Newsletter - 16th
March 2020
Society of Genealogists closed until further notice
BREAKING NEWS
Our ancestors faced a deadly virus - almost all
of them survived
Why was it called Spanish Flu?
RootsTech London
postponed by a year
Last chance to save on Ancestry DNA ENDS TUESDAY
Review: Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic
Asylums
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 12th March) click here; to
find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this paragraph
and the next (it searches ALL of the newsletters since February 2009, so you
don't need to keep copies):
To go to the main
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Society
of Genealogists closed until further notice BREAKING NEWS
This
afternoon I received the news that the Society of Genealogists is closing its London
premises to visitors until further notice.
To
find out more see the Coronavirus
Update page on the SoG website.
According
to Wikipedia "Living history is an activity that incorporates historical
tools, activities and dress into an interactive presentation that seeks to give
observers and participants a sense of stepping back in time."
But
for me, those two words have an alternative meaning. 'Living history' is also about
being alive at a time when we know that what's happening around us will feature
in the history books - I first had that feeling during the Suez Crisis (even
though I was just 6), and it returned at the time of Cuban Missile Crisis in
1962, then again a year later when President Kennedy was assassinated..
More
recently I experienced it on 17th January 1991: I was in California and
switched on the TV just as Operation Desert Storm launched - it was riveting,
but it was also scary, because nobody knew how it would play out..
And
we're definitely living history at the moment - the
novel coronavirus presents a threat to the world population that we will
overcome, but only by pulling together.
Unless
you live on a remote island and are totally self-sufficient
you're at risk of being exposed to the novel coronavirus that is sweeping
around the world. No doubt in the years to come there will be some who say that
governments should have done this or that - and some of them will be right, but
most of them will be ignoring the political realities.
I was born in 1950, a
few years after World War 2 ended, and it was hard not to admire the way that
the British population had come together in order to beat Hitler. (Of course, in
those days I knew nothing about my German ancestry, so I never considered the
possibility that it might have been much the same for civilians on the other
side.)
When
the 1939 Register for England & Wales was published a few years ago we were
reminded of the fact that many of the evacuees who were sent away to supposedly
safer areas were back home in early 1940. The first 8 months of the war were
known as the Phoney War, because much of the populace was unaffected by enemy
action. It ended on 10th May 1940 when Germany marched into Belgium,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
Ernest
Cawcutt's notebook, a wonderful contemporary document
that I 'rescued' from an auction last year records an air raid warning in
London on 24th June 1940, and lists sporadic bombing raids during August,
including a damaging attack on Croydon Airport on the evening of 15th August -
but the devastating bombing campaign against London, known as The Blitz, didn’t
begin until 7th September 1940, more than a year after Britain and France declared
war on Germany.
It
isn’t surprising that some became sceptical about the restrictions imposed on
the civilian population in the early months of the war, and that's what governments
are trying hard to avoid in the present crisis. Crack down too soon and there
is the risk that people will become cynical and careless; delay and people will
find a scapegoat rather than hold themselves accountable for their own
recklessness. If there was ever a time for us all to act responsibly and
encourage others to do the same, this is it!
Note:
as I was writing this article I saw the news that the
BBC is delaying the abolition of free TV licences for over-75 by two months,
from 1st June to 1st August - this is a step in the right direction.
Our ancestors faced a deadly virus - almost all of them
survived
Towards
the end of 1917 pathologists working at the British army camp at Étaples, close to Le Touquet in Northern
France, reported a deadly virus - later identified as a type of influenza. The
camp is thought by some to have been the epicentre of the Spanish Flu pandemic
that swept around much of world in 1918-19; others trace the outbreak to army
camps into the US; a third theory is that it came from China, and was carried
to the US by migrant labourers. Plus ça change!
Nobody
knows how many people contracted Spanish Flu, but a figure widely quoted is 500
million, out of a world population of around 1.8 billion. Nor does anyone know
how many people died as a result - the estimates range from 17 million to as
many as 100 million - but the chances are that it was more than were killed during
the Great War (that figure has been estimated as 20 million, about half of whom
were civilians - see this analysis
for more details).
And
yet we wouldn’t be here today if most of our ancestors hadn’t survived!
Why was it called Spanish Flu?
During
WW1 newspapers were subject to censorship, which made it difficult for the
media on both sides to report on how their allies were affected.
But
Spain was a neutral country, so newspapers were free to write about the
outbreak there - and that is said to be how it acquired the name 'Spanish Flu'.
King Alfonso XIII of Spain was one of the first high profile figures to
contract the disease - he recovered.
