Newsletter – 19th
October 2022
1921 Revisited – with a subscription!
Researching homes and workplaces
That’s the way the cookie crumbles
Latest news from ScotlandsPeople
Where there’s a way there’s a will
Why clerical errors would of occurred frequently
Poetry over the ears EXCLUSIVE
The LostCousins
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1921 Revisited – with a subscription!
One
of the reasons I’ve been waiting for the 1921 England & Wales census to
become part of a subscription is to track down my grandfather’s fellow workers.
When my maternal grandfather retired from his job as a boilermaker at the age
of 65 in 1947 he was given a clock with an inscription which read:
Presented by
The Directors of
Towler & Son Ltd
To F.R.Wells
on his retirement
after 47 years service with the Company
1900 - 1947
Grandad died in 1954,
not long after my 4th birthday, so I never really knew him – indeed I
have no memories of him at all, even though we all lived in the same house! But
that clock was on the mantelpiece when I was growing up, an ever-present
reminder that Grandad had spent his entire adult career working for the same employer.
Many
years later, when I started researching my family tree, I sat down with my
aunt, then in her late 80s, going through family photographs – and thank
goodness I did, because I wouldn’t have known who most of them were. It turned
out that one of the photos showed my grandfather with some of his work
colleagues. Grandad is on the far right in the picture – goodness knows what he
has on his head!
I
don’t know when this photo was taken, but it could well have been around the
time of the 1921 Census, when Grandad was in his late 30s (though I’m sure
there’s someone reading this who knows more about early 20th century
fashion than I do, and can be more precise).
I
also don’t know who any of the others are – my aunt thought that one of them
might have been George Pepperell, a cousin of grandfather on his mother’s side,
because she knew that he had also worked for Towler & Son – as the 1921
Census subsequently confirmed:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives and used
by permission of Findmypast
But
she didn’t recognise him in the photo, so out of the 10 people pictured my
grandfather is the only one I can name.
One
of innovations of the 1921 Census was the recording of each person’s employer and
place of work, so I could easily search for employees of Towler & Son – but
the search results included employees of other companies with a similar name,
as well as some whose employer was not ‘Towler’ but ‘Fowler’ (which looks very
similar, and is a much more common surname). It would have been prohibitively
expensive to look at every image, so I decided to wait until the census became
part of a subscription, as previously experience suggested it would (eventually).
Now
that I have unlimited access to the census I’m steadily working my way through
the list. Of course, there will be many more than 10 employees – a 1922
directory listing suggests there were about 100 in all – but looking at the smiling
faces in the photo I get the feeling that they were all good mates, so they
probably did similar jobs. Once I have a shortlist of possible candidates I’ll
enter them on my My Ancestors page using the 1911 Census as my source,
and giving the relationship as ‘Employment’ – I bet there’s someone receiving
this newsletter who is related to one of the workers in the picture!
Tip:
if you’re looking for people in the same area who have the same occupation
there’s a link you can click when you view the transcript for an individual –
however, the fact that they do the same job doesn’t necessarily mean they work
for the same employer.
Remember,
if you have a 12 month Pro or Ultimate subscription you can upgrade to the new
Premium subscription for just £19.99 (or local currency equivalent), no matter
how long your subscription has to run. If you have a lesser 12 month
subscription it’ll cost you more, but you’ll also be adding the biggest online collection
of British newspapers there is, and all of Findmypast’s world records.
The
Premium subscription is only available as a 12 month subscription, and it’s the
only one that includes the 1921 England & Wales census. Please use the
relevant link below, whether you’re upgrading or buying a new subscription:
Researching homes and workplaces
I’ve
just been reading a fascinating blog post by Dave Annal, a professional
genealogist who worked for the National Archives and knows more about the
censuses than just about anyone.
Entitled Our
Ancestral Places he describes
how he has embarked on a long-term project to identify the locations where his
ancestors lived and worked using historical maps, Google Street View, and everything
in between. The example in his recent post comes from the 1861 Census, so he
was fortunate that the cottage where his ancestor lived was still standing – had
he been working through the 1921 Census, as I will be for some months to come,
the chance that buildings still remain would have been much higher.
In
1921 my grandparents were living at 16 Richford Road, Plaistow – in the house
where my mother was to be born, a little under 5 years later (she was just a few
weeks older than our late Queen). In 1920 a large-scale (6 inches to the mile) Ordnance
Survey map of the area was published, and I was able to view it free at the National Library of Scotland
website, which has maps for the whole of Great Britain, not just Scotland. I
then went to Google Maps and switched to Street View by dragging the doll-like
icon in the bottom right to Richford Road.
