Newsletter
- 20th June 2015
Join our
£3 million BMD certificate bonanza! COMING SOON!
Adoption
group criticises government
Get a Findmypast
World subscription for peanuts SAVE OVER 90%
Woman
digs up dead dad to prove that he wasn't her father
Why you
should test your DNA now
Save
10% on Family Finder tests ENDS SUNDAY
Michelle
loses her dad - but finds her mum
Genealogy
makes sense in hospices
Don't
believe everything you read
Site unavailable? Try the Internet Archive
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 5th June) click here, for an index to articles from 2009-10
click here, for a list of articles from 2011
click here and for a list of articles from
2012-14 click here. Or use the customised Google search below
(that's what I do):
Whenever possible
links are included to the websites or articles mentioned in the newsletter
(they are highlighted in blue or purple and underlined, so you can't miss
them). If one of the links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're
using adblocking software - you need to make the
LostCousins site an exception (or else use a different browser, such as
Chrome).
To go to the main LostCousins website click the
logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a member, do join -
it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you whenever there's a new edition
of this newsletter available!
Join our £3 million BMD
certificate bonanza! COMING SOON!
I calculated this week that, between us,
LostCousins members own well over 300,000 BMD certificates - which would cost
£3m to buy at the current price of £9.25 each.
In reality, the figure must be far
higher - I've done my calculations based purely on the boxes that members have
ticked when entering relatives on their My
Ancestors page, and I know that even I haven't indicated all of the certificates
I own. This information is in the optional part of the Add an Ancestor form:
Until now the only person who could see
the certificate information has been the person who entered it, but from next
month you'll be able to see which certificates are held by your cousins (and
other members you've been matched with), so you'll be able to ask for copies if
you don't already have them in your collection, or volunteer copies of
certificates that you do have, but which your relative doesn't.
IMPORTANT: if for any reason you don't
want the other members you've been matched with to know which certificates you
hold for the relatives you've both entered, you'll need to delete the ticks
before this new feature goes live next month. If there are a large number I can
do it in your behalf.
I hope that, like me, you'll take the
opportunity to update your My Ancestors
page to include certificates you hold but which aren't already shown: to amend
an existing entry simply click on the person's name, tick the relevant box and
click Save - it only takes seconds. It's very
much in your interests to provide this information, because members you're
matched with are much more likely to respond promptly if they know that you
hold birth, marriage, or death certificates for some of their relatives.
When this new feature launches the
information will be displayed on the My
Contact page for the relationship - for example, here's what one of my
cousins will see:
There are, of course, many websites
where you people can post information about certificates that they hold, but
anyone who has tried them will know that it's time-consuming to search and the
chance of finding what you want is very low - often less than 1 chance in 1000
(whereas the chance of finding a match when you enter a relative from the
England 1881 Census on your My Ancestors
page is fifty times greater, at 1 in 18).
With this new LostCousins feature the
information is right in front of you, because the first thing you do when you
make a match is to look at the My Contact
page - so there's no time wasted. To display the My Contact page for a relationship simply click on the name or
initials of the person you've been matched with.
Note:
if you're worried that scanning or copying certificates might not be legal, please
see this recent article.
Adoption group
criticises government
I don't usually quote from a press
release, but this one was written by a LostCousins member who I have
corresponded with for many years:
Members of
the Descendants of Deceased Adopted Persons (DAP) Group have been waiting more
than 10 years for the Government to correct an anomaly in the adoption
legislation that excluded them from accessing original birth information if
their adopted relative [usually parent] had died without asking to see this
information. We were elated when the Government announced in December 2013 that
the law would change and that descendants would have the right to apply for an
intermediary service to enable them to get the information they were looking
for.
The
Regulations came into effect in October 2014, but were withdrawn due to a
technical error which meant that the Registrar General was unable to disclose
the original birth information to the intermediary agency, which was necessary
to effect the clear intentions of Parliament. DAP was
advised that it was a simple matter to correct the wording of the Regulations
and that this would be attended to in January 2015. The Adoption Division at the Department for Education, assured the DAP Group that they were making this
a priority and were keen to get the new regulation laid down.
The ‘goal
posts’ kept moving. The latest date given for the amendment to the Regulations
was JUNE 2015, but it is very hard to believe that this will ever be resolved,
when yet another delay has been announced by the DfE.
They said that ‘new issues’ had been identified and due to other urgent
priorities it had been decided to postpone laying the amendment to SEPTEMBER.
Why have these new issues come up at the ‘11th hour’ and why were they not
evident before? What relevance do they have to the matter in hand?
