Newsletter – 28th
March 2023
Prohibited degrees – the inside story
How the GRO coped with flu and COVID
Why you might not find an entry in the GRO birth
indexes
What do the GRO references mean?
The first time I knocked down a ‘brick wall’ using
DNA
Save 25% on Ancestry DNA tests in the UK ENDS MONDAY
From family history to pioneer history
Wartime ration books discovered in cupboard
Did your ancestor work on the railways?
Interpreting Scottish handwriting for the 16th
and 17th centuries FREE
Why did BBC announcers wear dinner jackets – on the wireless?
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Prohibited degrees – the inside story
Professor
Rebecca Probert’s ground-breaking book Marriage
Law for Genealogists is a must-have for any serious family historian
with ancestors from England & Wales – we all have antecedents who bent the
rules when they married.
But
understanding who could marry who and when isn’t just about people who married
when they oughtn’t to have done – the restrictions can also explain why some people
didn’t marry, or why they married at a different time or a different place.
Only by reading the book can you gain a proper appreciation of the obstacles
that sometimes blocked the path of true love.
When
it comes to 21st century marriage law there is a useful online guide
produced by the General Register Office (GRO). It’s not normally available to
genealogists like you and me, because it’s in an area of the GRO website that’s
intended for registrars: I stumbled across it when carrying out a Google search, and thought that you might be interested. The document
is in PDF format and can be downloaded here
(but you may have to be quick as access could be blocked at any time).
How the GRO coped with flu and COVID
I
also found two PDF documents which set out the procedures to be followed during
a pandemic: one, on the GRO Extranet, is entitled Guidance Note for Flu
Pandemic and dated September 2014. It can be downloaded here.
Note the detailed instructions relating to causes of death that must be
referred to the Coroner, and also the acceptable
causes of death – which varied according to the age of the deceased.
The
other is more recent: Instructions for Implementation of the Coronavirus (Emergency)
Act 2020 is dated March 2020 and whilst produced by the GRO is available from
the Royal College of Pathologists website here.
Although
the documents focus primarily on the procedures for registration of deaths
during the pandemics, reading them will provide insight into the procedures in
more normal times - we don’t often get to see the instructions to registrars.
Incidentally
the March 2020 document has a link to the September 2014 document, as well as
to a circular
issued to Superintendent Registrars, Registrars, and others involved in registration
services in February 2020.
Why you might not find an entry in the GRO birth indexes
When
the GRO released their own index of historic births in November 2016 we were
able, for the first time, to discover the mother’s maiden name for births
registered between 1837 and 1911 without purchasing the relevant certificate.
But
the way in which this new index was compiled sometimes causes problems – indeed,
within days of the new index being released I published a newsletter article
highlighting the key differences.
In
particular I pointed out that the illegitimate birth of my great-grandmother in
1842, which had been indexed in the contemporary quarterly index under both the
surname of her father (Roper) and the surname of her mother (Buxton), appeared
in the new index only under the father’s surname. Fortunately I’d bought the
certificate many years before, when the quarterly indexes were all we had to go
on, but these days it’s natural for someone planning to order a certificate (or
PDF) to start their search at the GRO site.
Another
example cropped up recently on the LostCousins forum:
I find a birth index entry for a cousin Mable Cannon on all the usual sites. She was born
Name: Mabel Cannon
Registration Date: 1873
Quarter of the Year: Jul-Aug-Sep
Registration Place: Nantwich, Cheshire, England
Volume: 8a
Page: 321
However, a search of the GRO index returns no
match. I've checked on FreeBMD for other entries on
the same page and they are found when I search the GRO index.
Any ideas why she might not be in the GRO index?
[Footnote: She appears to be illegitimate and is
subsequently described as a child of her grandparents in censuses. Her
grandmothers will reveals her true identity. I did
spot a Mabel Platt on the same page when I looked on FreeBMD
and a quick search for her on Ancestry didn't come up with any further matches.
She does appear in a GRO index search but with no mothers maiden name. Is it possible she is in the
indexes twice under different names? If I order the birth certificate using the
details I have above, even though a search doesn't return a match, am I likely to
receive it and will I be charged if they can't find it?]
I’m
sure that when you read that footnote you had the same thought as I did – that perhaps
Mabel Platt and Mabel Cannon were the same person (full marks to the member who
posted the query for including this additional information).
