Newsletter – 16th
September 2022
1921 Scottish Census should be out before
the end of the year
Remember what happened in 1952
How to get used to singing “God Save the King”
Why was the Queen Mother’s birthdate wrong?
Access to the 1939 Register for Scotland
Church of Ireland parish registers
Wales and North America – historic links
Queen Elizabeth II: what the newspapers said
in 1926
Did my cousin invent the digital scanner?
Absolute cognatic primogeniture
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1921 Scottish Census should be out before the
end of the year
At
one time it was hoped that the 1921 Scotland Census would be released before
the end of 2021, but now ScotlandsPeople is indicating
a release date towards the end of 2022:
Preparations for the publication of the 1921
Scottish Census on the ScotlandsPeople website and in
the ScotlandsPeople Centre towards the end of this
year are well under way. In January, work began on the transcription of the
index to publish the records and digital images on ScotlandsPeople.
Once this is complete, a full transcription of the remaining information from
approximately 4.8 million individual records will be created.
This is a large scale and complex project
that involves the transcription of individual records followed by extensive
quality assurance. To date we have transcribed over 3 million index entries and
continue to work on the quality assurance of these while progressing with the
technical preparations on the ScotlandsPeople
website. As we continue to proceed with this project, we will announce its
publication as far in advance as possible via our digital channels.
We appreciate how patient people have been
waiting for this important release. This is a key priority for NRS and considerable resources are being devoted to ensure
these records are released to the public as soon as possible.
It’s
interesting to see that it is described as ‘a large scale and complex
project’ because the corresponding England and Wales census, released by
Findmypast on 6th January this year, was 8 times larger. It just
goes to show what a magnificent achievement that was!
Remember what happened in 1952
Hundreds of thousands
of mourners have paid their respects to Queen Elizabeth II,
or are queuing across London in order to do so. In 1952, when King
George VI lay in state, times were very different – we still had rationing in
the aftermath of World War 2 – but the sense of loss felt by the nation was no
less.
When
King George VI came to the throne it was at a time of crisis: crisis for the
Royal Family, because the eldest son of King George V wasn’t prepared to put his
duty to the British Empire before his personal wishes; crisis for Europe,
because of the rise of Hitler and his Nazi henchmen.
His
early death, coming at a time when the destruction wrought by the War was still
very visible, was a great blow.
When
Queen Elizabeth II died it was at Balmoral, her Scottish residence; when King
George VI died it was at Sandringham, his Norfolk estate where on fine days he
would go shooting. For 4 days his coffin lay in the church of St Mary Magdalene
on the Sandringham estate guarded by members of his staff, who later received
typed letters of thanks signed by Her Majesty the Queen.
One
of those letters is in my collection and can be seen on the right – it’s the
only example I have of the Queen’s signature.
In
2022 we can see what’s happening on the Internet, or on TV, in glorious colour.
But in 1952 there was no colour television: indeed there
was no television at all in most homes – we got ours for the Coronation, but it
was rented (my father continued renting a TV until he was well into his 80s).
But there is some colour film footage that you can see online, including these
two clips on Twitter.
Notice how foggy it was – that was typical of London in the 1950s. There are
also several black-and-white Pathé newsreels that you’ll
find on YouTube – you could start with this
one.
How to get used to singing “God Save the King”
By
all accounts it has been proving difficult for loyal subjects of His Majesty
King Charles III to remember to sing “God Save the King” when the National Anthem
is played – most have only known a Queen on the British throne.
Back
in October 2013 I shared a link to this Pathe News film
of Julie Andrews singing “God Save the King” at the age of 13 in front of an
audience at the London Palladium which included King George VI and his consort,
Queen Elizabeth (mother of Queen Elizabeth II). Perhaps if you practice singing
along with Julie Andrews you might manage to avoid getting it wrong when it really
matters?
The
2013 article wasn’t the first time I had written about Julie Andrews, whose
performances as Mary Poppins and as Maria in The Sound of Music were
part of the backdrop to my early teenage years (both films came out in the UK when
I was 14 years old).
