Newsletter
- 28th July 2017
Welsh tithe records free online
More London
records at Ancestry
Somerset parish records at Findmypast
Returned from the Front project tracks WW1 grave markers
Last chance to save at Findmypast ENDS SUNDAY
Get a free LostCousins upgrade
Are you descended from St Bernard? Do you have any Afghans in your
family tree?
DNA: the Bad, the Good, and the not so Ugly
Save on DNA tests at Ancestry ENDS THURSDAY
Review: Herding Hemingway's Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
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July) click here; to find earlier articles use the
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Welsh tithe records free
online
Last September I mentioned
the Cynefin project at the National Library of Wales
aims to repair and digitise around 1,200 tithe maps and transcribe over 30,000
pages of index documents with the help of a small army of diligent volunteers.
I'm delighted to say that the project is
complete, and the records can be found here,
at a new website set up by the National Library of Wales. Best of all, it's
free!
Those of us with ancestors from England
aren't so fortunate - but most of the surviving records for English counties are
online at The Genealogist (you can save £20 on a Diamond subscription if you
follow this link), and
many of the maps are now in colour. But there are more than 500 tithe maps for
Cheshire online at the website of Cheshire Archives & Local Studies which are free - you'll find them here.
More London
records at Ancestry
Ancestry's collaboration with the London
Metropolitan Archives continues with the release of two new datasets, with 268,000
and 178,000 records respectively:
London,
England, Poor Law School District Registers, 1852-1918
London,
England, School Admissions and Discharges, 1912-1918
Somerset parish records
at Findmypast
Last week Findmypast added nearly 5
million transcribed records for the county of Somerset, including 2.1 million
baptisms, 250,000 banns, over 1 million marriages, and 1.5 million burials. The
following links will take you direct to the relevant search pages:
The years of coverage are given by parish
for the baptism index, but not for the other indexes.
Returned from the Front project tracks WW1
grave markers
We're all familiar, even if only from
photographs, with the Portland stone memorials that are massed in seemingly
endless rows and columns in war cemeteries - but they weren't the first grave
markers. Typically soldiers who were killed were buried in small local
cemeteries, their graves marked with simple wooden crosses - and some 10,000 of
them were sent to the soldiers' families after the war.
The Returned from the Front project aims
to track down the surviving markers - you can read more about it here and also in this BBC News article.
My wife recently came across the papers
that her father was given when he left the Royal Navy just after the end of the
war - I was quite surprised to see how much information there was. Amongst the 4
foolscap pages of form S.459 were his personal details, a list of all the ships
he served on with the start and end, annual assessments of his character and
efficiency, each signed by the captain of the ship on which he was serving,
plus swimming qualifications and other examinations passed, medals, good
conduct badges awarded, and a schedule of time forfeited (thankfully blank).
Because he was a Signalman there was
also a separate form S.1246, also 4 foolscap pages, with his examination record
(including the scores on each part of each qualification), and spaces for other
information, most of which were blank in his case.
If your father or grandfather served in
the Royal Navy during World War 2 have you inherited similar documentation (and
how much does it differ from the service record held by the Navy)? I'd be
interested to hear from readers who have made similar discoveries, or who can
shed more light on these documents.
Last chance to save at
Findmypast ENDS SUNDAY
At Findmypast.co.uk you can save on 12 month Britain and World subscriptions; at Findmypast.com
(the US site) you can save on Premium subscriptions. All of
these subscriptions include the 1939 Register, probably the most
important British release since the 1911 Census.
This offer isn't exclusive to
LostCousins, but you can support LostCousins when you use the following links:
Get a free LostCousins
upgrade
Right now there are two ways you can get
a free LostCousins subscription, worth up to £12.50 - one is by winning it in
my Summer Competition (you'll find full details here);
the other is by purchasing a new Findmypast subscription using one of the links
above - just make sure that when you click the link you can see the words 'LostCousins'
on the browser command line when you arrive at the Findmypast site.
