Newsletter – 29th
September 2021
GRO remove search options – is this a sign of better
things to come? EXCLUSIVE
19th century registrar seeks precision
FamilySearch complete digitisation project
Deleted baptism register entries
Findmypast reaffirm January release date for 1921
Census
32 million additional electoral register
entries now online NEW
Ancestry update ethnicity estimates
'Black Friday' and 'brick walls'
Plans to map churchyards UPDATE
The LostCousins
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GRO
remove search options – is this a sign of better things to come? EXCLUSIVE
The
online England & Wales birth and death indexes provided by the General
Register Office since November 2016 have proven immensely valuable to
researchers, but the limitations of the search have frustrated many. In particular,
the insistence that all searches must include a surname combined with the poor
fuzzy-matching options have made it difficult to find entries where the surname
that has been transcribed doesn’t match the name in the contemporary quarterly
index.
Both indexes were compiled from the same source,
the copy registers held by the GRO, but contemporary indexers were - inevitably
- better able to interpret the registrars' handwriting. Familiarity with the
writing styles is not the only factor – 19th century indexers were working from
the registers themselves, whereas their 21st century successors are working
from scanned microfilms. Of course, when we access the quarterly indexes we tend to rely on sites like Findmypast and FreeBMD which have introduced errors of their own when transcribing
the indexes, but at least we can refer to the images they were working from; we
also benefit from the fact that there are multiple transcriptions. We don’t have
those options when it comes to the new GRO indexes.
Recently the GRO have removed two search options:
one is the option to include Similar Sounding
Variations of the Surname, which applies to both the birth and death indexes (though strangely
it remains an option for the Mother's Maiden Name when searching the birth indexes). The Phonetically
Similar Variations option remains, though neither fuzzy-matching
option has proven particularly useful for experienced family historians who
have, in many cases, already found the entry in the quarterly indexes.
The second change is that you can no longer specify
Age at death when searching the death indexes. Although somewhat clumsy, it was a way
of cutting down the number of results returned, and thereby staying within the
250 results limit.
My hope is that these changes indicate that the GRO
are intending to make their search more useable – fingers crossed!
UPDATE: the GRO have now reinstated the search options.
19th century registrar seeks precision
Except
in the case of infants and very young children, ages on death certificates are
normally recorded in years. LostCousins member Jeff was understandably iintrigued by this death register entry, which is amazingly
precise:
What
wasn't clear from this single entry is whether it was the registrant or the
registrar who had insisted on such a precise measurement of the deceased's age,
so I 'splashed out' on another entry from the same register page:
Although
this isn’t quite as precise, I think it’s a fair assumption that it was Thomas
Hunt, the registrar, who opted for this additional level of precision (and if
you look carefully at the latter entry you can see
part of the word 'days' in the preceding register entry.
By
the way, the name of the town is Horwich, not Norwich (as you might possibly have
thought). I first came across Horwich in the novels of Anne Harvey, a
well-known writer in family history magazines (as well as a long-time member of
LostCousins) – you'll find my review of the first book in the series here.
FamilySearch complete digitisation project
In
March 2017 I revealed
that FamilySearch planned to stop distributing microfilm copies of records to
their Family History Centres around the world and predicted that this apparently
unwelcome news might presage a project to digitise the films. This hunch proved
to be correct, and I'm delighted to report that FamilySearch have now digitised
all 2.4 million reels of microfilm.
This
information, which relates to 11.5 billion individuals, is now available online
at the FamilySearch site provided you are in a FamilySearch Centre or affiliated
library (such as the Society of Genealogists, although their library is
currently closed pending a move to new premises). To find out more see this
FamilySearch blog
posting (and note the questions and answers that follow).
Deleted baptism register entries
Do
you have any thoughts about why these two entries in the baptism register of St
Michael's, Macclesfield have been crossed out?
©
Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Service; used by kind permission of
Findmypast.
The
date might be significant (and not just because the vicar was unable to spell
February correctly!). Between 1783-94 Stamp Duty was charged on parish register
entries, so my guess is that the parents of the two children were unwilling or
unable to pay. Paupers were exempt and pauper entries were often marked with a
'P', but I haven't noticed any such entries in this register.