Fortunately the
houses in the area are still standing, and I soon found the right house . Many
of the properties have been substantially altered over the past century but –
from the outside at least – No.16 seems to have retained most of the period
features, even if the windows are now uPVC rather than wood.
Switching
to Google Earth I looked at Richford Road from above – all the houses on both
sides of the road now have two-storey extensions at the back. In the second half
of the 20th century there were grants available to add indoor
toilets and bathrooms to older properties which had been built without
facilities which we now regard as essential. (When a friend of mine bought a
house in East Ham in the 1980s one of the first things he did was have a
bathroom added – I think there were still grants available, even then.)
But
in 1921 there were just 4 rooms in my grandfather’s house, even though there
were 6 people living there (3 adults and 3 children); it must have been cramped.
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy
of The National Archives and used by permission of Findmypast
It’s
instructive to compare the entry for my grandfather with that for his cousin
George Pepperell – although they have slightly different jobs, they both worked
for the same company at the same location. However Towler & Son has been allocated
two different industry codes within the metal working category: 159 is ‘Other engineering
– other’, but 222 is ‘Boilers and tanks’. You can check how your ancestors’ occupations
and employers
have been classified in tables on the Findmypast site (no subscription is required
to view the tables).
Although
my main focus was on Towlers, I couldn’t help noticing that my grandmother’s sister,
Clara, was shown as working at the Peek Freans biscuit factory in Bermondsey,
on the other side of the River Thames – I wonder how she got to work? I very
much doubt that my grandfather knew that his great-grandmother, daughter of a
German leather worker, was brought up in Bermondsey – like me he would really only
have known one of his four grandparents, as one died before he was born and two
of the others before he was 5 years old.
That’s
the way the cookie crumbles
What
the Americans call a cookie is what I’d call a biscuit – at least, it was until
I started visiting the US regularly in the 1980s and became bilingual. After
discovering that my great aunt Clara worked for Peek Freans I did some research
on the Internet, and came across a 1906 film shot inside the factory – you can
watch it here. I also
discovered that Peek Freans invented some of the favourite biscuits of my
childhood: Garibaldi, Bourbon, and Twiglets (the origin of Custard Creams – my
other favourite – seems to be lost in the mists of time).
A
more surprising discovery is that there is a Peek Freans Museum on the site of
the old biscuit factory, which closed in the late 80s. Visitors need to make an
appointment – you can find out more here and here
(their website is being updated, but the email address given in one of the
articles still works).
Whilst
on the subject of small museums, I’d like to mention Felixstowe Museum which is
run by my younger brother – a conservator by trade, he spent most of his career
working for big museums (including the British Museum, the Museum of London,
and the Imperial War Museum). Last week Felixstowe Museum won Small Museum of
the Year in the Suffolk Museum awards, and my brother’s previous employer, the
National Horseracing Museum was highly commended in the Large Museum category (there’s
a local news report here).
If you haven’t visited Felixstowe Museum before, please note that it is closed
during the winter – this coming weekend and the following weekend are the last
opportunities to visit before April 2023. Visit the museum website now to find out more.
Note:
one of the compensations for being served very small cups of coffee in
continental Europe is the provision of small caramelised biscuits, and I discovered
recently that my supermarket sells Lotus Biscoff, supposedly the original biscuit
of this type. I bought a pack to go with my mid-morning coffee, and whilst they
were everything I remembered, I realised that what had been a delightful
occasional treat was no longer nearly so special when I indulged myself every
day. I’ll be going back to digestives when the pack runs out.
Latest news from ScotlandsPeople
When
the October newsletter from ScotlandsPeople arrived in my inbox yesterday I was
hoping there would be an update on the release of the 1921 Census that I could
pass on – but there wasn’t.
However
there was link to a resource I wasn’t previously aware of, the National Records
of Scotland YouTube account, which has recordings of talks and interviews with
archivists as well as presentations that provide insight into records in their
collection – you’ll find it here.
Note:
I’m not the only who was unaware of this resource – there were only 162
subscribers when I looked.
Nearly
7 months ago the personal data of millions of FamilySearch users – myself included
– was exposed during a cyber-attack. You might wonder why it has taken so long
for us to find out – it seems that although they immediately notified the
relevant authorities they were asked to keep the incident confidential until a
week ago.
Fortunately
FamilySearch is rather like LostCousins in that no payment details are held,
but nevertheless it’s possible that the names, email addresses and (if
provided) postal addresses and phone numbers were accessed.
Is
it something you should worry about? Probably not given everything else that is
going on in the world at the moment. But it’s good practice to use two-factor
authentication where this is offered, and to use different passwords for different
websites.
