Newsletter
- 20th October 2017
How to avoid
errors when ordering BMD certificates
12 months, 8 billion records, 10% less BREAKING NEWS
Will you qualify for a free LostCousins upgrade?
ScotlandsPeople add 1935 Valuation Rolls NEW
Irish regiments of the British Army online
Hearth Tax Online out of action
The chips are down at Ancestry DNA
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
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October) click here; to find earlier articles use the
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How to avoid errors when
ordering BMD certificates
There's nothing worse than spending out £9.25
on a certificate from the GRO, waiting for it to arrive, then finding out that
you've ordered the wrong one - and yet it's a mistake we've all made in the
past.
Prior to 6th April 2010 the GRO offered
a service where you would pay £3 (or was it £3.50) and they'd check each entry
in a list until they found that matched the criteria you specified. You'd pay
the normal cost of the certificate plus the checking fee for each entry they'd
checked - it was a sort of insurance policy.
But in 2010 somebody in the corridors of
power re-read the legislation and realised that there was no authority to charge
for this service - on reading the announcement most people assumed that it had
been discontinued. But it hadn't been discontinued - it just worked a bit
differently. And best of all, it was now free!
When I wrote about the checking service
in the last issue of this newsletter I explained
how to place an order, but I didn't mention that there is a limit to how many
entries will be checked. Subsequently a LostCousins member who is a
professional genealogist reminded me that the GRO will only check a maximum 6
entries - which might possibly cause a problem if you're searching for someone
with a very common forename/surname combination.
It's not a problem you'll run into very
often, because you have to specify the registration district,
and they'll only search three years (the year you specify and one on either
side). Even 'John Smith' tends not to show up more than 6 times in a 3 year period, at least not in the registration districts I
checked. (You might, however, run into a problem if you're searching for a 'John
Jones' in Wales, because in some parts of Wales a quarter of the inhabitants
are called Jones.)
It's not a foolproof
solution - the GRO will stop searching as soon as they find an entry that
matches the criteria you specify, so you may never know that there was another
matching entry. On the other hand, if you're too specific you might be told the
entry can't be found, even though there's a 'near match'.
Tip:
if you can, avoid specifying an
occupation - since there can be many different ways of
describing the same job.
The good news is that if they don't find
a matching entry you won't be charged at all, whereas if they find an entry
that matches all the criteria you specified - it's very probably the one you
wanted.
I can't imagine that this free service
will last for ever: now that the GRO has more flexibility, subject to
Ministerial approval, to offer different services at different prices, there
will probably come a point where they'll start charging (or else discontinue
the service altogether). But while you can, take advantage of their generosity!
Finally, if you are unsatisfied with the
service you receive from the GRO you can now contact them online by following
this link.
12 months, 8 billion
records, 10% less BREAKING
NEWS
Just as I was starting to unwind after a
very busy week news came through from Findmypast of a discount offer on all NEW
12 month World subscriptions - it runs until midnight
(London time) on 31st October (but see note below about the UK link).Fortunately
I'd already started putting this newsletter together, so I was able to rush it
out for the weekend - I know that for a lot of readers it's the only time you
get a chance to work on your family tree.
The discount applies at all four of
Findmypast's sites, and to encourage you to use my links I'm once again giving away
LostCousins subscriptions to those who take up the Findmypast offer.
Tip:
remember that Findmypast offer a generous 15% discount to subscribers who
renew, so you can look forward to paying even less in 12 months' time (assuming
there are no changes in the price structure).
All World subscriptions are the same,
providing unlimited access to the entire Findmypast collection, which includes
over 8 billion historical records and articles, including many which aren't
available elsewhere, such as the 1939 Register for England & Wales, the
British Newspaper Archive, and parish registers that no other site has.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that for technical reasons the offer at the UK site will end at 5.30pm on Wednesday 25th October; fortunately it shouldn't cost any more to subscribe to the Australian site instead (and it might even cost less). Remember, when you have a World subscrption you can log-in at any of the Findmypast sites.
The offer applies to new and lapsed
subscribers only. If your subscription has recently lapsed you might have to log-out
from your Findmypast account before clicking the link.
Will you qualify for a
free LostCousins upgrade?
If you take
up Findmypast's offer I'll give you a free LostCousins subscription worth up to
£12.50 for supporting LostCousins - just make sure that:
(1) you haven't installed ad-blocking software;
(2) tracking is enabled in your
browser (it will be unless someone has changed the setting); and
(3) when you click the link you can see the words 'content=LostCousins' on the
browser command line when you arrive at the Findmypast site (it might be off
the screen, but if so just place the cursor on the command line and move to the
right until you see it)
Why is
this important? Your LostCousins subscription will be funded by the commission
that Findmypast pay us - get it wrong and we'll all lose out!
To claim
your free subscription just forward to me the email receipt that Findmypast
will send you (you can use any of the LostCousins email addresses, including
the one I wrote from to tell you about this newsletter). Please make a note of
the precise time of your purchase in case the email doesn't
arrive - I must have that time to confirm your entitlement. Your LostCousins
subscription will run from the date of your Findmypast purchase unless you
already have a subscription, in which case I'll extend it by 12 months.