In
2011 I wrote about the fact that her name had changed – not because she became
an actress, but because her mother had remarried when she was a young child. Her
original name is shown on her birth certificate:
I
bought this certificate many years ago in an attempt to
discover whether there was any connection with my family – Wells was my mother’s
maiden name, and some of the branches settled in Surrey – but as so often
happens, there was no link.
According
to LostCousins member Jean, Julie Andrews attended Moor Lane School in
Chessington, where Jean’s father was deputy head – Petula
Clark was another pupil, but their paths may not have crossed since Petula was evacuated to Wales during the war, to live with
her maternal grandparents in the village of Abercanaid, near Merthyr Tydfil, though
it appears that she and her sister were still living with their parents at the
time of the 1939 Register:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and with the permission of Findmypast
Whether
or not the two girls knew of each other in those early years, perhaps there was
something about the school that encouraged both of them
to become singers?
Why was the Queen Mother’s birthdate wrong?
One
consequence of the death of our Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, will be the opening up of her record in the 1939 Register. She and her
sister, Princess Margaret, weren’t living at Buckingham Palace on Registration
Day, as you can see from the entry for the Royal Household:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and with the permission of Findmypast
In
fact the two Princesses were in Scotland, staying on
the Balmoral Estate – see the next article for details of how one would go
about ordering a record from the 1939 National Register for Scotland.
But
the thing that really stood out for me when I read this entry was the incorrect
date of birth shown for the Queen Mother – it was recorded as 24th
August 1900, and only later corrected to 4th August (probably at
Windsor in 1942 judging from the annotation). What an amazing error!
Access to the 1939 Register for Scotland
The
1939 Register for Scotland is not online, and compared
with the arrangements for England & Wales the process of obtaining entries
is not only slower, but more expensive.
This
page
from the National Records of Scotland website explains how to order an extract;
you can download a PDF copy of order form here
(this must be completed in writing and returned by post).
Note:
extracts from the 1939 Register for Northern Ireland are available free of
charge – but only in theory. See this article
on Claire Santry’s website for more details.
Church of Ireland parish registers
On
Claire Santry’s website I found a link to this
invaluable PDF document
which lists the location of surviving Church of Ireland parish registers.
Wales and North America – historical links
My
wife is three-quarters Welsh (93% according to Ancestry), and spotted an
interesting page
on a Welsh government website. The claim that a Welsh explorer discovered
America might be hard to prove, but the more recent historical links are just
as interesting.
Queen Elizabeth II: what the newspapers said in 1926
As
I was watching mourners file past the Queen’s coffin in Westminster Hall, I wondered
how her birth had been greeted. Searching at the British
Newspaper Archive I discovered a page from The Civil and Military
Gazette dated 23rd April 1926, two days after the birth of the
future monarch.
All
Rights Reserved; image created courtesy of British Library Board, used by permission
of Findmypast
I
found it particularly interesting because it not only records the time of the
birth (2.40am), a detail missing from many modern sources, but also quotes from
several London newspapers. For example, it reports that according to the Evening
News the new princess was to be christened Mary Victoria Elizabeth, though when
she was christened a month later it was as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. Somewhat
more presciently the Star had written that the princess, though third in
line, was much closer to the throne than generally believed.
Tucked
away in the corner, probably unnoticed by most readers at the time, is a
development that represented a small – but important – step towards the world
in which we now live: “A cheque made out in London and transmitted by wireless
has been honoured by a New York bank.”
In
the next article I’ll take a closer look at how and when images were first
transmitted electronically…..
Did my cousin invent the digital scanner?
The cutting on the
right, taken from the South Gloucestershire Gazette of 24th
April 1926, gives more details about the first wireless transmission of a
cheque referred to in the previous article:
All
Rights Reserved; image created courtesy of British Library Board, used by permission
of Findmypast
Incidentally,
whilst most newspapers correctly recorded the cheque as being for $1000, the Daily
Mirror described it as being for £200 – a courtesy, one supposes, to their
readers.