When
something like this occurs it’s often helpful to weigh up the odds of it
happening by chance: if you search the birth indexes for the forename ‘Mabel’
in 1873 you’ll find that there were only 32 in the whole of Cheshire that year,
and just 2 in Nantwich, ie Mabel Cannon and Mabel Platt.
How likely is it that both these entries would be on the same page in the GRO
birth register?
There’s
an additional clue. If you search at FreeBMD for
entries on the same register page you’ll get this list:
To
the untrained eye what leaps out from that list is the two Barker girls at the
top, possibly identical twins. But if you know a little about the GRO birth
registers you’ll soon realise that there are 11 names listed, when there’s only
room for 10 entries on a single register page – and that hints at the
possibility that there are two index entries for the same register entry.
Sometimes
entries are mistranscribed, and if it’s the page
number which is wrong this can cause confusion – as you’ll see if you repeat
the same search for entries page 322:
Fortunately FreeBMD aim to
transcribe each entry twice, and the chance of two different transcribers making
the same error is fairly low. Entries shown in bold have been transcribed twice
– and if you look at the image of the page from the quarterly birth index for John
Edward Tortington, the one entry that isn’t bolded,
you’ll see that the page number is not 322 but 327 (I’ve already reported the
error to FreeBMD).
Something
to bear in mind is that Ancestry’s GRO indexes up to 1915 were provided by FreeBMD, so if you want to check another source, try Findmypast
or The
Genealogist. Findmypast is my preferred source for births
because they have added the mother’s maiden name for most of the entries from
1837-1911, and for this reason it’s a good place to start your search even if
you don’t have a subscription.
Tip:
it’s natural to make a beeline for the site(s) where we have a subscription, but
sometimes searches at free sites such as FamilySearch, or free searches at commercial
sites such as Findmypast will work better.
But
if you’ve read down this far I suspect you’re wondering if there is a happy
ending to the problem of Mabel. And there is – this is the entry from the GRO
birth register:
Whether you’re ordering
certificates or PDFs, or simply using the civil registration indexes to gather
freely available information, it’s important to understand how they were compiled,
and to recognise the differences between the contemporary quarterly indexes and
the GRO’s modern indexes.
Tip:
sometimes the fact that an entry has been recorded differently in the new
indexes tells us all we need to know!
What do the GRO references mean?
If
you’ve ever ordered an historic birth, marriage, or death certificate from the
General Register Office you’ll know that the numeric references you used to
order the certificate (volume and page) don’t appear on the certificate itself.
That’s because those references didn’t exist at the time the event was
registered – whilst there will be a sequential number in the first column, this
will relate to the original register, ie
the one at the church or register office.
The
registers held by the GRO contain copies of entries in the registers held
locally – that’s why you’re unlikely to see your ancestors’ signatures on a
marriage certificate ordered from the GRO. From 1837, when civil registration
began in England & Wales, loose leaf copies of the entries in the locally
held registers were submitted quarterly to the GRO, where the
pages were bound into large volumes with entries from other registration
districts, and the pages subsequently numbered sequentially.
In
other words the references we see in the quarterly indexes are the number of
the volume in which the entry can be found, and the number of the page on which
it is recorded.
Note:
the number of entries per full page varied over the years – a good way to check
how many entries there usually were in a particular quarter is to carry out a number of searches by page number.
How
were the indexes compiled? As I understand it, clerks at the GRO wrote out a
slip of paper for each birth or death, and two for marriages, which included all
the information required for the index, including the registration district, volume,
and page number. These were then sorted into strict alphabetical order, then
copied again to create the relevant index.
So
what we see in the quarterly indexes had been copied at least three times –
more if the original handwritten indexes deteriorated to the point where they
had to be replaced by typewritten or printed copies. It’s remarkable that there
are so few errors and omissions!
If,
like me, you searched for your ancestors’ marriages at the Family Records
Centre, or one of its predecessors, you’ll know how frustrating it was that prior
to 1912 the quarterly marriage indexes didn’t give the spouse’s surname. If you
had a clue to the spouse’s surname you could look up the entries for that
surname and scan them for a matching entry, ie one with the same volume and page references, but it
was infinitely more challenging if you didn’t.