Findmypast reaffirm January release date for 1921 Census
On
Friday Findmypast issued a press release relating to electoral registers (see
next article) which affirmed their intention to release the 1921 Census for
England & Wales in January. Whilst 1st
January 2022 is the earliest date it could be released under existing
legislation, there has been some uncertainty as to whether the impact of the
pandemic might cause a delay (as it has for the Scottish census).
Of
course, even though a January release date has apparently been confirmed, it doesn’t
mean that the census will be available at the beginning of the month – releasing
such a major dataset on a Bank Holiday might well be seen as an unnecessary
risk – but hopefully we'll be able to search the census at some point during
the month.
We
should make the most of the 1921 Census – it'll be at least 30 years before another
England & Wales census can be released!
32 million additional electoral register entries now online
NEW
Findmypast
have added over 32 million electoral register entries for England & Wales from
1910-19 to their early 20th century collection. It's a very timely addition,
since in January they are expected to release the 1921 Census for England &
Wales, and if – as generally expected – the 1921 Census is initially available
only on a pay-to-view basis, even for subscribers, the opportunity to track
your relatives in the years after the 1911 Census could well save you time and
money in the New Year.
But
whilst 32 million names and 14 million addresses are large numbers, it’s important
to remember that electoral registers were compiled annually, so that rather
than finding all of your male adult relatives in the
collection (as you might expect given the scale of the new addition) you're
more likely to find a fraction of them appearing multiple times. It's also
worth bearing in mind that not everyone could vote during this period – whilst
we hear a lot about 'Votes for Women', there were plenty of men who were
unenfranchised. Also, the rules for local elections were different from those for
parliamentary elections, so you'll find some female names in the registers (as
you can see from this blog article).
Ancestry update ethnicity estimates
I've
said on many occasions that ethnicity estimates are "for amusement
only", but nevertheless I live in hope that one day they'll help me knock
down one of my 'brick walls'. So far I've been disappointed
and the latest revision, revealed this month, hasn't encouraged me to change my
opinion – Ancestry have once again correctly identified that many of my
ancestors came from East Anglia, but there's absolutely no hint of my German
ancestry (which is well documented).
Over
the past year DNA has enabled me to knock down several 'brick walls', so I
certainly don't regret spending out on Ancestry DNA tests for myself, my brother,
and many of my cousins – without it I doubt I would ever have made the breakthroughs.
But these discoveries were the result of analysing matches with genetic cousins
using the techniques in the DNA
Masterclass – ethnicity estimates didn't play any part.
Just
to give you a sense of how little help ethnicity estimates can be, I've yet to find
any Scottish ancestors, even though last year's 3% (range 0%-11%) has increased
to 8% (range 0%-24%). Here's what Ancestry had to say when I clicked Surprised
by your Scotland result:
"The ethnicity regions in your results
are assigned to you because your DNA looks most similar to
the DNA of people with families who’ve lived in those regions for generations.
Many people with Scotland in their results are from Scotland or have ancestors
who lived there. But that’s not the case for everyone, and it might not be for
you.
"This is because borders in 'genetic
geography' don’t always match modern national borders. As people moved from
place to place over time, they often crossed borders we see on the map today.
And as they did, they took their DNA with them.
"There’s a long history of movement
among the places that fall under our Scotland region, from the early Celtic
settlers of Great Britain and Ireland to the 17th-century Plantations in
Northern Ireland.
"The result is a map of shared genetic
heritage that is located primarily in Scotland but reaches across national
boundaries. In fact, on average, people native to England who take a DNA test
see about 20% Scotland in their results."
Until
very recently I hadn’t found any English ancestors who lived further north than
Suffolk, but now I know of one who was in the Staffordshire Militia, so may
well have come from that county. Nevertheless Staffordshire
is a long, long way from Scotland and he's just one of my 64 great-great-great-great
grandparents, who on average have contributed just 1.6% of my DNA…...
Note:
please do NOT write to me about your own ethnicity estimates – I have little enough
interest in my own! If you want to discuss ethnicity estimates please
contribute to this discussion
on the LostCousins forum. (If you're not yet a member please visit your My
Summary page to find out whether you have qualified to join. If not, simply add
more relatives to your My Ancestors page until you do qualify – it won’t take
long provided you focus on the 1881 censuses.)