Whilst
this may have been the first time that an image had been transmitted wirelessly
across the Atlantic, it was far from the first time that an inventor had come
up with the concept of sending images in a digital format. In the late 1870s,
Shelford Bidwell, an English physicist and inventor, had come up with a system
for scanning images using a selenium photocell – his work was described in an article
in Nature in February 1881.
Shelford
Bidwell wasn’t the only inventor working in this field – the Scottish-born
inventor Alexander Graham Bell, considered by many to be the inventor of the
telephone, experimented with a ‘photophone’. However
that device was designed to send speech in the form of light, so was arguably
the forerunner of optic fibre technology (perfected a century later a few miles
down the road from LostCousins, at the STC laboratories in Harlow, Essex).
I’m
particularly interested in Shelford Bidwell because I have Bidwell ancestors;
in 1788 my great-great-great-great grandfather William Calver married Mary
Bidwell at Fornham St Martin in Suffolk, less than 10
miles from Stanton, where Shelford Bidwell’s mother Georgina Bidwell was born in
1815. My researches also suggest that William’s
grandfather, another William, was born in Stanton a century earlier.
I
should mention that Shelford’s parents were both Bidwells,
as you can see from this birth register entry:
I’m
not sure that this doubles the chance that my Bidwell ancestor was a relative
of theirs, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm to the hypothesis. If only I
could pin down where and when my 4G grandmother Mary Bidwell was born – but I suspect
that only DNA can answer that question.
You
can read more about Shelford Bidwell’s experiments in this article
on the website of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire.
Incidentally,
had I not looked more closely at the article from The Civil and Military
Gazette, then followed up on the brief story about the electronically-transmitted
cheque by searching for other articles on the same topic, I would probably
never have come across Shelford Bidwell. He may not be a relative of mine, but in the course of investigating that possibility I’m likely
to get closer than ever before to solving my Bidwell ‘brick wall’.
It's
also an example of how researching one topic for this newsletter can easily
lead to another article on a completely different subject – it’s things like
this that transform it from a chore to a pleasure!
Shortly
after King George VI died in 1952 his widow, Queen Elizabeth, became known as Queen
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, to recognise her position as the mother of the new
Queen, and to avoid the confusion that would have arisen had there been two
Queen Elizabeths.
At
the time Queen Elizabeth II succeeded to the throne her grandmother Queen Mary
was still living, so for a while there were three Queens. Had they all been
called Elizabeth, would the eldest have been the Queen
Grandmother?
Prince
Philip died last April, 2 months short of his 100th
birthday. But had he outlived his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, might he have
become the King Father when his son became King Charles III?
In
practice this wouldn’t have happened – partly because Philip has never been a
King, though as a great-great grandson of Queen Victoria he was in the line of
succession to the British throne, and at the time of his birth he was in the
line of succession to the thrones of Greece and Denmark. But even if he had
been King Philip, there would have been no chance of confusing him with his son.
Absolute cognatic primogeniture
Some
of you might know what I’m talking about, but you’d be in the minority – even I
only came across this term when I was writing this newsletter.
Many
of you will know that in 2013 the United Kingdom abolished the system of male
primogeniture which had determined the line of succession to the British throne
for hundreds of years. Absolute cognatic primogeniture is the replacement – the
eldest child of the monarch inherits the throne irrespective of gender.
This
change only applies to heirs born after 2011, but as King Charles only has sons,
and the first child of each of those sons was male, there will be little practical
difference for a long time to come. Indeed, the last time that a son was chosen
ahead of an older sister was in 1901, when Edward VII succeeded Queen Victoria.