However,
once the entries had been computerised – by FreeBMD
and others – it was possible to sort the entries by page number, so that there
would be only a handful of options (there was a maximum of 4, later 2,
marriages per page, but many pages were incomplete). And that’s how some sites are able to suggest who the spouse may have been, even for
marriage between 1837 and 1911.
The first time I knocked down a ‘brick wall’ using DNA
When
I give a talk on DNA, if time permits I demonstrate to the attendees how I
knocked down my first ‘brick wall’ using DNA. It was a ‘brick wall’ that had
blocked my path for 15 years, yet some people might not have considered it a ‘brick
wall’ at all – since my great-grandmother’s birth certificate named her supposed
father.
When the birth
of my great-grandmother, Emily Buxton, was registered in 1842 her father and
mother weren’t married – at least, not to each other. Sarah Buxton (née Hunt) was
a young widow and, as for Robert Roper, all I knew was his name and occupation.
Even if the information on the birth certificate was correct, there was no
Robert Roper in the 1841 Census who was a lime burner, nor was there anyone in the
1851 Census who seemed a likely candidate, even allowing for the possibility
that he had changed his occupation.
Did
Robert Roper really exist? I certainly had my doubts, because Sarah Hunt too was
conceived and born outside marriage, and when Sarah eventually remarried in
1850 the name she gave for her father also seemed to have
been invented. And that’s how things remained until 2017.
I
had originally taken a DNA test in 2012, long before Ancestry started selling
them in the UK, and for the first 5 years DNA had proven an expensive
disappointment. In 2017 I bit the bullet and tested again – this time with
Ancestry. Within weeks I had matches with genetic cousins in the US who were descended
from a Robert Jeffreys Roper of Suffolk.
This
Robert Roper was also missing from the 1841 Census, but in 1851 he was shown as
a farmer of 170 acres with a wife and three teenage sons – hardly a likely
candidate, one would think. But the baptism entries for his sons (which were
not online) show that in the 1830s he was a lime burner – and taken together
with the DNA evidence, this proved beyond reasonable doubt that he was my
great-grandmother’s father.
With
the benefit of hindsight this wasn’t a ‘brick wall’ that was completely impossible
to solve using conventional methods, but there was no way of knowing that in
advance – and without the confirmation provided by DNA I would have been
relying completely on Sarah Buxton’s assertion that the father of her
illegitimate was a lime burner named Robert Roper.
DNA
isn’t a replacement for records-based research – it’s an extra tool in the researcher’s
toolbox, one that can:
· provide confirmation that the records are
correct;
· point us in the right
direction
when the records are elusive;
· prompt us to think
again
when the relevant records are wrong or misleading; and
· bridge the gap when the records are
missing
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When
the records are missing, incomplete, misleading, or simply hard to find DNA is
usually the answer - and without a doubt testing with Ancestry was one of the
best decisions I ever made.
I’ve
not only knocked down numerous ‘brick walls’, I’ve been
able to confirm that my records-based research is correct – which is a much
under-rated benefit of testing.
If
you’re in the UK you can save 25% on Ancestry DNA until
midnight on Monday. Please click the banner below so that you can support LostCousins:
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I
recently came across this fascinating page
on Rootsweb which describes the laws and customs in
Virginia, both before and after independence from Britain. Even if you don’t
have any colonists in your tree, reading it might prompt you to ask questions
about the laws and customs in England.
Note:
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information, but it appears to have been
compiled with care.
From family history to pioneer history
LostCousins
member Pam Garfoot has written a book with a difference
– so I’ve asked her to tell you about it:
My sister,
Elizabeth, and I have been passionate family history researchers for about the
last fifteen years. Family history research, as most readers are probably
aware, can take up a huge amount of time. But something else has kept us quite
busy for the last few years - another project which has been a logical flow-on
from our family history research.
Way back in
2017 we discovered by chance the existence of a diary handwritten by someone a
few generations back in our family tree (in fact, the brother of our great,
great grandmother). It was held in the special collections area of the James
Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. As far as we know, no-one had
studied it closely before. We made it our business to investigate.
We discovered
that the diary was a record made by Edward Hayes Talbot in 1878 during the course of a four-month 
journey
droving cattle from the coast of Queensland (Waverley Station, near St
Lawrence) a thousand miles to the west (Diamantina Lakes Station in the Channel
Country). Droving (that is, moving
livestock overland from one outback location to another) was challenging work.
