Newsletter 28th
July 2021
Developments at the GRO? BREAKING NEWS
Sometimes the old ways are the best
Another way to search at Ancestry
Findmypast plan major Scottish records
launch
A very good time to
research your family tree
It ain't what you do (it's the way that you do it)
The LostCousins
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Developments
at the GRO? BREAKING NEWS
Five
years I was one of a number of representatives from
the world of genealogy who attended informal meetings with staff from the
General Register Office, some of which included the Deputy Registrar General (who
actually runs the organisation the Registrar General is just a figurehead).
The
good news is that I've been invited to attend another
meeting next month this time it's a virtual meeting, which is probably just
as well in the current circumstances. I don't know
what they're planning and, even if I did, I couldnt tell you. But these are some
of the things on my personal wish list:
- More flexible searching of the
historic birth and death indexes currently searches are limited to a
5-year period and you can't search without
entering a surname, nor can you use wildcards
- Online marriage indexes which
give the surname of the spouse (at the moment this
information is only provided after 1911); the names of the fathers and
witnesses would be a bonus
- Option to order PDFs of marriage
entries
- The ability to search specifically
for illegitimate births in the historic indexes
- The option of specifying a county
or multiple registration districts when searching the GRO's indexes
- Instant online access to the
GRO's historic registers (ideally with a subscription alternative)
- The option to order a local
certificate via the GRO
Of
course, the chances are that none of items I've listed
will be proposed so please don't be disappointed if your wish doesnt come true!
Sometimes the old ways are the best
When
a new resource becomes available we sometimes forget
the old way of doing things just look at how the availability of takeaway food
and ready meals has produced a generation that can't cook (and, perhaps more importantly,
can't pass that skill on to their children)!
It's the same with the GRO indexes of births and
deaths because the indexes at the GRO's own site have been recompiled from
the source registers with additional information included, it's tempting to
think that the indexes we used to use are redundant. That would be a big mistake
for a start, the modern indexes have been compiled from microfilmed copies of
the registers, making it more difficult for 21st century eyes to interpret Victorian
handwriting. By contrast, the clerks who compiled the contemporary quarterly
indexes would have worked from the original register pages,
and would have been more familiar than a modern transcriber with the
styles of handwriting.
But
it's not just about transcription errors whilst there's
information missing from the contemporary quarterly indexes that can now be
found in the modern indexes, such as the mother's maiden name for pre-1911
births, there are times when it works the other way round. For example, if the
name of the father of an illegitimate child was recorded in the register the
birth would be indexed twice, once under the father's surname and once under the
mother's surname.
Note:
it's important to differentiate between multiple register entries and multiple
index entries for the same register entry if two index entries refer to the
same register entry they'll show the same volume and page number..
For
example, when the birth of my great-grandmother was registered in 1842 the
names of both parents were recorded in the register, even though they weren't married and the entry was indexed twice, as you
can see from these FreeBMD search results for the page
on which her birth was registered:
Of
course, these entries don't appear together in the
quarterly index, which is strictly alphabetical the only place they appear
together is in the register held by the GRO, and the corresponding register
held locally. Neither of these registers can be viewed by members of the
public, but we can buy copies of the entries, either as PDF files or in the
form of certificates.
The
index entries for Emily Buxton and Emily Roper both relate to the same register
entry. However, when the GRO created their new indexes
the birth was indexed just once, under the surname of the father:
Had
that been how the birth was originally indexed I'd
never have found it it was only when I purchased the certificate that I found
out the name of the supposed father (and 15 years later I was able to confirm
his identity thanks to Ancestry DNA). Notice that the mother's maiden name isnt shown in the index.
Recently
I was contacted by a member who was unable to find her relative's birth in the new
GRO indexes. This was another illegitimate birth, as you can see from the FreeBMD search results below:
All
but two of those birth entries can be found in the new GRO indexes (though Botting
has become Bolting); the two which can't be found are:
Clearly
these relate to the same register entry, and the reason it appears with two
different surnames in the quarterly index must be because the father's name is
shown in the birth register, even though the parents weren't
married. You can see young Richard here in the 1871 Census:
All
Rights Reserved. Used by kind permission of Ancestry and The National Archives
Note
that Richard is shown as the grandson of the head of household, but there's no indication who his father was, though it seems
likely that he's the illegitimate son of one of the three unmarried daughters.