I share their frustration - this is just
the sort of thing that gives government a bad name. I raised this matter when I
encountered the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, last autumn - and still the
civil servants are vacillating, rather than implementing the wishes of
Parliament.
I'll be attending the roadshow in London
on Thursday, as will at least two other LostCousins members. If you're going to
one of the earlier roadshows it would be most helpful to have your feedback
before Thursday.
Something I didn't mention in the last
newsletter was the closing date of the consultation - although it was in the consultation
document. You've got until 27th August to put the family historians side of the
case, so there's plenty of time to consider what we learn at the roadshows.
I'll cover the key issues in this newsletter over the next two months, but it's
your own views that are most important.
Get a Findmypast World
subscription for peanuts SAVE
OVER 90%
This month Findmypast are offering NEW
subscribers the opportunity to get the first month of a World subscription for
just £1, $1, or 1€ !
It's a great opportunity for anyone who
hasn't tried the new Findmypast site before, and a great way to get access to
the British Newspaper Archive.
Follow the appropriate link below and
you won't be the only one who'll benefit - LostCousins will also receive
commission when you use these links (so please feel free to forward a link to
this newsletter to others who might be interested):
Findmypast.co.uk
- 1 month World subscription for £1
Findmypast.com
- 1 month World subscription for $1
Findmypast.ie
- 1 month World subscription for 1€
Findmypast.com.au
- 1 month World subscription for $1
Warning:
if you have subscribed to Findmypast previously you will probably see a message
that the discount code is no longer valid - please don't contact me when
this happens (remember, the offer is for NEW subscribers).
Of course, whilst the people I know at
Findmypast are a nice bunch of people, they're not doing this out of the
goodness of their heart - they’re hoping that some of you will continue to
subscribe after the first month (in which case you'll be charged the full
monthly rate). If you're not tempted to continue simply change the auto-renew
setting at the bottom of the Personal
Details page.
This week a BBC programme showed how
scientists can construct an image of a face based on genetic evidence from as
few as 20 genes. The surgeon who presented the programme sent a sample of her
saliva anonymously to the team in Belgium - and the results, which you can see here, are
pretty impressive.
Will it one day be possible to create
images of ancestors who died before the invention of photography - or for whom
no known photograph survives? The first problem would be finding a DNA sample -
after all, we can hardly dig up our ancestors - though it's not inconceivable
that we could reconstruct an approximation of their DNA from samples provided
by a large number of their descendants. Already at the free GEDmatch
site Tier 1 members (those who have donate $10 a month) can use a utility
called Lazarus to recreate the DNA of a close relative - or rather, the results
they would have got had they taken a Family Finder test.
Woman digs up dead dad
to prove that he wasn't her father
Last week the New York City Department
of Health was directed
by the Supreme Court of New York County to remove the name of Joseph Viola from
the birth registration of Nina Montepagani following
clear DNA evidence that he could not have been her father.
You might wonder why this lady was
prepared to dig up her supposed father's remains - she believes that her real
father was a doctor who died 5 years ago leaving a fortune of $100 million. I
imagine that the next step will be to dig him
up (and perhaps when they do, they'll discover that he has turned over in his
grave?).
Coincidentally I'm currently reading an
excellent book on illegitimacy (My
Ancestor Was a Bastard) which records that the mother of an
illegitimate child might have received as little as one shilling a week towards
its upkeep (and that only after taking the father to court). Talk about one
rule for the rich and another for the poor.....
Historic DNA was in the news for
another reason this week - analysis of the DNA of Kennewick Man, a 9000
year-old skeleton found in Washington State nearly 20 years ago, shows that his
DNA is more closely related to modern Native Americans (or Red Indians, as we
used to call them in the days before political correctness blunted our
vocabulary) than to any other people. Ironically this discovery would never
have been made if scientists had not won a 2004 lawsuit by arguing that
Kennewick Man was not closely-related
to the Native American tribes who wanted their 'ancestor' reburied.
Why you should test your
DNA now
I resisted testing my DNA for a long
time - and with good reason. Imagine that you are tossing a coin - it might
come up heads 10 times in a row, and it might come up tails 10 times in a row,
but it's 500 times more likely that in practice you'll get a mixture of heads
and tails. If you're playing a game where you only win when you get all heads
or all tails, the chances are you're going to lose.
It used to be much the same when it came
to DNA testing. Until a few years ago the only tests available were Y-DNA
tests, which track the direct male line, and mtDNA
tests, which track the direct female line - in other words they track the two
lines at the extreme edges of your family tree or pedigree chart. That's better
than nothing, but inevitably most of our 'brick walls' are somewhere in the
middle of our tree.