(If
you don't see those words check that you haven't disabled tracking in your
browser - and ask me for help if that doesn't solve the problem.)
To claim your free subscription forward
to me the email receipt that Findmypast will send you (you can use any of the
LostCousins email addresses, including the one I wrote from to tell you about
this newsletter). Please make a note of the precise time of your
purchase in case the email doesn't arrive - I must have that time to confirm
your entitlement. Your LostCousins subscription will run from the date of your
Findmypast purchase unless you already have a subscription, in which case I'll
extend it by 12 months.
Are you descended from St
Bernard? Do you have any Afghans in your family tree?
The BBC Watchdog programme recently
lived up to its name by checking out doggie DNA tests, as you can see from this
exposé
(you probably won't be able to see this clip if you live outside the UK, but
it's well worth having a go).
DNA: the Bad, the Good, and the
not so Ugly
THE BAD
Ever since I started writing about DNA
more than 10 years ago I've had to balance the good against the bad - and for a
long time the bad side seemed to be winning. It wasn't that DNA tests couldn't
be useful to family historians, it was the fact that the marketing claims made
by the companies selling the tests were frequently overblown.
Thankfully many of the companies selling
tests of dubious value, or using questionable marketing techniques to sell
over-priced tests, have fallen by the wayside. Recently the BritainsDNA
group of companies stopped taking orders - some of their tests may have been
useful, but they were over-priced and over-hyped. Debbie Kennett, genealogist,
DNA enthusiast, Honorary Research Associate at University College London, and
long-time member of LostCousins wrote on Twitter "They had what was a good
test in its day but ruined their reputation with over the top marketing."
To add to the confusion
it's not just as simple as Y-DNA, mtDNA, and atDNA - just because a test looks at (say) Y-DNA doesn't
mean that the results it generates can be compared against all other Y-DNA
tests. For example, if you’re male and take an atDNA
test with some companies it will provide some results from your Y-DNA - but you
wouldn't be able to compare those results against those of potential cousins
who have taken a standalone Y-DNA test.
Technical
note: the two are incompatible because the chips used for atDNA
testing look at SNPs (changes in individual DNA letters) whereas Y-DNA tests
look at STRs (short segments of DNA that are repeated many times).
Similarly, a DNA test that is marketed
as a paternity test, or one that is used by police forces, won't be compatible
with genealogical DNA tests.
Even today the marketing of most DNA
testing companies can be misleading, because it tends to focus on ethnicity -
which for most family historians reading this newsletter is an unhelpful concept.
Even if the ethnicity estimates are correct, they're telling us where our
ancestors were likely to have been a couple of thousand years ago, which is
well outside the range of records-based genealogy - on other words it's
unlikely to help us knock down any 'brick walls'.
Technical
note: although all of our DNA is inherited from our ancestors, we don't
inherit DNA from all of our ancestors - in fact we only inherit DNA from a
small minority of them (see this article
by geneticist Graham Coop for more information). A DNA test can only tell us
about our genetic ancestors, those from whom we have inherited DNA.
For those of us who live in Britain, or
are of British origin, the ethnicity estimates are virtually meaningless
because of the migration that has taken place over the past 2000 years. Where
the results start to be of interest is when they look at where our ancestors
were a few centuries ago, and that's why the test from Living DNA, and - to a
far lesser extent - Genetic Communities at Ancestry are more useful.
So please don't write to me querying the
ethnicity estimates that you've been provided with by Ancestry, or Family Tree
DNA, or 23andMe - as far as I'm concerned they're
meaningless, so there's no way I can make them more meaningful for you!
Tip:
the Living DNA sale is continuing - you'll find more
details and links to offers here.
Although it's too early to say how accurate the breakdowns they provide are,
there are two key advantages for those of us with British ancestors. One is the
higher resolution they offer - they break down the British Isles into 21 areas,
some as small as a single county; the other is the timescale
THE
GOOD
After all that doom and gloom, here's
what's good about DNA - and why it is incredibly exciting. Very simply, it can
lead you to answers that you can't or won't find in written records.