'Black Friday' and 'brick walls'
The
shopping event known as Black Friday is the time when many suppliers offer
their lowest prices of the year (though as any Which? reader will know,
there are exceptions). If the past few years are anything to go by, DNA tests
will be amongst the discounted products, but please don’t base your purchasing
decision solely on price. All autosomal DNA tests are based on the same technology,
but it's what happens after your sample has been analysed that really matters –
and there's one provider that is head and shoulders above all the others.
Not
only do Ancestry have the largest database (by far), which means that
you'll get many more useful matches with genetic cousins, they are the only
provider to integrate family trees with DNA in a way that makes it easy for
users to knock down 'brick walls' – which is, after all, the primary reason family
historians take DNA tests. The clincher is that if you test with Ancestry you can upload your DNA to most other sites to get
extra matches (if you need them), whereas you cannot go the other way round –
for a whole range of reasons, Ancestry do not accept uploads.
Although
Black Friday is 8 weeks away, now is the time to start preparing. The first
step is to add the rest of your relatives from 1881 to your My Ancestors
page – I know that you think you've already done this, but only one person in
one hundred actually has, and the chances of you being
that person are pretty slim; even after 17 years I am still entering relatives
from 1881, and still finding new cousins.
Remember
that ALL of your living cousins are descended from the
branches of your tree. This means that it’s the relatives from the branches who
are most likely to connect you to them, and the corollary of this is that it doesn’t
much matter where your direct ancestors were in 1881 – it's where your cousins'
ancestors were that matters. For example, if you have British, or mostly
British heritage, it's inevitable that most of your living cousins still live
in Britain and are descended from dead cousins who were recorded in 1881 – and this
applies even if your own ancestors sailed with the First Fleet.
But
what has finding 'lost cousins' got to do with taking a DNA test? As anyone who
has tested will be able to tell you, the biggest challenge is identifying which
of your genetic cousins can help you knock down which 'brick wall'. That's
because it’s rarely obvious how you’re related to your DNA matches – only in a very
small number of instances will the common ancestors appear in both trees, and
whilst Ancestry will cleverly interpolate using other trees, you still won't
know how you're related to the vast majority of your
genetic cousins. One way to deal with this problem is to encourage known
cousins to test, but that's likely to be expensive; on the other hand most active LostCousins members have already taken a
DNA test, so collaborating with the 'lost cousins' you find will allow you to make
the best use of your limited funds.
Connecting
with your 'lost cousins' now and finding out which of them have already taken a
DNA test will mean that in November you'll know how many tests to buy, and who
to buy them for. It’s not rocket science.
Tip:
when you test please remember to update your My
Details page so that your cousins will know that you've already tested.
Plans to map churchyards UPDATE
In
the last issue I warned readers not to be over-optimistic about the Church of
England's plans to map 19,000 parish graveyards and publish the information
line. Information I've received subsequently proves that I was right to urge caution
– it seems that the intention is to map marked graves only, and to rely only on
memorial inscriptions to identify the occupants. One member who single-handedly
mapped and recorded the memorial inscriptions in a London churchyard told me
that only 200 graves had legible inscriptions, and even if you assume there were
multiple names on each memorial it’s still a minuscule fraction of the 50,000
individuals buried there.
Whilst
it is no doubt hoped that volunteers will help to fill the gaps, in many cases
the burial registers are already online, or have been transcribed as part of a
family history society project (and may well be included in the National Burial
Index, which has been available online for years (and on CD ROM for even
longer). In most cases the key piece of information that's missing is the
location of each grave, and whilst some parishes may have records that show
this, I suspect that most don't.
Cynics
might wonder whether the mapping of parish graveyards is a precursor to the
Church selling off some of its land holdings for redevelopment. Let's hope that
whatever plans are afoot, proper attention is paid to the interests of relatives,
whether or not they are family historians.
A black swan event is
something that is unlikely and unpredictable, but has
a traumatic effect. Some people have described the current pandemic as a black
swan event, though in reality something similar had been predicted many times (see this article).
Of course, if you live in Australia where black swans are native the
terminology doesn’t seem very appropriate, but if you're on the Norfolk Broads
and see a black swan, as I did last month (see photo), it’s quite an event.