Note:
Alfonso was proclaimed King on 17th May 1886, the day of his birth - this
unusual timing came about because he was the posthumous son of Alphonso XII, who
had died the previous November, just before his 28th birthday. His mother,
Maria Christina of Austria served as regent until his 16th birthday. In 1906
Alfonso married Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenburg, granddaughter of Queen
Victoria, and niece of King Edward VII.
Searching
at the British Newspaper Archive the first mentions I could find of 'Spanish
Influenza' or 'Spanish flu' were in June 1918. On 1st June the Liverpool
Daily Post was telling readers that hundreds of thousands of people in
Madrid had contracted the disease, theatres were closed, and because of a lack
of staff only one telegraph office was still functioning.
Later
that month reports of the disease in the UK started to appear - the article on
the right (from the Dundee Evening Telegraph of Friday 28 June 1918) demonstrates
the level of concern.
Image
© D.C.Thomson & Co. Ltd.
Image created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD
You
can read more about Spanish Flu and the newspaper reports of the time in this
BBC article,
which focuses on Belfast - one of the first hotspots.
If
you are in the UK you might like to note that BBC2 will
be repeating a docudrama about the 1918 flu pandemic at 15 minutes after
midnight tonight (ie the early hours of Tuesday
morning). After that it will be available on BBC iPlayer. I haven't seen it yet
- I'm merely relaying the information.
In
early 1956 I was diagnosed with Scarlet Fever, a potentially fatal contagious
disease. I was kept at home for many months and though my parents had to send
regular samples for testing, the only times I went out the front door were to
visit Ilford Isolation Hospital for further tests. (Despite the name, the hospital
was located in Chadwell Heath, close to where we lived, so getting there was easy
- and luckily I was never required to be admitted.)
I
don't remember very much from that period - other than the process for the
collection of samples, which I'm not going to go into here! But I got through
that period of near isolation, and I'll get through this one.
Tip:
reports from Medical Officers of Health for London from 1848-1972 are available
free online when you follow this link
RootsTech
London postponed by a year
At
the end of February it was announced that RootsTech would
be coming back to London in 2020, following a successful inaugural event in
2019 - but just 2 weeks later the impact of COVID-19 on the genealogy world became
apparent when FamilySearch announced
that the event would be postponed until 2021.
Will
other events be cancelled or postponed? Undoubtedly there will be some that don’t
take place, but unless there is a government ban in force it will be up to individual
organisers.
Although
over the course of a year only a small fraction of the articles in this
newsletter are directly related to DNA testing, I know that some readers have
gained a different impression - perhaps because the three letters D-N-A readily
stand out when glancing through the table of contents.
Those
of you who have an aversion to DNA will be pleased to know that are
circumstances in which DNA testing is unwise - indeed, even Ancestry and 23andMe,
the two biggest providers of consumer DNA tests advise against it. You can read
what Ancestry say here.
It's
not a great secret but it’s something I haven’t bothered to mention in the past
because I imagined the likelihood of it occurring was so small. However last
week I received an email from a member who wrote:
"I
have a DNA match as 2nd-3rd cousin for someone whom I can find no genealogical
kinship with, but she had a bone marrow transplant from a 2nd cousin of mine."
This isn't a surprise - the only surprise is that the recipient of a bone
marrow transplant would choose to test. People know whether they have had bone
marrow transplant; if they take a DNA test despite being warned not to, there
is bound to be a confusion.
Last chance to save on Ancestry DNA ENDS
TUESDAY
Ancestry's
offers in the UK and Australia run out tomorrow (Tuesday 17th March), but they've
also launched an offer at their US site which continues until Wednesday 18th March.
All prices quoted exclude shipping but bear in mind that shipping works out
cheaper when you order more than one kit.
(If
there are any more offers announced before the next newsletter
I'll update this article accordingly.)
Please
use the appropriate link below so that you can support LostCousins (you may
find that you need to log-out of Ancestry, if so click
the link again).
Ancestry.co.uk
UK only - REDUCED
FROM £79 to £59
Ancestry.com.au
Australia & New
Zealand - REDUCED FROM $129 to $89
Ancestry.com USA only - REDUCED
FROM $99 TO $59
Tip:
you don’t need to decide who will be testing before you place your order - you
can make your mind up at any time.
This
newsletter goes out to over 67,000 family historians - and much as I'd like to,
I cannot possibly help every single reader individually.
That's
why I create Masterclasses, articles that incorporate everything that I know
about a particular topic - or, at least, the bits that
you need to know about. The best example of the latter is my DNA Masterclass,
which deliberately omits things that I know (from my long experience of working
with DNA) will cause confusion and lead to time-wasting.