The 1881 Census confirms this:
All
Rights Reserved. Used by kind permission of Ancestry and The National Archives
Note
that Maria, who was unmarried in 1871, is now claiming to be a widow; she has
also knocked a couple of years off her age, but that's
hardly unusual.
Why
is there no entry for this child in the new GRO birth index? It may have been
indexed incorrectly unfortunately there is currently
no way to search the index without including a surname, and the fuzzy-matching
options won't pick up every misspelling.
Tip:
Findmypast have updated their birth indexes to include the Mother's Maiden Name
for most pre-1911 entries, so it's worth starting your search here if you're looking for multiple births
to the same parents, or need a more flexible search
than the GRO site offers.
Another way to search at Ancestry
If
you use the parish records at Ancestry, as I do, you may have found it
frustrating that the search form differs according to the record set. For example,
if you search the Staffordshire baptisms from 1813 onwards the form has lots of
fields, including:
You
probably won't need to use all of these fields, but if
the person you're searching for has a common surname you'll either want to
limit the number of results, or else make sure that the ones you're interested
in are near the top. The search above produces this manageable list of results:
To
the best of my knowledge I dont have ancestors from
Staffordshire. However I do have ancestors from Oxfordshire
but when I search the corresponding Oxfordshire records the options are much more
limited:
This
search produces a disappointingly short list of results:
Does
this mean that there were no John Smiths born in Oxfordshire
between 1848 and 1852? That seems most unlikely given how common the surname is.
The
reason, as LostCousins Forum member Pauline pointed out, is that most baptism
records don't include the date of birth you can see
this when you look at the Staffordshire results above. That's
why it made sense to use the Any Event field rather than the Birth
field an option that you don't have when searching the corresponding records
in Oxfordshire.
However,
if I remove the birth year and search the Oxfordshire baptisms again I get 1313 results, far too many even if I had the time
to look through page after page of results there's a good chance that my
befuddled brain would miss the very result I was looking for. What I really
need to be able to do is use the Staffordshire form to search the Oxfordshire
records
.
The
good news is that you can often cajole the Ancestry site into doing what you
want, and I'm going to describe a new way of doing it
that I discovered recently.
Each
record set at Ancestry is numbered, for example Oxfordshire, England, Church
of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1915 has been allocated the number 61057,
whilst Staffordshire, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms,
1813-1900 is 62292.
To
search the Oxfordshire records using the Staffordshire search form go to the
Staffordshire records and carry out the search you'd
like to perform in Oxfordshire. Now take a look at the
URL in the command line of your browser it'll look something like this (I've
highlighted the number of the record set in red):
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/62292/?name=john_smith&event=1850&count=50&event_x=2-0-0_1-0&father=john&father_x=1_1&mother=sarah&mother_x=1&name_x=p_1
Carefully
replace 62292 with 61057
and press the Enter (or Return) key on your keyboard then gaze in wonder at
the results:
Instead
of 1313 results, or none at all, we now have precisely
5 baptisms from the right period, and with the correct parents. It might seem a
bit technical, but its really simple in practice
all you have to do is exchange one 5-digit number for another.
Note:
in this particular case you can achieve the same results
by choosing Birth, Marriage & Death, including Parish from the main
Search menu and specifying Oxfordshire, England as the precise location. However,
this won't always work as well it all depends on
what information you're starting with so it's worth having the technique I've
described above as a standby.
Changing
the URL in the command line is a useful trick that you can also use when you're searching the censuses. When I looked up Richard Duddleston and his mother Maria in the 1871 and 1881 censuses
for the previous article I started by searching in
1871, then simply changed the date in the URL from 1871 to 1881 to repeat the
search in the next census:
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/categories/1871uki/?name=richard_duddleston&birth=1868&birth_x=1-0-0&count=50&name_x=p_ps
You
could accuse me of being lazy, but I like to think that I'm being more efficient
not only does it save me time, it reduces the load on
Ancestry's servers. If you want to try it out yourself, follow this link.