These days the main focus is on autosomal
(atDNA) tests, such as the Family
Finder test from
Family Tree DNA, because they can tell us about most of our ancestral lines. Why?
Because we inherit autosomal DNA from both parents: roughly half comes from
each parent, a quarter from each grandparent, an eighth from each
great-grandparent, and so on. To generate meaningful results means analysing
DNA at hundreds of thousands of locations, not tens or hundreds (as with
earlier tests), yet because the analysis takes place on a customised chip the
tests are cheaper.
Because atDNA
tests can match us with cousins from any of our ancestral lines the number of
results is inevitably far higher. For example, I only got one meaningful match
when I took a Y-DNA test and one when I took an mtDNA
test - but when the results of my Family Finder
test came through just under 3 years ago I got 123 matches. Inevitably most of
them were distant matches - because most of our cousins are distant cousins -
but I've continued to get more matches ever since. There were another 44 before
the end of 2012, 100 in 2013, 176 in 2014, and 95 already in 2015, including 12
so far in June!
Taking a DNA test isn't a substitute for
researching your ancestors using records - it complements traditional methods.
Paperwork can be missing or deficient - and sometimes our ancestors were 'economical
with the truth' - but DNA is always there, and it doesn't lie.
Why test now? Partly because the tests
are better and more affordable than ever before, but also because unlike
documentary evidence - which is usually preserved for posterity in record offices,
archives, and museums - DNA evidence gets diluted with every generation. If
only I'd got a sample from my 1st cousin twice removed Marjorie, who died last
year, I'd be in a much better position to solve the mystery of my great-great
grandmother - because she was Marjorie's grandmother, so around a quarter of
Marjorie's DNA came from her, whereas only about one-sixteenth of mine did.
Save 10% on Family
Finder tests ENDS SUNDAY
Another reason for testing now is
because until Sunday you can save 10% when you order a Family
Finder test from Family Tree
DNA - and if you're British the price is further reduced by the recent
recovery in the pound (the cost, including postage both ways, will be under £70
- which, considering you’re likely to get hundreds of matches is quite a
bargain, certainly compared to earlier tests).
DNA tests work much like LostCousins in
the sense that the more people who provide data the more matches there will be
- and you've also got the satisfaction of knowing that once you've taken your
test (or completed your My Ancestors
page) the matches will continue to come rolling in as others do their bit.
Once you've tested your own autosomal
DNA you'll probably want to persuade your cousins to test as well - because
whilst you'll each have inherited different parts of your common ancestors'
DNA. Even siblings inherit different parts of their parents' DNA - only
identical twins have exactly the same DNA (because they come from a single
egg).
Tip:
until Sunday you can also save on tests at Ancestry DNA when you follow this link. They're more expensive for those of us who live outside the US, but there are some advantages -
so, as I had already tested with Family Tree DNA, my brother has tested with
Ancestry. Please note that Ancestry do not offer DNA
tests in every country, but the list is expanding.
Michelle loses her dad
- but finds her mum
A year ago I reported
how a DNA test taken by LostCousins member Frances had helped 'dustbin baby'
Michelle Rooney to find her dad, a story that featured in the Daily Mirror. Sadly Michelle's father passed
away last year at the age of 84, but in February Michelle's birth mother
eventually saw her appeals, and the two of them finally met up, as this Daily Mirror article
relates.
Genealogy makes sense
in hospices
Last November I wrote how Derek
Hardwick, a volunteer at Saint Catherine's Hospice in Scarborough was helping
patients by researching their family trees in order put their life in context
and leave a priceless legacy for their families (you can read more about
Derek's work here).
At my request Derek has kindly put
together a guide for anyone else who wants to follow in his footsteps - you'll
find it here.
Don't believe everything
you read
There's an understandable tendency to believe
something that fits our view of the world, and discard anything that doesn't -
that's one reason why many of us prefer to read a particular newspaper.
However, it's one thing to fool
ourselves - it's different when we circulate information to others without
first checking that it's correct. For example, Adam Rutherford recently wrote
an article
for the Guardian in which he claimed
that he - and every other European - is descended from Charlemagne, and that
everyone alive in the 9th century who has descendants alive today is the
ancestor of every living European.
He might be right - but in quoting the
2013 paper by geneticists Peter Ralph and Graham Coop he left out the important
proviso "so long as populations have mixed sufficiently", so we
really don't know whether he's right or not. Of course, the Guardian article got picked up by other
writers, and unlike me they didn't go back to see what the original paper had
said - this is how incorrect information eventually ousts the truth, much as
online trees with glaring errors tend to multiply and overwhelm the few
well-researched examples.
