Newsletter - 24th May 2018
Last
chance to win an Ancestry DNA test
Why
visit record offices when there's so much online?
Archives Card - doomed to failure?
More
Kent parish registers to go online
Tales - but not from Canterbury
Marriage witnesses: correction
New death indexes for 2007-16 are not complete
Did your convict relatives travel on the last ship to Australia?
Are
you being hounded by GDPR emails?
Researching forwards rather than backwards
Tracking down granny's boyfriend
Parents
sue 30 year-old son who refuses to move out
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Last chance to
win an Ancestry DNA test
As mentioned previously, I've
decided to mark the 14th Birthday of LostCousins on
Tuesday 1st May by giving away a free Ancestry DNA test to a lucky member.
At the end of May I'm going
to pick ONE of the readers of this newsletter - but to be chosen you need to
have supported my work by doing ALL of these things:
· Logged-in to your LostCousins
account at least ONCE between 28th April and 31st May
· Entered on your My
Details page EITHER a secondary email address that I can use to get in
touch if your primary address fails OR your full postal address
· Added at least ONE relative to your My Ancestors page between 28th April and
31st May
· Purchased at least ONE LostCousins
subscription since first joining
If you’ve already tested your
DNA you can give the kit to a family member or cousin - indeed if you live in a
country where DNA testing is illegal, eg France,
you'll have to nominate a cousin in the UK to receive your prize.
There's no need to tell me
that you want to be considered for the prize - your name will go into the
(metaphorical) hat automatically IF you meet all the criteria above. Should the
winner turn down the prize for any reason I'll draw another name from the hat.
Why visit
record offices when there's so much online?
These days an amazing number of people manage to
research their family tree without ever visiting an archive or records office -
although I think it's fair to say that in many cases they don't realise what
they're missing. Since Ancestry and Findmypast began
to make parish registers available online 10 years ago many records office have signed contracts with one or other (and, very
occasionally, both) so that now more than half of English registers are online.
But there are still many registers that aren't online,
and whilst some of the gap is filled by transcriptions (eg
FreeREG, FamilySearch, local family history
societies, online-parish clerk projects), coverage can be patchy,
transcriptions are rarely complete (details such as maiden names, occupations,
and age at baptism might be omitted) and they're certainly not always correct.
Even if all parish registers were online they represent
a mere fraction of the holdings of a typical records office - other sources
typically include pre-1841 censuses, licensing records, court records, wills,
muster rolls, vaccination registers, school records, hospital and asylum
records, Poor Law records, correspondence of various kinds, business records,
and family papers. Occasionally some of these holdings are made available
online (most commonly Poor Law records and wills), but most of the time the
only way to access them is to visit the records office. And by the way, it's
worth reminding you that there's a lot more to parish records than the
registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials - as anyone who has read The Parish
Chest will know.
Archives Card - doomed to
failure?
Visiting an archive or records office for the first
time can be quite traumatic - no two are the same - and because most of the
records they hold are unique, and therefore beyond price, the archivists have to take every precaution to protect their holdings
against theft and damage. Consequently visitors aren’t
allowed to access original records without appropriate ID, and you might not
even be able to access microfilm copies.
Having to take along ID every time you visit is not
only tedious, and something extra to remember, it’s time-consuming - especially
if you have to fill out a form on arrival as well as
presenting your ID. An added complication is that what's acceptable as ID at
one location might not be acceptable at another….
When I started my research I
was delighted to discover the CARN (County Archives Record Network) card, which
served as ID at most of the county record offices. But it had some shortcomings
- some archivists considered it wasn't sufficiently secure - and with the new
data protection regulations coming into force this month the Archives &
Records Association (which owns and administers CARN) decided to discontinue
the scheme with effect from the end of November 2018. Some archives might
continue to accept the cards after this date but it
will be risky for them to do so.
Naturally, given the overall success of CARN, the
Archives & Records Association realised that a replacement needed to be
found, and last September they issued a tender document setting out their
proposals and seeking a supplier for the cards and associated equipment. What
they clearly didn't do, however, was to carry out a proper Stakeholder Analysis
- since if they had they would have consulted users like you and me, however it
seems they only took the views of their own members into account.
Now they're in fix - they have to
decide whether or not to go ahead by the end of this month, yet only around 40 local
authorities have signed up, just two-thirds of the number required for the
scheme to be financially-viable. I only found out about any of this on Monday,
when I received an urgent email from the Federation of Family History
Societies, which pointed out that:
Family
historians often have ancestors spread over a range of locations and find the
existing multi-access usage arrangement useful. While nobody is likely to visit
all 68 locations, many of us carry out research at three or four local archives
and value being able to use a single card to do this, rather than needing to
carry passports, driving licences and utility bills on each research trip.
