Newsletter - 19th September 2019
Join
me at the Royal Institution on Monday FREE
Tracing your Medieval and Early Modern Ancestors FREE
Last chance to get a free DNA test UK
ONLY
Stop Press
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 13th September)
click here;
to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this
paragraph and the next (it searches ALL of the newsletters since February 2009,
so you don't need to keep copies):
To go to the main LostCousins website click the
logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a member, do join -
it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you whenever there's a new edition
of this newsletter available!
Join me at the Royal
Institution on Monday FREE
On the evening of Monday 23rd
September DNA experts - including long-time LostCousins member Debbie Kennett -
will be at the Royal Institution in London's Albemarle Street discussing the good,
the bad, and the ugly of DNA testing in a panel session entitled DNA testing
kits and me. Tickets are £17 (or £10 for over 60s like me), and doors open
at 6.30pm for 7pm start.
If you're interested in attending
or finding out more follow this link
- but if you are over 60 you may be able to attend free of charge! I've
bought 4 extra tickets to give away to LostCousins members, and the
first 4 members who contact me will get them.
Note: I will update this
article when all the tickets are gone. As of 2pm on Monday there were still
TWO free tickets unclaimed so I'm now offering them to ANYONE over 60 (even if
thery're not yet a LostCousins member)!
Tracing your
Medieval and Early Modern Ancestors FREE
In the last issue I mentioned
a talk by Michael Gandy at the Society of Genealogists entitled Tracing your
Medieval Ancestors: The Realistic Possibilities which was scheduled for
26th September. This event has now disappeared from the SoG
calendar (it had already been rescheduled once) though in any case, fewer than 0.1%
of the readers of this newsletter could have attended - not because of distance,
infirmity, or prior commitments, though they would have been factors for many -
but because the room wouldn’t have been big enough!
So, for the 99.9% who
couldn't have been there, here is a link
to a free one hour talk by the renowned historian Professor Nick Barratt. Entitled
Tracing your Medieval and Early Modern Ancestors it is on the Findmypast
website, but not only do you not need a subscription, you don't even need to
register or sign-in!
Last chance
to get a free DNA test UK ONLY
I've had confirmation that next
week Findmypast are going to stop giving away DNA tests to researchers who
purchase a Plus or Pro subscription at their UK site - the final
date of the offer will be Thursday 26th September.
Remember, if you use my link
you could also get a free LostCousins subscription, paid for by the commission
we receive from Findmypast (but it's up to you to ensure that tracking is
enabled in your browser, and that you haven't installed an adblocker or other
software that will block tracking). See my articles
in the 6th September newsletter for full details of the offers.
Of course, Findmypast are
relative newcomers in the field of DNA, so you won’t be matched with many cousins
in their database - at least, not in the foreseeable future. But that really doesn’t
matter, because when you upload your results to GEDmatch and MyHeritage you'll
get thousands of matches with genetic cousins - so it’s a great, cost-free way
for those of you who can’t make up your mind whether DNA is worthwhile to
"dip a toe in the water".
The 85% price cut has created
such a backlog that most wills are being delivered a month or more after the
supposed delivery date. If you’re one of those waiting for wills please join
the discussion at the LostCousins Forum where you'll be able to compare your
own experiences with those of other members. (Please don't write to me direct on
this topic as any information I have will be published in this newsletter
and/or on the forum.)
Tip: you don’t need to be
a member of the forum to read what other people have posted, but you will need
to join in order to post messages of your own. If you qualify there will be an
invitation on your My Summary page.
When I was corresponding with
a member last weekend I mentioned how useful I had found
Friends Reunited when it launched at the turn of the millennium, and this
prompted her to tell me this poignant story:
"I
became a member of Friends Reunited in 2002, and was able to reconnect with
quite a few 'old' school friends. However, what I
didn't expect just three weeks after joining is receiving a message from my son
who I gave up for adoption in 1970 when he was a week old.
"Apparently he had applied for his adoption papers two years
earlier and had been looking for me all that time, never thinking that I wasn't
living in England (I emigrated in 1974). In his first message he told me a
lot about himself that I had been wondering about over the years (his changed
name, marital status, children, occupation, who he looked like), though I never
had any thoughts of trying to find him.
"We
finally met up three years later back in England. It was good to spend
time with him, but as much as we both wanted our new-found relationship to
work, it didn't. I guess when you join these social network sites you have
to expect the unexpected."
Do you have an adoption story
that I can feature in the newsletter? If so, please get in touch(
although I don’t include my email address on the LostCousins website, it
was in the email that told you about this newsletter).