How does it do this? In much the same
way as LostCousins, but instead of matching you to cousins who have found the
same relative on the census, it matches you to cousins who share some of your
DNA. Another difference between LostCousins and autosomal DNA testing is that
whilst at LostCousins you get a small number of matches, but you always know
how you're related to the cousins you find, with DNA you get large numbers of
matches, and it's hardly ever obvious how you're connected to your DNA cousins.
In a future article (hopefully in the
next newsletter), I'm going to set out the key techniques that I use to sort
through the thousands of DNA matches that I have and figure how I'm connected
to some - not all - of my DNA cousins. If you've already got your results but
aren't sure what to do next, that's the article to look out for.
If you haven't tested yet, my advice is
to start by testing with Ancestry
- not because they're the cheapest, but because they have by far the biggest
database of autosomal DNA results (it was 4 million, but looking at the rate
that I'm getting new matches I suspect it's now well over 5 million).
Tip:
there's currently a sale on Ancestry DNA tests in the UK and some other
countries - see the article below for the latest information.
THE
NOT SO UGLY
If we inherit our looks from our parents
- and without a doubt there are similarities between parent and child in most
families - then those traits must somehow be encoded in our genes. Last week a
research paper was published
which identifies links between facial characteristics and specific genes (it's
a preprint, which means it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet).
Wouldn't it be wonderful if one day it
was possible to create 3D-representations of our ancestors from their DNA -
assuming, of course, that we had samples of their DNA in the first place? This
research certainly seems to be a step in that direction.
Note:
there's another reason why this paper is of interest to me - one of the authors
is a DNA cousin of mine!
Save on DNA tests at
Ancestry ENDS THURSDAY
There are currently big savings on DNA
tests at Ancestry - for example, at their UK site the cost is down from £79 to
£59 excluding delivery, which is £20 for the first kit, and £10 for each
additional kit ordered at the same time.
At the US site
the reduction is from $99 to $79 excluding sales tax and delivery, also a
useful saving; additional kits are just $69 each (you may also be able to get free
shipping by entering the code FREESHIPDNA).
Tip: you may need to log-out from
Ancestry in order to take advantage of the discounted prices; after logging-out,
click the link below a second time.
I can't see whether there are similar
offers at the Canadian and Australian sites, but I am including links so that
you can check yourself - I'll update this article based on the feedback from
readers. And remember, it's only when you use the links I provide that you'll
be supporting LostCousins.
Tip: some members who have bought
Ancestry's DNA test have been offered a discounted subscription afterwards -
will you be one of the lucky ones?.
|
SAVE £20 - ENDS THURSDAY 3RD AUGUST |
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SAVE AT LEAST $20 - ENDS THURSDAY 3RD AUGUST |
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???? |
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no sale at present |
Debbie Kennet spotted this wonderful
true story
in the Washington Post and shared it
on Twitter - it demonstrates how DNA testing, combined with good old-fashioned
research, makes it possible to solve mysteries that a generation ago would have
remained unsolved.
Review: Herding
Hemingway's Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work
Virtually all of the cells in our body (red blood
cells are an exception) contain a complete set of our DNA, the genetic
blueprint that defines who we are. There are 23 pairs of chromosomes
packed into each cell nucleus, and whilst the nucleus is smaller than the width
of even the finest human hair, if the DNA in any one nucleus was stretched out
in a straight line, rather than scrunched up (as it normally is), it would be
around 7ft in length.
In Herding
Hemingway's Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work, Kat Arney
sets out to tell - in less than 300 pages - the story of how our understanding
of genetics has developed over the past 60 years, since Watson & Crick
identified the structure of DNA. And amazingly, she does it without any
diagrams - forcing her to explain everything in words rather than leaving it to
the reader to figure things out for themselves.
I can't claim to have understood
everything that I read, but I did get to grips with most of it - at least at
the time I was reading it. How much of it has actually become
integrated into my knowledge is a different matter - I suspect I'll keep
dipping into the book to check my understanding of some of the topics!
