Newsletter - 22nd November 2019
Last chance to save an amazing 30% at Findmypast EXTENDED? SEE STOP PRESS
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Army
records: when at first you don’t succeed....
Another amusing birth registration
The illegitimate, doubly baptized, incestuous orphan
Home
children: another moving tale
Hansard (and parish registers)
How would you deal with this conundrum?
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Army records:
when at first you don’t succeed....
Over the Remembrance Day
weekend Denise made a wonderful discovery:
"I
must send you a message to say a BIG thank you for letting us know about the free
access weekend at Find My Past. I have just finished downloading my Grandfather’s
Army record.
"You
do not know how much this means to me, because a good many years ago I
contacted the records office to do with the World War 1 records and they
informed me they hadn’t got any of my Grandfather's records on file as they
were amongst the WW1 ones destroyed in a fire.
"Imagine
my sheer delight when I entered his details into the search field this
afternoon on Find My Past within the records you highlighted. There before me
was page, after page, after page, of all his attestation and historical records
of his army service! It has even got my Grandmother's information and where
they got married and the date, because to date I have not been able to
ascertain that, plus the address they lived at after their marriage. It even
shows that my Grandmother was in the W.A.A. C, (which we had no idea about) and
that she was working in the camp at Alnwick, just a possible “story” that she
had worked at Alnwick Castle.
"You
do not know how much this means to me to be able to discover all of this."
I know just how Denise felt -
when I couldn't find my grandfather's records at Ancestry I assumed that they
were among the 60% that had been lost in WW2 - but when Findmypast launched
their WW1 records a few years ago I was delighted to find that this wasn't the
case!
It just goes to show that
even when two sites have the 'same' records, there can be differences.
Nobody thinks it's strange
that there are two entries in the GRO indexes for every marriage - one for the
bride, and one for the groom - but finding two entries for a birth or a death can
strike some people as extremely odd, not to say suspicious.
The important thing to
remember is that multiple entries in an index don't necessarily mean there are
multiple entries in the register (and if there are, it will be obvious, because
the references will be different). The reason you'll find a marriage indexed
under two surnames is so that you can find the register entry, even if you only
know the name of one of the parties - which is very often the case, especially
when we're researching the branches of our tree. But in England people can
perfectly legally change their name at will, or be known by more than one name.
This especially applies to married women, who might still be known by their
maiden surname even after they marry, and divorced women who might or might not
retain their husband's surname after their divorce. I have all of those in my
own family!
But there are plenty of other
reasons why someone might be known to some under one name and others under
another - and it doesn’t matter what the reason is, if - and only if - an alias
is recorded by the registrar, then the entry will be indexed under both names.
Until fairly recently the
surname of a child born in England or Wales wasn't shown in the birth register
- only forenames (if any) were recorded. We look at the entry and assume that the
child took his father's surname (or his mother's surname, if no father was
shown), but that's just convention.
My birth certificate doesn't show
my surname, although ironically this is because it is a full certificate - short
certificates have always shown surnames, as you can see from the example on the
right, which is my father's original birth certificate. Of course, that's
because the name of the father and mother aren't shown on a short birth certicate - all
that's shown is the name of the individual and his or her date of birth.
Nowadays
many births are indexed under two surnames - that of the father and that of the
mother - but it doesn’t mean there are two entries in the register. The important
thing to remember is that an index is simply a finding guide - it isn't
intended to be an authorative source, even though we
family historians often regard information in the GRO's indexes that way.
The
same applies to transcripts of records. Leaving aside the certainty that there
will be occasional transcription errors - or even frequent errors if the source
is particularly difficult to transcribe - a transcribed record of a baptism or
other event is often incomplete. Indeed there's no
reason why it should be complete, because the main reason that records are
transcribed is so that a searchable index can be created.
Even
if every detail is faithfully transcribed, if you don’t look at the source
document you can't put the entry into context. For example, my great-great-great
grandfather was baptised in 1820 at the age of almost 5 - but if I hadn't
looked at the baptism register I wouldn't have known
that his half-sister was baptised on the same day. Why? Because she had a
different father, so she was indexed under a different surname.