Jane was inspired to write to
me by Barbara's story in the last newsletter - I suspect that Jane's story will
prove just as inspiring!
"I
enjoyed reading the story about the woman finding her mother’s friend's family
and sharing the letters. I had a successful mini mystery of my own that I resolved
thanks to Internet detective work.
"We
did a family trip to Scotland in 1980 with my grandparents, and I remember stopping
by this house below, to see if my grandfather’s cousin ‘Chrissy’ was home. There
was no answer so after waiting awhile we left. My grandfather hadn’t been back
to Scotland since the 1930’s so he wasn’t even sure if she was alive or still
living there. I have no idea where we were or which side of his family this
cousin Chrissy was from.
"My
grandfather has since passed away and no one else could give me any details. but
I was organizing some of my grandmother’s photos and while her photos were pretty
similar to the photos that I took on the trip, her
photo of this house had ‘Struan’ marked on the back. I Googled 'Struan', only
to find that there is more than one place in Scotland called Struan, so I went
on Google Streetview and found that the houses looked
different in each village - but that one village resembled the building style
of Chrissy’s house.
"I
then found a Bed & Breakfast in Struan with an email address and sent them
a photo of the house and asked if they knew where it was (I figured a B&B
owner was easily reachable, and they would likely know their village). I had a
very quick reply that the house was ‘Bridge House’ and not only was it just
down the road from them, her husband knew the people that had lived there. Once
I heard the name everything fell into place - my grandfather’s mother had died
at Bridge House in the 1930’s (he had the death certificate) and it was the
home of her daughter (Chrissy would have been my grandfather’s cousin). I was very
pleased to have that little mystery resolved, something that wouldn’t have been
possible without the internet!"
What impressed me about
Jane's story is the way she moved from one Internet resource to another, ending
with the masterstroke - the email to the B&B. Yes, she was lucky to get
such a helpful response, but if there's one thing that I've learned from my own
research, it’s that doing something is better than throwing up our hands in
horror and saying "It can't be done".
There was an amazing response
to the article
in the last newsletter: I had an email from a reader who was related to Christopher
Robin Milne on his father's side, another from a reader who was related on his
mother's side, a third from a reader whose 19th century farming ancestor lived
at Cotchford Farm, where A A
Milne and his family lived in the early 20th century, and a fourth from a
reader who, earlier this year, stayed in the Devon holiday cottage where
Christopher Robin used to live.
Considering that this
newsletter goes out to over 67,000 family historians I shouldn't, perhaps, have
been surprised to find that there so many connections between the Milne family
and the membership, but I nevertheless still found it pretty
amazing.
Meanwhile I spotted this article
from the Brighton Argus, which will also be of interest to fans of the books.
Note:a later owner of Cotchford
Farm was former Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Two days
after he was found dead in the swimming pool I was amongst the crowd of more
than a quarter of a million at the Rolling Stones
concert in Hyde Park, where thousands of white butterflies were released in
his memory.
Remember when you were still studying,
and had to sit exams? The examiners posed questions, you had to answer them as
best you could - and whilst it usually helped if you had a choice of questions
to answer, if you didn’t know the answers to any of them you were unlikely to
pass. Inspired guesswork can only get you so far.
These days family historians
are more likely to be testing their DNA than taking exams, but there's an interesting
parallel between the two activities. When you're matched with a genetic cousin the
first thing you want to know is "How are we related?" - and answering
that question is crucial to making sense of your DNA results.
Now consider that you'll have
thousands, or (if you followed my advice and tested with Ancestry) tens of
thousands of matches with genetic cousins. Yes, it's better to have more
matches than fewer matches - however what you really need is not more questions,
but more answers!
Someone said to me the other
day, "Why should I search for 'lost cousins' when I already have more
genetic cousins than I can possibly handle?". What I gently explained to
him is that genetic cousins are questions, whereas documented cousins are answers.
Often all you know about a
genetic cousin is that you have a shared ancestor - but in 99% of cases that
shared ancestor could be anywhere between 4 and 14 generations back. (Bearing
in mind that once you go back more than 10 generations
we're all related, you might begin to wonder what the point of DNA testing is!)
A documented cousin can be
someone you already know - or someone you find using LostCousins. In each case the
evidence for the connection is set out in historic records - BMD registers,
parish registers, censuses and all the other sources that family historians are
accustomed to using: so you not only know that you’re related,
you know how you’re related. And the good news is that you can use this information
to answer the questions posed by your matches with genetic cousins.