Having a single scheme which allows access to a multitude of local archive
sites benefits us all.
Please lobby your local archives and councillors to encourage them to sign
up to the new scheme, if they have not yet done so.
Unfortunately it's a bit
late to lobby archives and councillors - local authority budgets for 2018/19
will have been agreed long ago, and although the amount of money each archive
would need to commit is quite small, most of them are already having to cope
with diminished budgets.
I've spent much of this week fact finding and
surveying a sample of LostCousins members in the UK
to see what they thought about the idea for a new Archives Card. Based on the
results I've tallied so far over 80% were definitely in
favour, and less than 5% against the idea. Users want it, so why not archives?
I suspect it’s largely down to money - instead of charging a small sum to cover
the cost of the card and help defray the cost of the scheme the Archives &
Records Association decided to give the cards away. That sounds like a good idea
when I'm wearing my 'family historian' hat, but not so clever when I think of
myself as a ratepayer!
One of the other results of my survey was that over
80% were prepared to pay a modest sum, say £5, for a card. Bearing in mind it
would be valid for at least 5 years that's a pretty trivial
amount for the convenience of having a single card that could be used at
multiple archives. (By the way, this isn’t a back-door means of charging for
access to archives - those who aren't concerned about convenience would still
be able to show up with their passport and utility bills - or whatever the
relevant archive requires.)
I'm hoping that the ARA will come to their senses,
start talking to users, then reformulate the scheme as necessary and go back to
their members with a proposal that makes sense for all concerned. But I've been
given to understand that they'll go for the nuclear option - write-off the time
and money they've invested so far, and leave
individual archives to come up with their own schemes. I'm not sure whether
dog's dinner or pig's breakfast is the best description of what we'd be likely
to end up with if they carry out their threat.
Note: many thanks to everyone who replied to my survey
- the response was absolutely amazing, about 60%
within the first 24 hours. I've replied personally to as many as I can, but it
probably won't be feasible to respond to everyone (though every response will
be read and accounted for).
More Kent parish
registers to go online
The registers for the Archdeaconry
of Canterbury held in the Canterbury Cathedral Archives have been online at Findmypast for
several years, but the rest of Kent is less well-served, so - as someone who
has several ancestors from Kent - I was delighted to hear that Kent History and
Library Centre have reached an agreement with Findmypast
that will lead to more than 2500 registers going online. The first records will
be available towards the end of this year.
There's a handy PDF document
on the Kent History and Library Centre which lists all of the parishes in Kent
and notes not only where the original registers are held, but also where there
are microfiche copies or Bishop's Transcripts - you'll find it here.
Tales - but not
from Canterbury
In the last issue I mentioned
that I'd been unable to find a reference to an occasion in 1992 when passers-by
were asked to sit as jurors at Middlesex Crown Court - but I eventually found
articles in The Times of 8th and 9th
January. According to the chief clerk he had needed between 100 and 120 jurors,
but only 56 of those called in advance had turned up - so on the first day
court officials recruited 'tales' from the nearby offices of the Department of
Trade & Industry in Victoria Street; on the second day they went to the
first office they came across in Tothill Street.
The report from The Times of 8th January is interesting
in that it refers to "a celebrated case at the London Guildhall in the
early 1950s which ensured Richard Upwitch and Thomas Groffin a place in the annals of legal history". Of
course, anyone familiar with the works of Charles Dickens will realise that Upwitch and Groffin are actually
fictional talesmen in the pages of Pickwick
Papers - but they were referred to in an April 1958 article
in The Cambridge Law Journal (which
relates to a case at Brighton Quarter Sessions when 12 bystanders had been
chosen, the jurors originally summoned having been mistakenly sent home). It's
possible that injudicious editing of the article in The Times led to confusion between the cases of Bardell v. Pickwick and Regina v.Solomon,
but surprisingly it doesn’t seem to have spurred a Letter to the Editor.
By the way, the word tales in this context is mediaeval
Latin, the plural of 'talis' meaning 'such' - the
full legal phrase is tales de circumstantibus, or 'such men amongst the bystanders'.
Marriage
witnesses: correction
In the last newsletter I
stated, incorrectly, that to be a marriage witness you have
to be 16 years-old, information I took from the Citizens Advice website
- foolishly assuming that they would have got it right. It was very quickly
pointed out to me by professional genealogist, speaker, and writer Anthony Marr
- a former deputy registrar - that there is no fixed lower limit. However,
anyone acting as a witness needs to understand what is taking place, and be able to testify to what they have seen and
heard, should it be necessary.