Similarly,
if you look at a baptism register you might notice that some of the entries are
marked with a 'P', which can indicate either a private baptism or the baptism
of a pauper child. Only by looking at the register pages can you properly
interpret the information.
Transcription
errors are common and inevitable, but they rarely prevent an experienced and
wily researcher from finding the entry. The biggest danger is not the transcriber
who makes an error, but the inexperienced researcher who fails to realise that
"it's only an index"!
Peter in Australia sent me
this example of a Scottish birth registration from 1855, the year in which they
were introduced - it shows far more information than we get on English and
Welsh certificates, and more even than on modern Scottish certificates:
It's the second birth on the
page that is of particular interest - the mother was
married but her husband had been abroad for 20 months by the time the child was
born.
I've blown up the relevant section
so that you can read what was written there:
Peter tells me that the
husband must have been home by the beginning of 1856, for in February that year
the Supreme Court of Scotland handed down a decision finding that Alexander
Murdoch Samson had “…. seduced and committed adultery with Jane Hunter or
Glover.... Samson was to pay £2000-00-00 damages which was an enormous sum in
1856 although Samson came from a wealthy ship owning family.
The Measuring Worth
website suggests that in relation to incomes in 1856, £2000 was the equivalent
of nearly £2 million today.
Another
amusing birth registration
When Robert Gouldstone registered the birth of his third son (and
fourth child) in 1870 he must have been wondering how he would manage to feed the
sixth member of his family on a labourer's wage, and as you can see from this GRO
birth certificate he named him 'One Too Many'.
Later that year the child was
baptised at St James, Walthamstow - but this time he was accorded some proper
names, 'Robert William', as you can see from the transcription at Ancestry, which
is confirmed by the 1871 Census entry (below). I also noticed that the baptism
register gave his date of birth as 29th June, not 30th June as shown in the register
of births - I suspect that mothers have a better memory for such details than fathers!.
I don’t suppose Martha Gouldstone was particularly happy about what her husband
did in 1870, and one way or another she made sure there were no shenanigans
when their next child - another son - was born in
1872:
The illegitimate,
doubly baptized, incestuous orphan
I don’t have any Dutch
ancestors (yet) but from time to time I find interesting articles on the Dutch
Genealogy site run by Yvette Hoitink - take a
look at this article
from 2015.
Home children:
another moving tale
This moving story was sent in
by Susan:
"I
have just read with great interest the article about Home Children (I read all
your articles with great interest).
"My
great-great grandfather Levi Gates was born in Toxteth, Liverpool in 1860 to
Thomas and Hannah, and was one of 8 sons. I found him on all but the 1881
census, and have all the relevant certificates. I discovered that his mother
died in January 1873 and Thomas remarried (his 3rd wife) and had further
children. I managed to find what happened to most of the brothers, all bar 2,
George (1866) and Edward (1869). I failed to locate them on the 1881 census but
also could not find them on further census, nor a record of a death.
"I did a general search on Ancestry using the
parents' names, and the results showed that they appeared in the family tree of
a lady in the USA. When I contacted Penny through the Ancestry service, she
confirmed that Edward was her ancestor. When their mother died, father Thomas
Gates abandoned his children. Those old enough to fend for themselves, like
Levi, who was almost 13, made their own way. Baby Robert was sent to live with
Thomas’ brother and family. But George and Edward were placed with the
Liverpool Sheltering Home. Also placed there was the daughter of Thomas’ new
wife by her previous marriage.
"On 21 March 1876, aged just 9 and 6, the two
brothers left Liverpool for Halifax Nova Scotia in a party of children cared
for by Mrs Birt. On arrival in Nova Scotia they were
placed with separate farming families. George stayed in Canada and married but
had no children that I can find. Edward ran away when he was old enough and
made his way to the USA, where he raised a family. He related his story to the
family and Penny tells me that Edward told her he was treated very badly on the
farm. I am now in regular contact with Penny, who is my mother's second cousin.