Note:
if you are warned by your browser that one of your passwords has been included
in a data breach, the chances are that it’s nothing to do with you or the site you’re
logging into. It usually means that someone else happened to use the same
password, and it was their account that was hacked into – let’s face it, with
billions of people using the Internet, and each of us having dozens of
different passwords, there can’t be that many which are totally unique.
I’m
often asked whether I think that the genealogists of the future will struggle
to unravel the name changes that have become so common – and the answer is that
I don’t. The reason we struggle with name changes in the 19th
century is not only because so few of those changes were documented, but also
because many of them were deliberately designed to confuse – either to escape
creditors, or to escape justice (or both).
The
celebrity name changes we hear about in the media, such as Kanye West’s recent transformation
into ‘Ye’, or Prince’s adoption of an unpronounceable
symbol, are just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s an iceberg that is usually well-documented.
Although it’s still the case that (in England, at least) one can change one’s
name at the drop of a hat, these days it’s almost impossible to do so
discreetly – anyone who has changed their name can attest to the difficulty of
convincing one’s bank to change the name on the account!
Admittedly
it can be more difficult to identify those whose surnames changed when they
were children, perhaps because they acquired a stepfather, but that’s hardly a
new phenomenon – most 19th century widows with young children remarried
(often it was the only way to escape the workhouse).
Birth
certificates have a column for name changes on baptism – however it’s rarely
completed, even though it’s far from unusual for a middle name to be added (often
to honour a godparent). But this week a LostCousins member told me about on
occasion when the name change was recorded in the birth register, and for
a very special reason:
My wife Patricia was born in 1940 at the
Fulmer Chase military hospital in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire. Her father had just
joined the army to serve during WW II. He and his wife had been living in
Northern Ireland and he was now stationed in England. My wife’s birth
certificate has her name as Patricia, but at the end of the certificate there
is column 10, not usually filled in, which is for “Baptized Name if added after
Registration of birth”.
Her name in this column is given as Patricia
Jane Elizabeth, because an event occurred that caused her parents to add one of
the two extra names. King George’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, was about to make a
visit to the military hospital as part of the royal family’s support duties,
and the hospital staff wanted a new born baby on location for the Queen’s
visit. Patricia was the only baby available and she and her mother were about
to leave, so the hospital staff asked her mother to stay on for the Queen’s
visit. All went well and when the Queen saw Patricia she patted Patricia on the
head, hence my wife’s third name. The other name, Jane, may have been from a
distant relative.
Funnily enough, years later, the Queen (by
now Queen Mother) and Patricia met again when Patricia was about to graduate
from Queen’s University, Belfast. The Queen Mother was officiating at the
inauguration of the new physics building and was met by some of the graduates,
including Patricia.
That brings us to the passports. Her US
passport has Patricia Jane, while her UK passport has Patricia Jane Elizabeth.
To renew her UK passport it must have the same name as does the US passport.
After many phone calls and much mailing of documents, all should be well.
There’s
a little bit of information about the military hospital in this Fulmer
village newsletter (it’s on page 10).
Where
there’s a way there’s a will
The
tip about will
ordering in the first newsletter of the month was very much appreciated –
so much so that several readers asked if they could include it in their own
newsletters or journals.
However
I don’t allow articles from this newsletter to be republished except in the
most exceptional circumstances – that’s because the main reason this newsletter
exists is to introduce researchers to LostCousins in the hope that they will take
part in my project to connect cousins around the world. But what I do allow – indeed,
encourage – is the publication of links to individual newsletter articles.
To
link to an article simply right-click on the title of the article in the
contents list at the start of the newsletter, and choose ‘Copy link’ or the
equivalent in your browser. You can then paste the link (not the article
itself) into an email, a forum post, or a publication of your own.
Why clerical errors would of occurred frequently
Goodness
me – it’s a long time since an article in this newsletter has caused as much
controversy as the one in the last
newsletter which gave an example of a bride who was recorded in the
marriage register as Mathew.
I
was swamped with emails from volunteer transcribers who had come across this
error so often in old registers that they believed that Mathew was once regarded
as an alternative to Martha. However the frequency with which an error
occurs does not necessarily make it an acceptable alternative, as the deliberate
error in the title of this article demonstrates: I doubt that anyone reading
this newsletter would regard the frequent confusion between would of and
would’ve as establishing one as a genuine alternative to the other.
Many
of you will know that this newsletter often includes inadvertent errors; what
you might not realise is just how many are weeded out before you get to see it.
Some of the mistakes I make seem quite ridiculous when viewed in the cold light
of day, but for someone like me who types what he hears, they are par for the
course. I don’t know what percentage of the population talk to themselves as
they write, but I regard it as an asset – it encourages me to write in a more
conversational way. It also helps to explain why in my youth I would compose
poetry using a portable typewriter on my lap, rather than writing it by hand in
a more traditional manner – it was a more immersive experience. But it can lead
to the most ridiculous errors when I mishear something I said!
