register for the parish of All Saints, Writtle, Essex, the vicar had listed all of the relevant
charges:
Table
of fees due to the Minister of Writtle
For
Registering Baptism 6d
For
going to give Baptism at Home 5s
For
Publishing Banns 2s
For
Certificate of Banns 1s 6d
For
Marrying with Banns 5s
For
Marrying with Licence 10s
For
Licence to Marry - Bond Warrt Stamps & Oath £1 9s
6d
For
Churching a Woman 6d
For
breaking the Ground in the Churchyard: for a Parishioner dying in the parish 2s
For
a Headstone 5s
There are many other charges for burials
depending upon the type of memorial, and whether the person was a parishioner
or not. The final charge in the list is:
Easter
Offerings for each Person 16 Years old (to be paid by the Master of the Family)
4d
One of the key points is that there was
no charge for a baptism ceremony carried out in the church - the charge was for
registering the baptism. This could mean that some baptisms carried out were
not recorded in the register - the 6d charge would have been a large sum for a
farm labourer, who would have been earning in the region of 10d per day in the
early 18th century.
Note:
this PDF document
gives estimates for farm wages in different areas of England between
1670-1850.
Privacy groups
up in arms over Australian census
In Britain we're fighting to get more information
added to our next (and potentially last) census in 2021, but in Australia
privacy advocates are arguing that the collection of names in their 2016 census
(which will take place on 9th August) represents an unnecessary security risk. This press
release from Liberty Victoria sets out some of the concerns - to see the other
side of the story follow this link
to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Fraudsters use social
media to target victims
According to a report from the fraud
prevention service Cifas,
identity fraud rose by 57% in the UK last year. Younger people are more
vulnerable because of their use of social media, but over 60s nevertheless
accounted for over 17% of the total.
It always amazes me how much information
it is possible to glean by scouring public records - for example, recently I
noticed that someone involved in a discussion in one of my LinkedIn groups had
included his birthday in his profile. Starting with that piece of information I
was able to find his birth in the GRO indexes at Findmypast, which confirmed
his year of birth and gave me his mother's maiden name. That might not
be all that a fraudster needs, but it’s a frighteningly good start!
Note:
you might not include your birthday in your profile, but I bet that if you have
a Facebook or Twitter account you get congratulated on your birthday - and that
could be just as informative.
Some people are under the impression
that the most dangerous thing you can do online is use your credit card - but
in reality it's probably one of the safest things you can do (assuming you're
dealing with a reputable site), because the transaction takes place using a
secure connection. It's almost certainly far more dangerous to send somebody a
cheque - because it includes the name of your bank, the precise branch, your
account number and your signature!
Many years ago, when I first began
researching, Rootsweb was an important source of
information. It still handles many mailing lists, including the Society of
Genealogists mailing list - the only one that I regularly read.
Earlier this year the Rootsweb servers were badly hit by technical problems which
resulted in the loss of some data - and as I write many of the mailing lists at
Rootsweb are unavailable, and have been for at least
a day. So don't be surprised if you too run into problems.
There are precious few British families
that made it through the Great War unscathed - it was a time of terror, of
trauma, and of tragedy.
But whilst there are no longer any
living veterans of the first great conflict of modern times their voices live
on, in recordings held by the BBC and by the Imperial War Museum - which you can
hear in a wonderful series of radio programmes broadcast over the past two
years but available online here.
The ferry captain
executed as a terrorist
In a few days' time it will be exactly
100 years since Captain Charles Algernon Fryatt was
executed by the Germans for attempting to ram a U-boat while captaining a North
Sea ferry.
The event that led to Fryatt's execution took place in March 1915, when he was in
command of the SS Brussels, a cross-channel steamer owned by the Great Eastern
Railway company. Ordered to stop by a U-boat when just
off the Dutch coast, Fryatt decided to steer towards
the submarine, forcing it to dive.
On that occasion Fryatt
and his ship escaped, but fifteen months later he wasn't so lucky - the Germans
were out for blood and he was cornered by 5 German destroyers just after
sailing from the Hook of Holland. He was tried, sentenced, and executed in the
space of a single day - 27th July 1916.
You can read more about Captain Fryatt in this BBC article, which
has a photo of documents relating to the case which are held at the Essex Record Office.
Old soldier was the
last of his line
Stewart Cooney, who served with the
Royal Artillery in World War 2 was the last of his
line - his wife and their adopted son had both pre-deceased him. So, when he
died last month in a care home a quiet funeral was in prospect, with nobody in
attendance other than staff from the care home.