Something
that's entirely predictable is that at this time of the year new cars start appearing
on Britain's roads with the latest registration plates. Since the numbering
system changed 20 years ago the new digits allocated in September have always
been the same as my age, so there's little chance of me forgetting how old I'm becoming!
This
year any excitement over new cars has been overshadowed by the fuel shortage –
or rather the panic buying that has led to a shortage. It's certainly vindicated
my decision to buy a fully electric car last year to replace the 11 year-old diesel I'd been driving since new. Mind you,
there's also an upheaval in the energy sector as a result of
the steep increase in natural gas prices, which affects the cost of generating
electricity – though it's hardly a black swan event since the wholesale price has
been rising steadily since February. We can’t get gas where I live, but there
has been a knock-on impact on the price of heating oil, which has gone up by a
quarter since we filled up our storage tank last week. Just as well too, since
the end of the Indian Summer we've been enjoying recently meant that I had to
switch the heating on yesterday.
Tip:
one of the best ways to save on heating bills is to turn down the thermostat –
ours is generally set to 18C during the day, 10C at night, but I know that some
people have theirs permanently set to 22C. Ironically setting the thermostat
too high can increase your chances of catching a cold, because warm air can dry
out the airways, harming your natural defences – it’s perhaps no wonder that
respiratory diseases are such a problem for the residents of care homes.
I'm
certainly glad that we changed electricity supplier in August - Symbio, our former supplier went out of business today, one
of three companies to pull the plug so far this week, and one of nine that have
closed recently. As I mentioned last month we switched
to EDF, a large company that produces its own electricity, because it has
special tariffs for owners of electric vehicles – our tariff is fixed for 12
months at 14.88p per kwh, which is very competitive (I noticed that customers
of one of the bigger companies to fold have been moved to Octopus, whose price
for electricity is around 24p per kwh!). If you're considering moving to EDF
for gas, electricity, or both, you can get a £50 credit by signing up using
this link (by the way, I'll also
benefit, and you don’t need to own an electric vehicle – though I'd thoroughly recommend
that you get one like mine).
Next
week is a big week for me – on Monday our smart meter is being installed, so
we'll be able to switch to an even cheaper EDF tariff for homeowners with
electric vehicles. Then next Saturday I'm getting my booster jab, 6 months to
the day after my second dose.
This
week an article
in the Guardian reported research published in the New England
Journal of Medicine which shows that in Israel a third dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech
vaccine reduced the chance of infection with the Delta variant by a factor of
11.3 times compared to those who had had two jabs 6 months earlier. Better
still, the booster reduced the chance of severe infection by nearly 20 times,
so all in all these are absolutely astounding results; if you want to delve
into the details you'll find the research paper here. I'm
hopeful that the jab I get will be similarly effective, though I don’t suppose
I'll know which vaccine it will be until it happens.
Readers
of this newsletter probably don't need to be convinced about the advisability of
getting vaccinated – we all have numerous ancestors who died of infectious
diseases for which there was no effective treatment at the time. But please do
what you can to persuade others, especially those from ethnic minorities – this
BBC article has a
table which is, frankly, shocking.
They
say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but
try telling that to someone who has 'long COVID'. The focus on long-term
symptoms of COVID-19 has now highlighted the existence of 'long flu', as this
BBC article reports – it
seems that nobody bothered looking for it before. None of this
surprises me – I had symptoms for 2 years after contracting dengue fever,
another viral infection, in 2013. The NHS website still says about dengue that
"You should start to feel better after about 1 week, although it may be a
few weeks before you feel your normal self again", but how would they know
if they don't follow up with their patients?
I
heard recently that hairdressers are having to check whether their clients have
become allergic to hair colourings as a result of
contracting COVID – again that doesn’t surprise me, because ever since
contracting dengue 8 years ago I've been allergic to most deodorants (fortunately
there's one designed for sensitive skin that I can still use). In the UK only a
few hundred people suffer from dengue each year, always after travelling
abroad, but it’s estimated that globally up to 400 million people are infected
each year, of whom 100 million get sick and around 22,000 die.
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 month with more news from the world of family
history, but in the meantime please consider what you can do to help your 'lost cousins'.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2021 Peter Calver
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