The
same trick works at Findmypast:
https://www.findmypast.co.uk/search/results?datasetname=1871+england%2C+wales+%26+scotland+census&firstname=richard&firstname_variants=true&lastname=duddleston&lastname_variants=true&yearofbirth=1868&yearofbirth_offset=2&sid=998
Again you can try it out yourself if you follow
this link.
Findmypast plan major Scottish records launch
On
Thursday 29th July Findmypast are holding a virtual launch for a major
collection of Scottish records I will update this article with information
about the records as soon as it becomes available.
UPDATE: Findmypast
have released an enormous collection of Scottish parish records, with more than 10 million entries.
You can find out more here.
Note:
some readers may be unaware that Findmypast is a Scottish-owned company they are
part of the DC Thomson group which is based in Dundee.
There's an excellent guide to tracing the service
records of Royal Navy officers on the Family History Federation website. Whilst
I dont have any ancestors who became officers I still found Ian Waller's article
a fascinating read you'll find it here.
For
most Britons the initials JCVI stands for one thing,
and one thing only the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which
has come to prominence during the current pandemic because of its role in
determining who gets what vaccine and when.
But
there's another JCVI in the US, and it's the J Craig
Venter Institute, named after the man who led the private sector project to
sequence the human genome. They're trying to determine
whether the remains purported to be those of Leonardo
da Vinci at Amboise Castle can be conclusively identified by comparing DNA extracted
from the remains with the DNA of Leonardo's living relatives. According to this
research
paper 14 male line descendants of Leonardo's family have been identified
it will be interesting to see the results of the DNA comparison in due course.
For an easier read see this CNN article.
Roots revisited
In
the 1970s Alex Haley's novel inspired many, especially African Americans, to research
their ancestry; a quarter of a century later Jen Reid decided to find out what
she could about here own ancestors. You can hear her story (or read a transcript)
at the BBC Sounds website.
A
very good time to research
your family tree
Wherever
you are in the world there's one activity that's not
only healthy but totally risk-free researching your family tree online. I expect
that like me, you've spent more time researching your
family history over the past year than you would have done in normal times
Up
against a 'brick wall'? Of course, you are in fact, you've
probably got dozens of them. The further you get back the more lines there are to
research, so the more 'brick walls' you'll have. A
beginner might think it strange that the most experienced genealogists have the
most 'brick walls', but they'll learn soon enough!
With
so many 'brick walls' to tackle it's an impossible
task for one person, but it doesn't have to be that way all we need to do is
find people who can help, and the obvious candidates are fellow researchers who
are up against some of the same 'brick walls'. You might think that people like
that don't grow on trees, but actually they do and its
your tree that they're growing on!
Connecting
and collaborating with cousins may be the route to success, but how can you find
the cousins who are both experienced researchers and willing collaborators? Simply
complete your My Ancestors page by entering as many as possible of your
relatives from 1881.
It
ain't
what you do (it's the way that you do it)
A
common refrain that I hear from LostCousins members is "I've been a member
for X years, but I've only found Y lost cousins", where X is a large number
and Y is often only 1.
If
truth be told there are no rewards for long service at LostCousins other than
the pleasure of reading this newsletter, of course. Someone who joins today and
enters Z relatives from the 1881 Census is likely to make just as many matches
as someone who joined 10 years ago, but has only entered
the same number of relatives.
I
was reminded of this by an email I received a few days ago from a very supportive long-time member who mentioned that sadly she'd
only had one match so far, which was with someone who had joined much more
recently. Interestingly the new member had 12 matches to her one but when I
looked closely I soon realised this was because he had
entered 12 times as many relatives from the 1881 Census.