But, after an appeal on social media,
hundreds of people turned out for the funeral - the chapel was overflowing with
mourners paying tribute to a lonely old soldier who had served his country.
You can read more about this heartwarming story here, on the BBC
website.
Army service records
now browsable at Findmypast
Findmypast
have nearly 8 million British Army service records in their collection, but
whilst they have always been searchable, it has only just become possible to
browse the records. This allows researchers to look at records in a different
way - perhaps studying a particular regiment - but could also lead to
discoveries of records that have been misfiled, miscatalogued,
or incorrectly indexed.
You can browse the service records here.
Note:
also browsable for the first time are the Absent
Voters lists from 1918-21.
Overcoming your 'brick
wall' GUEST ARTICLE
It’s generally pretty simple to research
our ancestors, but occasionally you will get stuck. So how do you get out of
the genealogical mire? Here are ten top tips from expert Simon Fowler:
1
Don’t make
assumptions about your ancestors without testing them. In particular, remember Occam’s
Rule that ‘the simplest explanation is usually the correct one’.
2
Spellings of
names, especially surnames, change over time.
3
Your ancestor may
have always been called by a name that wasn’t on their birth certificate. Or
rearranged their forenames or had them rearranged by a clerk.
4
Don’t trust the
written record - it can be wrong. Clerks will and do make mistakes in writing
down names, misspelling surnames and getting forenames wrong.
5
There may be
records you haven’t used. The Victorians, in particular, produced a lot of
paperwork that effectively duplicate each other. So if the document you want is
missing, there may be something almost as good.
6
Don’t rely on
family tradition - it can be wrong.
7
Note down all the
sources you have used so you can revisit them if you need.
8
Don’t use online
databases without checking whether there is a description of the material, what
it contains and most importantly what is missing.
9
Some ancestors
don’t want to be found. Keep things in proportion. Don’t waste your time in
pointless searches, on the off chance.
10 Attend the AGRA conference in Cambridge on 17
September to hear from the experts about overcoming genealogical brick walls!
© 2016 Simon Fowler
Simon
Fowler is a member of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in
Archives (AGRA) and is taking part in the genealogical help session at AGRA’s
conference on Demolishing Brick Walls in Cambridge on 17th September. You'll
find full details of the program here.
Is the noose tightening for
Dr Daly?
I've just received the birth and death
certificates for Patrick Edward Daly - and very revealing they are, providing
proof of perjury and adultery:
There's a special area on the
LostCousins forum where we're going to be dissecting this case - and whilst
you'll need to be a forum member to contribute, anyone can follow the
proceedings simply by clicking this link.
When someone approaches me with a
longstanding problem in their family tree I invariably inject a sizeable dose
of scepticism into the dialogue. It's not that I don't trust people to tell me
the truth, just that long experience shows when we can't find the proof we're
searching for, it's often because we're looking in the wrong place, or for the
wrong evidence.
Sometimes we can be so determined to
prove our hypothesis correct that we ignore evidence that points in the
opposite direction ("there are none so blind as
those who will not see"). A more scientific approach is to try to prove
that our hypothesis is incorrect - this helps us to focus on the
counter-arguments.
Note:
occasionally I come across a researcher whose 'brick wall' is so important to
them that they don't want to solve it! More often than not these are mysteries
that could be solved once and for all with a DNA test. So always consider the
possibly that you're the 'brick wall'.....
The
Guardian printed this story
of a 117 year-old Mexican lady who had been waiting years for a copy of her
birth certificate, then died just a few hours later - but I'm not sure that I
believe it. Do you?
An equally improbable story that I really
want to believe is this one,
about the man who proposed to his girl-friend via a fake United Airlines
in-flight video.
Woman loses
brother - but finds sister
There have been many stories of children
separated soon after birth, but few are stranger than the tale of Vanda James
from East Anglia, who spent many years wondering what had happened to the baby
boy she remembered from her childhood.
A few years later Vanda, then aged 10,
had found her mother's diary, which revealed that she had given birth to a son
she named Kenneth - but it was only after her mother's death in 1990 that Vanda
learned from a cousin that the child was the product of an affair. Like so many
children born in such circumstances he had been put up for adoption, as a
result of which Kenneth had become John Best - but when a researcher working
for the ITV series Long Lost Family
eventually tracked him down it transpired that, following gender reassignment
surgery, John was now Debbie.
So Vanda never found her long-lost
brother - but half a century later, she found a new sister! You can read more
about this unusual story here.