It’s
interesting to ponder what might have happened had the throne instead passed to
Princess Victoria, who had become Crown Princess of Prussia and Empress of
Germany as a consequence of her marriage to Frederick
III. She was also the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who succeeded his father in
1888. Had she become Victoria II in January 1901 on the death of her mother it
would have been a short reign – she herself died in August of that year – so she
would have been succeeded as monarch by her eldest child, Wilhelm, who would
presumably have been styled King William V of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland.
In
those circumstances it’s quite likely that the course of early 20th
century European history would have been very different, but let’s suppose that
for one reason or another King William V abdicated in 1918, when Kaiser Wilhelm
II gave up the German throne, and that his descendants were barred from succeeding
him (as was the case when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936). Next in line would
have been his eldest sister, Charlotte of Prussia and
Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen – but that too would have been a short reign because
she died in 1919.
Charlotte’s
heir was Princess Feodora Viktoria Auguste Marie
Marianne of Saxe-Meiningen, her only child, and had she ascended to the British
throne it’s likely that she would have become Victoria III. She died childless
in 1945, so would have been succeeded by a descendant of Princess Victoria’s 3rd
child, Prince Henry. Henry himself had died in 1929, and only one of his three
children outlived Feodora – the other two had
inherited the haemophilia which afflicted so many of Queen Victoria’s male
descendants.
Prince
William Victor Charles Augustus Henry Sigismund of Prussia was styled Prince
Sigismund of Prussia during his lifetime, but let’s suppose he would have
ascended the British throne in 1945 as King William VI. When William VI died in 1978 the British throne would have
passed to his eldest child, Barbara Irene Adelheid
Viktoria Elisabeth Bathildis, who had married Duke
Christian Louis of Mecklenburg, and might have chosen to be known as Victoria
IV.
When
she died in 1994 she would have been succeeded by her
eldest daughter, Duchess Donata of Mecklenburg, who was
born in 1956 and is still living. Goodness knows what regnal name she would
have chosen had she ascended to the British throne!
We’re
frequently reminded to keep our ‘food miles’ to the minimum, but at this time
of the year it’s more like ‘food yards’ in our household, with fruit and
vegetables from the garden and the hedgerows providing a large part of our
diet. Currently we have a surplus of beans, courgettes, tomatoes, and
aubergines.
Moussaka
has long been one of my favourite dishes, but the calorie count is on the high
side, so I’ve been looking for another way of using aubergines. This week I
made a batch of Roasted Aubergine & Tomato curry following a recipe
on the BBC GoodFood website which had very high
ratings, and it was absolutely delicious (I used low-fat coconut milk to keep
down the calorie count). I served it up with rice and a portion of the Pakistani
Zucchini curry which I recommended
last month; although I would struggle to become a vegetarian, I’m very happy to
eat vegetarian food when it tastes as good as this!
Note:
I ran out of ground coriander, which is an ingredient in both recipes, but have
found a cheap supply at Amazon.
The
bullaces that grow near us have a very sharp flavour, which makes them ideal
for jam, but when we spend time on the Norfolk Broads
we’re more likely to come across mirabelles, which
are sweeter – we enjoy them for breakfast, poached with a little sugar and
served with Greek-style yoghourt.
So
far most of the apples we’ve consumed have been windfalls, which have been turned
into apple sauce, or cooked up with blackberries and/or elderberries. Shortly I’m
going to start making baked apples, a real autumn treat – stuffed with mixed
dried fruit and muscovado sugar, and served with
yoghourt (or occasionally cream or ice cream).
One
of this year’s batches of Spiced Blackberry, Elderberry, and Apple jam turned
out not to be properly set – rather like Bonne Maman
conserves that I used to buy. It reminded me how much we used to enjoy having a
teaspoonful with scrambled egg, so that was a breakfast treat earlier in the
week. If you haven’t tried the combination (blackcurrant jam would also work
well), you should!
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Although Monday, the day of the Queen’s funeral will be a sad day,
it’s also the last day of National Mourning. We can start looking to the future,
including the Coronation of King Charles III – now that will be
something for your grandchildren to tell their grandchildren about!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2022 Peter Calver
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