Droving trips often covered vast distances, with the droving team going on
horseback and the camp cook usually making the trip in some sort of dray or cart.
On this trip Talbot travelled with a handful of other men and even the wife of
one of them.
Determined to
write something about the journey, we researched the route travelled, the
places visited along the way, and the drovers and other people
involved. In many ways we utilised the research skills we had developed while
doing exhaustive family history research.
In 2020, the
diary was one of several items in James Cook University’s collection chosen to
help celebrate 50 years of the university’s existence. The ‘50 Treasures’
exhibition was the result and you can see a sample page from Edward Talbot’s
diary here.
Nearly six
years after we came across the diary, our book Capricorn Drover has been published. It tells the story of the
trip, the challenges faced, the places along the way, and the story of each
person involved. The book includes more than 80 black and white images and a
detailed route map. We are so excited to have been able to delve into some
fascinating Queensland pioneer history.
Further
details about the book can be found here
Thanks,
Pam – this is part of Australian history that I knew nothing about.
Wartime ration books discovered in cupboard
I
missed this story
about wartime ration books when it was reported in 2015 – I suspect quite a few
readers of this newsletter have made similar discoveries.
Note:
you can share photos of ration books, ID cards, and other ephemera with other
LostCousins members via the LostCousins Forum. If you’re not yet a member check your My Summary page to see whether you qualify for
membership.
Forced adoption
There
was a story
on the BBC News site this week about forced adoption in Britain in the 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s. As someone who worked for the Children’s Department of a
local authority in the late 1960s I was surprised to read the article – at that
time I was not aware of mothers (or parents) who were able to look after their
children being forced to give them up for adoption, though no doubt some single
mothers may have felt under pressure to do so when the practical difficulties of
bringing up a child on their own were explained to them.
Note:
until fairly recently the term ‘orphan’ described a
child who had lost one parent, not both – this underlines the fact that few single
parents could bring up a child and earn a living.
It’s
certainly true to say that moral standards were higher in those days, and that
those who didn’t live up to those standards were looked down on, but that’s not
quite the same thing. If anything it was society that
forced some mothers to give up their children, rather than the government – I
suspect that fathers of single mothers were often unsympathetic.
Did your ancestor work on the railways?
The
Railway Work, Life & Death project has just released a new dataset, featuring
details of around 25,000 British and Irish railway trade union members and how
their union looked after them between 1889 and 1920.
The
project looks at accidents to railway staff before 1939, transcribing and summarising
details from railway records. Together with the existing data, the database now
covers nearly 50,000 individuals, all transcribed by the project's excellent
volunteers.
The
new trade union records come from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants/
National Union of Railwaymen, and tell us about
support in the event of accident, ill-health, or old age. They show how the
Union provided financial benefits for members and their families,
and represented their interests at coroner's inquests. The project is a
joint initiative of the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum and the Modern Records Centre at the University of
Warwick, working with The National Archives. They want to see the information they’re
making available being used by you, in your research – it's all available free in
a spreadsheet that you can download from the project website.
Note:
they're also keen to hear from you if you find someone you're researching, so do
please let them know.
Roll over Beethoven
Everyone
knows that Beethoven started losing his hearing in his 20s,
and was almost totally deaf in his 40s – but only now have researchers attempted
to analyse his DNA in order to find out why.
Don’t
worry, they didn’t have to exhume his remains – they had access to 8 hair
samples from different sources, and as DNA tested proved that 5 of them came
from the same individual, they used those samples for their further analysis.
Whilst
they were unable to find a definite cause of his hearing loss, they were able
to gain some insight into what killed him – see this BBC article
for more details.
Interpreting Scottish handwriting for the 16th
and 17th centuries FREE
National
Records of Scotland has a free PDF guide to help you interpret the handwriting
in Scottish documents from 1500-1700 – you can download it here.
Why
did BBC announcers wear dinner jackets – on the wireless?
It’s
well known that announcers on the BBC wore dinner jackets when they were reading
the news on the radio in the 1930s, but this is a rather misleading
interpretation of the evidence, according to this interesting article I found online. The
official
version is rather different…..
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 2023 Peter Calver
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