English tree undergoes
ultimate pedigree collapse
As everyone knows, the number of
ancestors in our family tree doubles with every generation, so if we go back 10
generations we have 1024 ancestors, whilst there are 1048576 when we go back 20
generations, and over 1 billion if we go back 30 generations - roughly 1000
years.
There's only one problem with this simple
calculation - there weren't that many people living 1000 years ago! The
discrepancy is explained by the phenomenon of pedigree collapse, which occurs
when cousins marry - because cousins have shared ancestry their offspring will
inevitably have fewer distinct ancestors than the calculations would suggest.
In practice there will be many of our
ancestors who unwittingly married distant cousins - and a few, no doubt, who
knowingly married close cousins. This means that not only do we not have as
many ancestors as a simple calculation would suggest, we're related to many of our
ancestors multiple times - which means that we're also related to many of our
cousins multiple times.
The ultimate pedigree collapse is of a tree
where every living descendant is descended from one individual from nearly 2000
years ago - I'm talking, of course, about the English elm (Ulmus procera). According to a 2004 paper
published in Nature
every English elm tree is descended from a single example which was taken by
the Romans from Italy to Iberia, and then brought to Britain for the purpose of
supporting and training vines. The trees don't produce fertile seeds, instead spreading
by means of root suckers.
Note:
it's probably the fact that English elms were clones that caused them to be so
susceptible to Dutch elm disease.
A street-full of
cousins GUEST ARTICLE
Alan Craxford,
a long-term member of LostCousins recently wrote to tell me about the
fascinating results of his research into the inhabitants of a single street -
and he kindly agreed to turn it into an article, one which I suspect you'll
find not only interesting but instructive and inspirational!
Given my somewhat unusual surname I think I am
aware where most of my ilk fit into the family tree. However I have always been
rather intrigued by the fact that our long term ancestral home, Gretton, Northamptonshire, has a street which bears the
family's name. No-one is quite sure when Craxford Lane
was first so called, or why the family were so honoured. It only
appears by name in the censuses of 1891 and 1911 where there are about 20
cottages, and in the latter census there were no residents named Craxford.
It has been said
(*1) that In a population of between three and
five hundred people, after six generations or so there are only third cousins
or closer to marry. During most of human history, people have lived in small,
isolated communities of about that size, and have in fact probably been closer
to the genetic equivalent of first cousins, because of their multiple
consanguinity. In nineteenth-century rural England, for instance, the radius of
the average isolate, or pool of potential spouses, was about five miles, which
was the distance a man could comfortably walk twice on his day off, when he
went courting- his roaming area by daylight. The bicycle extended the radius to
twenty five miles1
I had seen hints of this effect in previous
researches around the Welland Valley. I wondered
about the 'neighbourliness' of Craxford Lane. The
purpose of this study was to investigate the links and liaisons between the
families living in Craxford Lane and test out this
theory in microcosm. To say I was unprepared for the
results would be a profound understatement. I traced the ancestry of each
household back over the census returns and the parish records through about
seven generations and about 150 years (1750 - 1911). This showed that 19 of the
20 households were indeed related by blood or marriage (or both) - and all of
them showed some relationship to the Craxford family.
The
most obvious linkages were the straightforward marriages between unrelated
families. Close behind numerically were the consanguineous unions: marriage between second and third cousins were quite common
and one first cousin marriage was also found.
Beyond that the level of degrees and removals between marriage pairs
became less clearly defined. There were several instances were partners to a
marriage had been married before or who married again after a death. There was
one woman who married her dead husband's brother. We then came across the
phenomenon of "affinal relinking" where there
may be one or more intermediate marriages between the union of members of same
family tree. In an attempt to assess these relationships in greater depth we
have paid particular attention to female lines of descent and to what became of
the quite large number of illegitimate children born within these families.
There
were 16 distinct surnames residing in Craxford Lane
in 1911. There were a similar number (although the list not completely
matching) of surnames whose family lines figured in the relationships. The
results of this study have been written into an article entitled "Craxford Lane: A Genealogy" which can be found on the Extended Craxford Family Website.
I am not sure how
many family history hobbyists either ignore or do not realise the extent of
this aspect in their own family tree. I am not sure
what further research methods there are, short of laborious cross checking of
archive documents to tease out these relationships and it is certainly not easy
to present them in an easily readable form. This study which applies to just one street
confirms Professor Fox's assertion but it is equally valid if extended to the
village as a whole. It applies to other centres I have studied including,
perhaps more surprisingly, a family population we found on Victorian Tyneside
where North and South Shields could almost be considered a single entity which
happens to have a river running through it.