How does one set of assembly instructions
generate so many different types of cell, and ensure that they all end up in
the right place? How can human beings, the most intelligent creatures on the
planet, manage with fewer genes than a water flea, or an apple? Why is so much
of our genome filled with junk that appears to have no function whatsoever? And
why haven't the promised health benefits come to pass - what has gone wrong?
Kat Arney deals with all of these
issues and many, many more - not always providing definitive answers, though, because
there still lots of unanswered questions. Indeed, answering one question often
leads to more unanswered questions, just as each 'brick wall' we knock down in
our family tree leads to at least two more.
This isn't a book for everyone - just as
I don't need to know what's under my car's bonnet in order to
drive it, you don't need to know precisely how DNA works in order to use it as
a tool in your research. But if, like me, you are insatiably curious, and want
to gain a better understanding of the science behind the jargon, or an
appreciation of just how much - or how little - the leading scientists really
know, then this book is a great way to extended your knowledge.
I managed to get a good-as-new hardback
copy of the book at a very good price from an Amazon Marketplace supplier
(although I had to wait for it to arrive from the US), but it's also available
as a Kindle book or as a paperback. As usual you'll be supporting 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
I had some interesting responses to the
puzzle in my last newsletter:
"can you tell me who was born a Marquis, became a Knight, ended up
an Earl, but is best known as a Lord? Oh, and he also had a recipe named after
him....."
Several readers plumped for the Duke of
Wellington or the Earl of Sandwich, although neither of them fitted all of the facts, as they would have discovered had they
done a little more research.
The clue was, of course, the word
'Marquis' - in England this spelling of the title is usually only seen on pub
signs, notably the Marquis of Granby
(it is said that he has more pubs named after him than anyone else). The more
normal spelling is 'Marquess' - but a Marquess is ranked more highly than a
Baronet or an Earl, so it would be very unusual for someone to end up with a
lower-ranked title than the one he was born with.
Since 'Marquis' is clearly not a title,
it must be a surname - and the most famous person to bear that surname was
Frederick James Marquis, knighted in 1935, created a Baron in 1939, and finally
made an Earl in 1956. However he is best known as Lord
Woolton, and the recipe is, of course Lord
Woolton Pie, a vegetable dish created during the Second World War by the
head chef at the Savoy Hotel, and recommended by the Ministry of Food as a
nutritious meal at a time of rationing.
I'm glad to say that most of the entries
were correct - although since only a dozen or so readers submitted an entry
it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the perspicacity of the readership as a whole! Perhaps the rest of you were focusing on winning
the autograph of Queen Mary which is the first prize in my Summer
Competition?
One reader had a bit of an advantage over
the rest of you - Philip told me "Lord Woolton is on (the edge) of my
family tree, being the husband of my grandmother's cousin. My grandmother used
to say during the war that although her cousin was the Minister of Food she could
not even get an extra pat of butter!"
Here in Essex the summer weather has
veered from one extreme to the other, with temperatures well into the 30s at some times, and heavy rain at others - and this could well
explain why the blackberries are both earlier this year and rather plumper than
usual. Hopefully they'll make up for our poor crop of rhubarb, which was ended
by the dry hot weather in June.
This year I once again resisted the
temptation to harvest elderflowers since last year's Blackberry &
Elderberry jam (with a hint of lemon) was a great success - but the elder trees
in our garden are mostly in shady positions, so I won't be able to start harvesting the
berries for a few weeks yet. We get very few blackberries in
our garden - the brambles tend to grow in places with too little water and/or
too little sun - but there are plenty growing wild along the footpaths and
bridleways.
I've just noticed that Findmypast
now show the number of records in each dataset when you use the A to Z of record sets;
I know I'm going to find this really useful, and I suspect you will too.
There's lots more that I would
have liked to include in this newsletter but I ran out of steam… however
there's always the next issue!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2017 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