How can connections to
documented cousins help you resolve your DNA matches? Simple - if both you and one
of your documented cousins have been matched with the same genetic cousin then it's
very likely that you’re all connected through the same ancestral lines. In
other words, you now know which part of your tree to look in to find the connection
with your genetic cousin - for example, this could be one-eighth of your tree
(if your documented cousin is a 3rd cousin), or one-sixteenth (for a 4th cousin).
This makes it far more likely that you'll be able to find the precise connection
to your genetic cousin.
A reader of Who Do You
Think You Are? magazine recently wrote in with this unusual example, taken
from the Probate Calendar from 1908:
I thought it would be
interesting to dig a little deeper, so I first looked to see whether all of these forenames are shown in her entry in the new GRO
birth indexes. Sadly they aren't - the first four forenames
are shown in full, but the others have been completely
omitted:
By contrast, the contemporary
indexes show the first two forenames followed by 23 initials:
As far as I can tell Ann was
the only child of the marriage. By 1901 Arthur Pepper had been widowed but his
daughter was not living with him; in fact, I struggled to find any mention of
her after 1891 - if you are able to find her please post your research on the
LostCousins Forum (in the Latest Newsletter area) rather than contacting
me direct.
Tip: if the Match
Potential shown on your My Summary page is 1.00 if more then you are invited to
join the LostCousins Forum. If your Match Potential is lower than 1.00 it's
likely that you haven't entered all of your relatives who were recorded in the
1881 Census - remember that all of your living cousins are descended from the
branches of your tree, so tracking the branches and twigs through to 1881 is
crucial.
The lead article in the latest
issue of Genealogist's Magazine, the Journal of the Society of
Genealogists: was written by John Wintrip (whose books
received glowing reviews in this newsletter in March
2017 and March
2018). In it he raises an interesting question - one that I hadn't given
much thought to previously, though I had noticed occasional anomalies: how did
the bride sign the marriage register, ie did she give
her surname as it was before the marriage, or as it was afterwards?
It's a particularly interesting
question because by the time the register is signed the marriage has already taken
place - so it would be quite logical for the bride to give her married surname.
John Wintrip found that between 1754-1837 the practice
varied by parish - and he draws the reader's attention to the printed examples
often found at the beginning of a marriage register.
One thing I've noticed in my
own research is that brides who acted as witnesses at other weddings on the
same day weren't consistent in how they signed their name - some used their
maiden name, even though they were witnessing a marriage that took place after
their own. But the ones that stand out for me are where the bride started
signing her maiden name, but crossed it out, and replaced it with her married
name.
If you're an SoG member the article is well worth reading - I've only
picked out a few highlights.
Goodness knows how the
plumber featured in this BBC article
manages to stay in business, but I wish there were more like him!
Writing about the untimely
death of Brian Jones, who was found in the swimming pool at Cotchford
Farm in 1969, reminded me of the house I bought in 1982. It too had a swimming
pool (those were the days!), and about 10 years' before a previous owner, who was
apparently 'known to the police' had been found dead in that pool - a fact that
the seller wisely chose not to reveal to me until after I'd committed to buy
the property (I didn’t find out about the dry rot until too late, either)! Nevertheless,
for a time I was on top of the world - but just 5 years later I was paying £40 a
week for a rented room in a shared house (though at least I was still alive and
kicking).
I have to say that having
lived in a rented room for the best part of a decade in my late 30s and 40s I tend
not to have a lot of sympathy for the 20-somethings who complain that they can’t
afford to buy a house, but don’t save up for a deposit (as we all did). In an article
in the September issue of The Oldie Tom Hodgkinson commented that his
mother was exaggerating when she said that if only young people stopped buying expensive
cups of coffee they'd find it easier to buy a house - and whilst he's arithmetically
correct, I suspect that Liz Hodgkinson was also right in a way, because people
who will happily spend £3 on a cup of coffee are probably equally lavish when
it comes to meals out and takeaways - to say nothing of foreign holidays and
other forms of entertainment that few of us enjoyed when we were their age.
I've commented previously how
rare it seems to be these days for the younger generation to make a fair contribution
towards the housekeeping when they're still living at home - no wonder they
feel hard up when they finally move out. Indeed, I get the impression that most
pay nothing at all, whereas in 1975 I was giving my parents £20 a week, about £250
a week in today's money.
FRIDAY 20TH: Findmypast
have added baptism, marriage, and burial registers for around a dozen parishes in Cumberland -
you can see which parishes are included if you follow this
link
That's all for
now - but I'll be back in touch soon.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
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?