Penny is now a very involved member of her local historical society, and sends
me a copy of their newsletter.
"It
seems the practice of children's homes sending their young charges abroad continued
for many years. I have also read the book 'Oranges
and Sunshine', also known as 'Empty Cradles' It seems Penny’s great grandfather
was lucky compared to those who went to Australia."
In those days, when a parent
died the surviving spouse was often faced with an impossible situation - they
couldn't both earn a living and look after the children. Thomas Gates probably
did what he thought was best - otherwise they could all have ended up in the
workhouse.
In fact, when my own great-great
grandfather died in 1885, my great-great grandmother was left alone with 10
children aged from 8 months to 23 years, so she was in much the same position -
and she came up with a very similar solution, which involved some of the
children going into the workhouse.
Whilst so far as I can
ascertain none of those children were sent overseas (one just disappears), I do
know from talking to the daughter of one of the youngest, just before she died,
that her father didn't even know that his oldest brothers and sisters existed -
the family had been sliced in two. It's not what anyone would have wished, but
our ancestors did their best in trying circumstances.
Hansard (and
parish registers)
This year many of us have
been glued to our television sets watching the proceedings at Westminster, but
the televising of Parliament is a fairly recent phenomenon - it was in 1989, just
30 years that the cameras were allowed in to the House of Commons, though there
had been experiments in the House of Lords.
But 250 years ago, not only
were there no TV cameras, it was illegal to report on proceedings in Parliament
- this followed a decision taken in 1738. Some, including Dr Johnson, got around
the restriction by publishing parodies of the proceedings, but in 1771 the ban
was lifted. However the problems for journalists didn’t
end there - it wasn't until 1783 that journalists were allowed to take notes, so
were forced to rely on their memory.
Thomas Hansard acquired the
contract for keeping records of debates in 1812, and you can now access much of
the information online - the records go back to the early 19th century. I always thought
Hansard was a verbatim record, but in fact it is edited to remove hesitations
and repetitions (though not, as far as I know, deviations).
It's amazing what you can
find in Hansard - I discovered a 1971 debate in which Lord Teviot drew
attention to the problems of parish registers and other historic records
languishing in local churches, "many of which are being allowed to rot, to
be stolen, burned or blown up, [so] may be lost for ever".
It's well worth reading the debate
and reflecting on the extent to which things have, and haven't, changed over
the intervening half century.
How would
you deal with this conundrum?
Most historic parish
registers are now safely in the care of the diocesan record office, which in
most instances is the county record office; only a handful are still held in churches,
though I frequently get emails from members who are planning to travel half-way
round the world in order to go their ancestors' local church in the hope of
looking at the registers - a myth that is perpetuated by some of the writers of
genealogical fiction.
But supposing you discovered
that an historic parish register was in the possession of an ordinary citizen -
what would you do about it? It's not a hypothetical question - I was approached
recently by a LostCousins member who was in that precise situation.
I was amazed to discover that
the Black Friday sale at Amazon has already started. It’s not too late to sign
up for a free trial of Amazon Prime, but if you do, please use the links in my
last newsletter (you'll find them here).
In the same article you'll find the details of the Dog DNA discount offer which
started yesterday (Thursday).
And whether
or not you sign up for Amazon Prime, please use one of the links below
to visit their Black Friday Sale - you can save money ans
support LostCousins at the same time!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Good news! At noon (London time) on Sunday 24th November the
Findmypast.and British Newspaper Archive offers were still running, although it was necessary to enter the relevant discount
code on order to secure the reduced prices. UPDATE: the discount codes were still working at 9.55am on Monday, but please
remember to use the link in the article above!
I hope you've
been enjoying reading Ignoring Gravity, the free genealogical mystery
novel from Sandra Danby which I gave away in the last issue. If you haven't
downloaded your free copy yet you'll find all the details here.
Enjoy - and see you again soon!
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
Peter Calver
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