Similarly I received an email this week
from one of my oldest and dearest friends suggesting that I boycott Tesco
because of the way that they are forcing dairy farmers to quit by paying low
prices for milk. True, Tesco have done a lot of bad things recently, but as it
happens this isn't one of them - like Sainsbury's they operate a scheme which
ensures that farmers make a profit on their milk. But there are plenty of
supermarkets which pay less - a lot less - for their milk, as you can see from
this article,
and they should really have been the target.
Here's another example of misleading
information - what was the date of the English Summer Bank Holiday, often
referred to as August Bank Holiday, in 1968? There are plenty of websites that
will purport to provide this information, but most of them are wrong.
Note:
a good share of what I write in this newsletter is designed to get you thinking
differently - and if I'm successful I suspect you'll find it quite
exhilarating!
Review: File Under Fear
Earlier this year I gave a glowing
review to File Under Family,
a novel by Geraldine Wall which introduced probate genealogist Anna Ames - the
author really brought the characters to life, and whilst it was more about
families than family history that didn't spoil my enjoyment in the slightest.
This month I treated myself to the
second part of the trilogy, File Under Fear - in which our heroine takes on a very
different case, one which puts her and her family in danger. The assignment
seems simple enough - but she soon discovers that the client has something
completely different in mind, and the mix of danger and discovery is as
finely-balanced as anything you'll find in one of Steve Robinson's mysteries. I
enjoyed the book so much that I did some sleuthing of my own to track down the
author - and I hope to feature an interview with her in the next newsletter.
If you're considering buying the book you
can support LostCousins by using one of these links (even if you end up purchasing
something completely different):
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
One word of warning - do read File Under Family first as it does a
very good job of introducing you to Anna's family and friends, who play an
important role in the second book.
According to a recent article
on the Daily Telegraph website,
nowadays only 1 couple in 5 has a traditional wedding cake on their special day
- a great shame, because for me there's nothing that can beat a rich
multi-tiered fruit cake. Queen Victoria's wedding cake was three yards in
circumference and weighed 300 pounds - even more rotund than Victoria in her
later years (a pair of her silk bloomers were
auctioned last year - they had a 52in waist!).
If you've got a yearning for Royal
wedding cake (and more dollars than sense), head off to Beverley Hills next
weekend where an auction house will be selling slices of cake from 5 Royal
weddings, including the marriage of Prince William to Kate, and Prince Charles
to Diana. You'll find more details - and pictures - here.
Site unavailable? Try the Internet
Archive
I recently recommended using the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive and
found myself using it again last weekend, since the Society of Genealogists
website was being updated, which meant I couldn't get access to the document I
was after - a guide
to the information recorded on birth, marriage, and death certificates for England & Wales.
The advantage of using links to archived
pages is that they'll still work, even if the website is reorganised, out of
action, or completely closed. The disadvantage is that you'll see the page as
it was, so it might be out of date - but that may not be a problem (it depends
on the type of information on the page).
My wife recently spotted a recipe in the
newspaper which was supposedly part of a 'balanced' diet, yet the ingredients
included 75g of butter and two teaspoons of oil - and this was breakfast for one
person. How a breakfast that delivers 100% of the recommended daily intake of
fat can be part of a balanced diet beats me!
Although interest rates haven't gone up
generally, I've noticed that recently I've been earning more on the money I've
lent via Ratesetter, one of
the leading peer-to-peer lending companies - for example, the rate on 1 month
lending has been as much as 3% pa, and I recently got 6.8% for 5 year money.
It's not completely risk-free, but because I only lend a small amount to each
person the risk is well-spread, and so far I haven't lost a penny. If you
register using this link and
subsequently lend £1000 or more you'll get a bonus of £25 (which represents an
extra 2.5% on a £1000 investment), but do first satisfy yourself that it's the
right investment for you - like investing in stocks and shares, peer-to-peer lending
isn't covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and what's right
for me won't necessarily be right for you.
Finally, I've just discovered that you
can currently get a one month Platinum subscription to Genes Reunited for just
£1 (the offer runs until the end of June). Whilst the range of records is much
more limited than at Findmypast, there's also the chance of finding new cousins
- I've made some very useful contacts through their site. Warning: at the end
of the first month your subscription will automatically renew at the full price
- unless you change the setting under Subscription
Details from 'Auto Renew On' to 'Auto Renew Off'.
Any updates or corrections will be
recorded here.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 Peter Calver
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives without
asking for permission in advance (though why not invite them to join
LostCousins instead - standard membership, which includes this newsletter, is
FREE?