1 Robin Fox, Professor of Social Arthropology,
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA in:
Shoumatoff, Alex: The Mountain of Names: A history of the Human Family with introduction
by Robin Fox; Kodansha International, New York, USA (1995). ISBN 1-56836-071-1
Note:
after submitting this article Alan sent me a link to this page
on his website which shows the 5 different ways in which two cousins were
related. It'd particularly interesting in the light of the articles which
follow.....
Endogamy and the
implications for DNA matching
My dictionary defines endogamy as "the custom forbidding
marriage outside one's own group", but genetic genealogists use the term
more broadly. For example, the ISOGG wiki page on the topic begins with these
sentences:
"Endogamy is the practice of marrying within the
same ethnic, cultural, social, religious or tribal group. In endogamous
populations everyone will descend from the same small gene pool. People will be
related to each other in a recent genealogical timeframe on multiple ancestral
pathways and the same ancestors will, therefore, appear in many different
places on their pedigree chart. Endogamy can be the result of a conscious
decision or cultural pressure to marry within the selected group but also
occurs as a result of geographical isolation (for example, in island
communities).
"Examples of endogamous groups include Ashkenazi
Jews, Acadians, Polynesians, Low German Mennonites, the Amish, people from many
Arab countries, people from Newfoundland and people from many islands. Endogamy
is also a problem in early Colonial American populations."
Over time the gene pool of an endogamous
population is likely to become more and more restricted as a result of variant
genes dying out, and this, together with the inevitable cousin marriages, will
make genetic matches appear closer than they really are.
However, just because you and a DNA
cousin share more DNA than would normally expected doesn't necessarily mean
that your common ancestors came from an endogamous population. This is because
it's inevitable that the DNA cousins we find will, on average, tend to be more
closely related to us genetically than we might expect. Why? Well, if you look
back at the article How far back is
our common ancestor? in my last newsletter
you'll see that most of the DNA cousins we find are so distantly-related that,
but for random variations in the way that DNA is inherited, the relationship
wouldn't be detectable at all.
In-breeding in the
Royal Family
In the June issue of Your Family History Anthony Adolph wrote a very interesting article
about the Queen's African ancestry. We're used to the Royal Family being
described as German - but African?
It seems that Queen Charlotte, the wife
of George III, (and Queen Elizabeth's 4G grandmother) is her closest connection
to Africa - she is believed to be descended from Madragana
Ben Aloandro, daughter of the Moorish ruler of the
Algarve, not just once, but 7 times.
Anthony Adolph also argues that most Europeans
have African ancestors within the past millennium, so perhaps the Royal Family
is more representative of the average Briton than we think? Even I have German
ancestors - though not quite so many as Prince Charles, judging from this Telegraph article
which was published in June 2015.
It has long been said that people are
more likely to change their spouse than their bank, and the latest statistics
confirm just how set in our ways we are in the UK. Only 1.05 million people
moved their bank account in the last 12 months, fewer than in the preceding
year - and this despite the incentives on offer!
The bank to gain most customers as a
result of switching was Halifax (who offer a £100 incentive), but Nationwide
Building Society - who I bank with - were a very close second. Nationwide offer
several accounts, most of which are totally free, and all come with handy
benefits - plus, if you ask an existing accountholder (like me) to recommend
you we'll each get a bonus of £100. You can see the range of accounts that
Nationwide offer here
- if you're interested in switching drop me an email so that we can both
benefit.
I'm a great believer in life-long
learning, and it's not too late to join me and tens of thousands of others on the
free online course GENEALOGY: RESEARCHING YOUR FAMILY TREE at the FutureLearn site (find out more
and sign up here).
Whilst the course is designed to be suitable for beginners, we can all benefit
from reprising the basics - LostCousins members who participated in the first
presentation gave me some very positive feedback.
If you prefer the face to face approach,
and live within striking distance of London, the Society of Genealogists is organising
a 'Family History Getaway' during the first week of September. Entitled 'Victorian
London Family & Social History' it includes 15 lectures over 5 days from a
highly-experienced list of speakers headed by Else Churchill and Michael Gandy
- there's also time set aside on each day for your to
pursue your own research in the famous SoG library.
Although the course is open to non-members you might want to consider joining
the society in order to benefit from the substantial discount for members.
You can find out more here
(there are only 19 places remaining as I write, so don't delay).
Finally, a reminder to
update your My Details page to
indicate whether or not you've taken an autosomal DNA test, or are considering
it. This information will be
invaluable for your cousins, because it's by using the test results from known
cousins that we can maximise our chances of finding new cousins.
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
That's all for now - I'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
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