Not
surprisingly the people who follow the steps in the DNA Masterclass rarely need
to write to me for help - if I do hear from them it’s to tell me about their
successes, and to thank me for the advice in the Masterclass.
DNA
is a great leveller - we all have very different family trees, but when it
comes to DNA the techniques are the same. Only if you are an adoptee and don’t know
the name of either birth parent is a different strategy required (though only
at the outset).
I
still get emails from adoptees which say things like "I'm an adoptee, and don’t
know who my birth parents were, so DNA won’t be able to help me, will
it?".
It's
certainly true that your DNA won’t help you to trace the ancestors of your adoptive
parents. But when it comes to your birth parents, that's precisely
where DNA can help. It's true that ultimately interpreting your DNA results
does rely on records, but they're not the records of your birth, they're the
records that connect your birth parents to their wider family. So even if you
were a foundling, the solution to your parentage is in your DNA!
Review: Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic Asylums
Until
fairly recently people with mental issues were
regarded as an embarrassment - in some cases children were told that a parent
had died rather than admit that they had gone into an institution.
But
up to the early 18th century Bethlem Hospital, commonly known as Bedlam, was
the only public institution for the insane in the whole of England, and whilst
during that century a number of charitable institutions were founded, the number
of places still fell far short of demand. Private asylums helped to fill the
gap, but relatively few families could have afforded the cost.
In the 19th century it
was a bit of 'postcode lottery' - depending on the area where they lived, someone
with mental difficulties who was not a
danger to themselves or anyone else might end up in the workhouse, which was a cheaper
alternative to an asylum. On the other hand people with
epilepsy who were otherwise perfectly normal might find themselves incarcerated
in an asylum.
All
of us have ancestors and other relatives who had some form of mental illness or
disability. My paternal grandmother was in the Essex County Lunatic Asylum at
the time of the 1911 Census, having been admitted 8 months earlier after the
birth of her first child. She was discharged the day after the census - had she
left before the weekend I would never have known about this episode in her life,
and I doubt my father ever knew.
My
grandmother's sister Florrie had more permanent problems - an 1889 school
register entry notes "defective speech", the 1901 Census states
"feeble-minded", whilst the 1911 Census records her as "deaf
from birth" which would certainly explain the defective speech (though not
how she was expected to learn at a normal infants school).
On
the other side of the tree my maternal grandfather's eldest child was
institutionalised for most of her life, though she was allowed
to come and stay with us one night a week. I doubt my family is exceptional
- the only difference is that in most families these facts wouldn’t have been known
- it’s only through my research that I've found out about most of them.
Michelle
Higgs, author of Tracing Your Ancestors in Lunatic Asylums, has written
9 books on social history and you will almost certainly have come across her articles
in family history magazines. She writes very sympathetically about the inmates
of the various institutions, though I felt a little uneasy about her use of
'mug shots'. The conditions she describes are often appalling - the imbecile
ward at the Dudley Union Workhouse had beds so close that they were touching,
which meant that the occupants had to clamber out of their beds at the bottom.
But
even today people with mental health issues can be treated appallingly by the
National Health Service, so when you're reading the book you will find that
some people - albeit only a small minority - were treated better in the 19th
century than they would be in the 21st century.
There
is a chapter on criminal lunatics, and one on mental illness in the armed forces
which looks at the way in which shell shock was (mis)treated in the WW1. For
many the final chapter on sources of information will be the most useful,
though the chance of finding your ancestor's casefile isn’t good; admission and
discharge registers are more likely to have survived.
I
can’t say that it was an enjoyable book to read - indeed, in some places it was
quite harrowing. But most people in earlier centuries lived in conditions that
we would regard as appalling, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. If
you want to understand what life was like for your ancestors with mental
issues, this is the book!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Here
a few links to pages I've found useful - it’s better to have the facts than
rely on the scare stories in the press, or the opinions on social media of
people whose motivation might be questionable:
Coronavirus
protection tips for those over 60 (CNN)
Coronavirus - what it does to
the body (BBC)
Coronavirus: What are social
distancing and self-isolation? (BBC)
Kind Canadians start 'caremongering' trend (BBC)
The
Coronavirus, by the Numbers (New York Times)
Why outbreaks
like coronavirus spread exponentially (Washington Post)
I
may add other links over the next few days.....
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......
I'll be in touch again soon - in the meantime please look after
yourself, and do what you can to help others.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2020 Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or republish any part of this newsletter
without permission - which is only granted in the most exceptional
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- though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins instead,
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