Another
factor to consider is that writing up a register with a quill pen was a bit of
a chore, one that many clerics would have done reluctantly. It’s understandable
that someone who looks at a parish register will assume that the entry was written
on the date of the event that is being recorded, but that isn’t how it worked in
practice – except for marriages from 1754 onwards, when participants and
witnesses were required to sign the register. Modern transcribers are
volunteers who enjoy transcribing hard to read handwriting: most clerics hated
the chore of writing up the registers, so you’d expect mistakes to have been
made even if they weren’t relying on hastily scribbled notes and
less-than-perfect memories (which they often were).
In
the case of Martha Church, who was recorded as Mathew when she married, I
pointed out in the original article that she was Martha when her first child
was baptised (an entry that is in the same handwriting as the marriage). I might
have added that all of the baptisms of her children show her as Martha, as does
her own baptism. Unless and until someone can show me a female Mathew who was consistently
recorded under that name I shall stick with my belief that it’s nothing but a
clerical error!
More than half a
century ago I joined the Poem of the Month Club, which entitled me to
receive a previously unpublished poem each month – some of them by poets who
were already famous, but mostly by poets I wasn’t familiar with. It was a way
of supporting and encouraging poets, and I may well have thought at the time
that it was also an investment, though since the subscription cost 5 guineas a
year – around £100 in today’s money – it was certainly rather extravagant for an
impoverished student like myself!
But
in my adolescent years I wrote a bit of poetry and whilst none of it was ever published
(unless you count the university poetry magazine, which seemed to print almost
anything), supporting and encouraging other poets felt like the right thing to
do. And as you can see from the photo I still have the poems today – a reminder
of a time of my life when everything and anything seemed possible!
At
this point you might be worried that I’m going to inflict some of my poetry on
you: don’t worry, that isn’t going to happen. But I am going to tell you about a
modern service that comes closer than any to the original concept of the Poem
of the Month Club – it’s called Poems by Post. I was contacted out
of the blue by the founder, Alex, who couldn’t possibly have known about my past
– it was one of those serendipitous moments.
Poems
by Post
isn’t a direct descendant of the Poem of the Month Club – but it’s very similar
in that it promotes poets (and artists) by making their work available to a
wider audience. Although for logistical reasons the poems aren’t signed by the
authors, you can opt for a hand-typed poem – a really nice touch!
I
was so impressed by what Alex has done that I promised to write about his
venture – and in return I managed to negotiate an exclusive half-price offer for
LostCousins members. The discount only lasts until the end of October, but if
you want to buy Christmas gift with a difference you can specify the month in
which the subscription starts. Click the banner above (if you can see it) or else
this link – either way
the coupon code should be entered automatically but you won’t see the
discounted prices until you go to the checkout.
Even
if you can’t think of anyone who would appreciate a special gift, take a look
at the website – you never know, you might decide to buy yourself an early
Christmas present!
Nostalgic
footnote: hearing about Alex’s hand-typed poems reminded of the late 70s, when
I started publishing computer software on cassette tapes – remember those? I
used a John Bull Printing Outfit to stamp the names of the programs on the
cassette labels, but it was a rather tedious task because I only had enough
letters for two or three titles, so I spent most of the time fiddling with the
rubber type (and getting ink smudges on my fingers). If you’ve got one of those
early ‘Supersoft’ cassettes it’s quite a rarity!
I was privileged to
receive an advance copy of Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s new book – entitled The
Sawtooth Slayer, it’s the second book in the Venator Cold Case series, in which
investigative genetic genealogy is used to solve crimes. The first book in the
series, The Chester Creek Murders was a great success, with 77% of Amazon
reviewers awarding 5 stars (and most of the rest gave it 4 stars).
I’ll
be reviewing the new book in a future newsletter, but you can order it in
advance if you follow the relevant link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Initially
it’ll only be available as a Kindle book, but I’ve no doubt it will come out in
paperback in due course. However if you can’t wait, remember you don’t need to
own a Kindle (or any tablet) to read Kindle books – there are free apps for most
smartphones, tablets, and computers. Although I own a Kindle I prefer to read
Kindle books on my smartphone, as I always have it with me.
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 back next week with another exclusive offer for LostCousins
members – but more prose than poetry. Until then, keep adding those relatives
and finding those cousins – why wouldn’t you want to collaborate with researchers
who are just as experienced as you are, especially when they’re researching
YOUR ancestors?
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2022 Peter Calver
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