New death
indexes for 2007-16 are not complete
One of the challenges for
those of us trying to find living cousins has been the lack of online death
indexes for the period after the GRO stopped selling copies of the birth.
Marriage, and death indexes. We could spend ages trying to track somebody down,
only to discover that they had passed away.
Findmypast last week added an index to United Kingdom Deaths 2007-2016 which
includes around 2.5 million deaths, a little under half of all the deaths for
that period. I found my father's death in 2011, but there were a couple of
errors - the age at death had been rounded up, even though the record showed
both his precise birthdate and his precise date of death - and it also gave the
wrong place of death. It wasn't the location of the hospital where he died, the
Register Office where his death was registered, nor the care home where he
lived prior to his final admission to hospital.
Note: these indexes cover most of the UK - the GRO
indexes only relate to England & Wales.
Did your
convict relatives travel on the last ship to Australia?
The Hougoumont was the last ship to
take British convicts to Australia landing at Fremantle, Western Australia, on
9th January 1868 - 150 years ago. The production company Shiver TV (part of ITV
Studios) is planning to produce a documentary about Australians whose ancestors
travelled on this final voyage, and is particularly
interested in anyone who is in touch with British cousins who share their
convict ancestors.
Many convicts started new
families in Australia - after 7 years with no contact with their wives they
could marry again, even if there was no evidence that wife was dead. As I
reported in 2011, when Alexander found that his great-great-great-great
grandmother had remarried he assumed that his great-great-great-great
grandfather had died - it was only later, after researching in workhouse
records, that he discovered that he had been transported.
The contact at Shiver TV is
Lauren Carter, whose email address is lauren.carter1@shiver.tv
PS: just before this newsletter went to press I heard
of another ITV Studios production which is based around family history, but has a rather familiar angle - it "aims to
connect people who have no close living family (or who are estranged) with more
distant relatives. Participants will get the chance to explore their family
tree further up the generations, and to come back down on another line to meet
members of the family they never knew existed from all over the world... or from
just down the road! In the first instance, we are looking for people in this
situation to speak with us about their experiences. This is just for research
at this stage so that we can begin to get a sense of different stories and what
it's like to live with no close relatives." The contact for this series is
Imogen Walford whose email address is imogen.walford@itv.com
The concerns I expressed
in the 21st April issue about the destruction of valuable records of historical
interest was echoed in an 8th May press
release from the Archives and Records Association (UK & Ireland), which
warned that the new Data Protection Act could spark a ‘bonfire of records’.
They gave numerous examples
of where officialdom has failed in the past to protect important records,
including:
- Mau Mau in Kenya (1950s)
- Scottish children in care (1950s-90s)
- Child sexual abuse
- Primodos pregnancy test drug (1960s-70s)
- Bloody Sunday (1970s)
- Hillsborough (1980s)
- Orgreave (1980s)
- Infected Factor VIII (1980s)
It's important to remember
that whilst historic records might be protected (though that isn’t always the
case - as the destruction of centuries-old property deeds has shown), unless
modern records are preserved there won’t be any historic records in the future!
Records that are burned, pulped, shredded, or lost don’t suddenly rematerialize
when they're 100 years old - what's gone is gone for ever.
Are you being
hounded by GDPR emails?
If you live in the European
Union - and quite possibly even if you don't - it's likely that right now
you're being showered with emails from companies keen to maintain contact after
the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) legislation comes into force
on 25th May. I've received emails from dozens of companies I'd completely
forgotten about, and quite frankly I don't have the time.
But according to an article
published in The Guardian many of
these requests are unnecessary, and some could even be illegal. In fact I'm thinking of complaining to the Information
Commissioner about the intimidating email I've received from Yahoo:
When I logged into my Sky
email account I was told that in order to continue
using the email account I would have to allow them to read my mail and send me
advertising based on the content. Blooming cheek! It makes me wonder whether
they've been doing this all the time, but are only now
asking my permission - one of the positive things about the new regulations is
the way they force companies to be more open about what you’re signing up for.
Researching
forwards rather than backwards
Tracing forwards is usually
more difficult than going backwards - it's largely because there is an added
degree of uncertainty. For example, when we go backwards we know that there's a
high probability that our ancestors married, and we know they had at least one
child - but when we're working forwards we can't be sure that the offspring
survived long enough to marry and have children. Or whether they emigrated - or
simply migrated to the other end of the county (or country).
But perhaps the biggest
problem when we're trying to make a connection to a well-known figure is that
the 'jigsaw puzzle' we're trying to complete may have a piece missing. The
harsh reality is that most family stories about connections with well-known
figures are myths that have welled-up over the generations, perhaps starting
with a coincidence. Several of the celebrities in the British Who Do You Think
You Are series had these in their family tree - the one that immediately
springs to mind is Jeremy Irons.