Feel free
to circulate a link to this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested.
ScotlandsPeople add
1935 Valuation Rolls
Although the 1939 Register for Scotland
isn't available online (though you can order an extract here),
ScotlandsPeople have recently released the 1935 Valuation Rolls, which will
provide clues to what your ancestors were doing around the same time.
Searching the rolls is free, but you'll
need credits if you want to view the records. You can find out more here.
Irish regiments of the
British Army online
There are some interesting items in the
National Army Museum's collection, but it wasn't until MJ Lee (author of The
American Candidate) told me that I realised that they have the
enlistment books for Irish regiments of the British Army which were disbanded
following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. There are nearly
12000 men listed, and you can search free here.
Note:
I took the opportunity to check whether there's another book in the Jayne
Sinclair series on its way - and I'm delighted to say that there is.
In the last issue I mentioned the index
of approximately 300,000 soldiers who were born before 1901 and discharged after
1920. I believe the significance of the birth date is that they would have been
old enough to be conscripted during the Great War - and that's very important,
because most (about 60%) of the service files for WW1 soldiers were destroyed
by enemy action during WW2.
Until recently, if you didn't find your
ancestors' records online, it would have been natural to assume that they were
amongst the 60% whose files were burned. But if your ancestor stayed in the
army after the WW1 - or joined up again - the chances are that his file would
have been stored elsewhere, and that's why this new index is so important.
Although it costs £30 to get a service
file from the MoD (unless it is requested by the soldier concerned or their
spouse), at one time the more discouraging factor was the delay of well over a
year in obtaining the copy. I'm glad to say that now the delay appears to have
reduced to just weeks for Army and RAF records, though 5 to 8 months is still being quoted for
Navy records.
Hearth Tax Online out of
action
The Hearth
Tax Online website hosted by the University of Roehampton is still out of
action having been hit by a massive cyberattack. On the other hand, the British Army Ancestors website,
which was hit on Monday evening, was back online the following day.
One of the delights of browsing through
parish registers is the occasional unexpected discovery of items that you wouldn't
usually expect to find, such as Jane Austen's alterations to the marriage
register for her father's church. I wrote about Austen's youthful indiscretion
in March - you can read the article again here.
A few weeks later LostCousins member
Gerald came across this sombre poem in one of the parish registers for Shalbourne in Wiltshire:
Reproduced by kind permission of
Wiltshire & Swindon Archives
Written by G M Johnson "in
moralizing mood" it is hardly an uplifting work, but I hope that one of
you can finish it off by providing suitable endings for the lines in the first
verse, which seem to have suffered water damage (perhaps the tears of someone
who read the poem?). Email your suggestions to me, and I'll publish my
favourite in a future issue.
Other delights I've come across in parish
registers in the past include lists of the inhabitants, recipes for healing potions,
and a map of the vicarage garden identifying the different trees. But what’s the
most surprising thing that you've found?
In the next newsletter I'm hoping to
feature a rather unusual offer - it's designed to encourage experienced
researchers like you to give a little helping hand to friends and relatives who
would like to research their family tree, but don't have your experience.
I suggest you ask around and make a note
of who is interested - but please don’t invite them to join LostCousins just
yet (you'll see why in the next issue!).
In the last newsletter I mentioned the French criminologist Alphonse
Bertillon and referred you to an article
about him that I wrote years ago.
My wife spotted some rather grisly crime
scene photos from the early 20th century which were found in Bertillon's case
files and published in the Daily Mail
in May this year - you'll find them here.
The chips are down
at Ancestry DNA
One of the reasons I recommend testing
with Ancestry is because it's the only way to get access to their enormous database
of more than 5 million tests results - and you've got the option of uploading
your results to GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA to make further matches there.
Or have you? Jerri wrote to tell me that
she was unable to upload her results to Family Tree DNA because of a change in
the file format, and she could only upload them to GEDmatch using the new
Genesis system, which is in beta testing.
Is it a change in the file format, or
have Ancestry switched to a different chip? When I asked Jerri how many lines
of data she had in her file it was about 18,000 lines shorter than mine. A
small part of the difference could be because I have Y-DNA and Jerri doesn't -
but on the other hand the file for my wife's results is the same length as
mine.
At the moment the best guess is that
they've switched to a different chip - presumably V3 as we've already had V1 and
V2 - but I'm waiting for confirmation.
Note:
the change doesn't, of course, affect matching with other Ancestry users.
I'm not going to mention the recent
demise of former American game show host Monty Hall because the last time I
wrote about him, and the puzzle that the show inspired, I was deluged with correspondence
(you can read all about it here).
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 2017 Peter
Calver
Please do NOT copy or
republish any part of this newsletter without permission - which is only
granted in the most exceptional circumstances. However,
you MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for
permission - though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins
instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?