Both
had entered the same number of direct ancestors the big difference was in the
number of relatives from branches. It's really
important to remember that ALL of our living cousins are descended from the
branches of our tree, so the best way to connect with them is to track each branch
and twig through to 1881, then let the LostCousins system bridge the gap
between 1881 and 2021.
The
second burial register entry below intrigued Anthea so much that she asked me
whether I'd seen anything similar before:
Image
© Welsh Archive Services; used by kind permission of Findmypast
I
haven't seen the term 'Hullabaloo' in a register
before but perhaps someone reading this has? My guess is that the incumbent didnt approve of, and perhaps didn't understand, the
ceremony its certainly quite a contrast with the previous entry!
Note:
in case you're having trouble deciphering the name of
the parish, it's Yspytty Ystwyth. I
wonder how many that would score at Scrabble?
Many thanks to everyone who wrote in to express their
appreciation about my peony article. While Peter maintains terrific momentum for
regular writing, sadly my novice enthusiasm nose-dived as the fine weather
turned to heavy rain and battalions of slugs came out to destroy much of my hard
work. Worse still, when I asked a number of gardening friends
"how do you really deal with slugs?" I discovered that they use a
range of truly barbaric methods which are too nasty to speak of. The more humane
slughelp.com is
much better and usefully lists slug-resistant plants.
But
enough about slugs this month I've decided to write
about roses, and you'll find my article here
(Peter said it was a little too
long to include in the body of the newsletter). I hope you enjoy it as much as
you enjoy your gardening Siβn.
Some LostCousins members have reported that they didnt
receive the email notifying them that the last issue (14th July) had been
published if you are one of them please accept my apologies and follow this link to see
what you missed.
By the way, my decision to start that newsletter
with a long article about England's COVID-19 strategy was always going to be a controversial
one. I'd avoided commenting on the pandemic in the two
previous issues, but I knew that England's decision to open up despite having more
daily cases than any other country in the world was confusing not just for those
of us who live in the UK, but also for those around the world who have cousins
in the UK (as all readers of this newsletter do).
The vast majority of the emails I received in response were from members who were greatly
appreciative of the clear way I explained what was happening, and why. However,
there were a handful who felt that the content was inappropriate for a family history
newsletter, and in one sense they were right the mainstream media should
really have grasped the nettle themselves.
What has happened over the past week has confounded
all the pundits instead of continuing to rise, case numbers in the UK have fallen
quite dramatically. There seem to be three key factors: the hot weather, the
start of the school holidays, and changes in behaviour the first two are the
easiest to predict! This article
by the BBC's Head of Statistics, Robert Cuffe, offers some useful insights well
worth a read whether you live in the UK or not. (Robert is a statistician, not
a journalist; he is also a statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical
Society, the organisation to which I've belonged for
the past 30 years.)
One
of my favourite meals is also one of the easiest to cook just so long as you
have the ingredients in your fridge or freezer. Start by thinly slicing
a piece of peeled ginger root into batons 2 or 3 inches long; repeat the process
with a couple of red chillies, then shred a handful of spring onions, using the
green parts as well as the bulbs.
Put
these to one side whilst you prepare some sea bass fillets (one per person is sufficient,
and quite expensive enough); score the skin a few times so that the flesh shows
through, then fry in a little hot oil (I use sesame oil for this dish) until
the skin is brown and crispy and the flesh is almost cooked. Carefully turn the
fillets over and fry for a minute longer, then put them in the oven to stay
warm.
Now
add the ginger and chilli batons to the frying pan; when the ginger is cooked
add the spring onions and a little rice wine vinegar (if available); allow to
sizzle for a minute or so.
I
serve the fish on a bed of rice with the ginger, chilli, and onions scattered
on top; add a sprinkling of soy sauce if liked. Last night I experimented with fried
mushrooms and steamed sugar-snap peas as vegetable accompaniments the latter
were definitely more successful than the former, both
visually and taste-wise; I might try water chestnuts next time. But a very tasty
and enjoyable meal nonetheless!
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 2021 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? To link to a specific
article right-click on the article name in the contents list at the top of the
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