So my advice is always to work backwards, because that
way you won't waste time researching stories that turn out to be untrue. If
there is a connection you'll find it by going backwards, but if there isn't
your research will still be equally valid and just as valuable.
The time to work forwards is
when you're researching your own tree, because it's the branches that are your
links to your living cousins. The uncertainties are still there - did they
survive to adulthood, did they emigrate - but at least every finding you make
will be relevant and of value.
There's a documentary series that has just
started on the BBC World Service about the English language, and it got me
thinking about how different BBC English is from the language we speak and hear
today. These clips
posted on the BBC Archive Twitter account are fascinating (you don’t need to
sign up for Twitter in order to listen to them).
Tracking down
granny's boyfriend
Jennie got in contact this
week to tell me a rather amazing story which resulted from the discovery of a
small bundle of letters addressed to her grandmother in a box of family papers
that had been in the loft for over 20 years. Here's what Jennie told me.…
"As far as I could tell the
sender wasn’t family, and the letters just a chatty correspondence between
friends spanning the 1940s to 1960s. The sender had emigrated and I wondered whether the letters might be of
interest to his family as they gave an insight into his early years
abroad.
"I set out to see if I
could find out more about this man and track down his descendants. I started
by Googling his name, not really expecting any results, and was astonished
to find he was still alive and, furthermore, still actively working aged
97. There was also an email address.... so I
wrote to him.
"A reply came quickly,
saying he remembered my grandmother well.... in fact
it turned out they had been an item for a year or two in the late 1930s. He
told me neither of them had wanted to get married at the time, but that
they had lived together in London in a flat they shared with two sisters until
the outbreak of WW2, when he had to leave London to work in a reserved
occupation in Kent. My grandparents met shortly afterwards and married a
year and a half later, but the families kept in touch for many years, and met
from time to time when both in the UK - I subsequently found out that my aunt
remembers meeting them.
"The letters were
subsequently repatriated to his family, and gratefully received. As
unusual and unexpected experiences go, I wonder whether any of your readers can
top corresponding with their grandma’s 97 year-old
ex-boyfriend during the course of their research?"
I certainly can't top
Jennie's true story, though when my stepmother died I spent some time trying to
track down a girl that my father had walked out with before the War - I think
he was rather disappointed that she married a Canadian serviceman before he was
demobbed in 1946. But how about you - do have an even stranger tale than
Jennie's?
Note: some of you may have seen this BBC article about
a love letter from the 1950s which has been returned to the women who wrote it
to her future husband more than 60 years ago.
Parents sue 30
year-old son who refuses to move out
The headline says it all - if
you want to know more, see this BBC News article.
I'm indebted to Myko Clelland from Findmypast who discovered this 1912 article from the Rodney and Otamatea
Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette (you'll find this and many other New
Zealand newspapers on the free Papers
Past website):
Numerous members have written
to thank me for pointing out the opportunity to claim refunds in respect of
Powers of Attorney - you'll find the original article here.
Two weeks ago
I wrote about the milk bottle tops and 'silver' paper I used to save as a
child, which prompted Fran to write in with her own memories:
" I was a child during WW2, in Primary school (years 3-6) and we were encouraged to save all metal for the War Effort. There was the silver paper that was then around cigarettes in a packet, chocolate wrappers which we would roll up into a big ball, and any aluminium or metal that could be spared.
"I remember we has a matinee at the local cinema for all the school children in the district and the admission price was a piece of suitable metal. We all lined up to go into the theatre and the pile became bigger and bigger. By the time I got there it was higher than me. My mother gave me the lid from an aluminium saucepan, as that was the only metal she could find at the time. I don't remember what movie we saw, but your article brought back a memory of over 70 years ago."
Once I finish this newsletter
I'm going to be making jam - low-sugar Blueberry Jam. I can't remember which
online recipe I used last time, but I think it was this one
(it was deliciously fruity, but as usual I added some orange zest to add a
little intrigue). Blueberries are usually expensive in the UK, but I bought
mine at the supermarket on the sell-by date, saving 75% and bring the price
down to under £1 per pound.
The disadvantage of making
jam (other than freezer jam) is that you need a certain level of sugar to
preserve it, but when I cook up the rhubarb from the garden I don’t add any
sugar, just grated ginger, a little water, and pure stevia - a plant extract
that's 400 times sweeter than sugar (I added just half a gram to several pounds
of rhubarb). I've got so many blueberries (over 11lbs) that I might lightly
poach some with a little stevia so that we can enjoy them for breakfast in the
days and weeks to come.
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 2018
Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or
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