25/9/2024 LostCousins Newsletter

The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 14^th 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!

6-year-old abducted in 1951 has been found!

I was just a babe in arms when 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was abducted from the Jefferson Park Playground in Oakland, California; his older brother Roger, then aged 10, gave a detailed description of the kidnapper to police, but no progress was made in the investigation. By the time I made my first visit to California in 1981 Luis had already been missing for 30 years, though his mother – who died in 2005 – never gave up hope.

Note: if you have a subscription to Newspapers.com you’ll be able to read this article that appeared in the Oakland Tribune on 22^nd February 1951. Luis (or Louis, as he was described in 1951) had been abducted the previous day.

The first hint that Luis might still be alive came in 2020 when his niece took a DNA test which showed that she shared 22% of her DNA with someone she didn’t know – in the right range for a match with an uncle, as you can see from the coloured chart at the end of my DNA Masterclass. However, as often happens, she got no response to her message and put the mystery on hold. But earlier this year she and her own daughters went to the Oakland Public Library to review microfilm copies of articles published in the Oakland Tribune after her uncle disappeared. This, combined with the DNA evidence, eventually convinced investigators to re-open the case – and by June the missing uncle had been found on the other side of the country.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for Roger to be reunited with the younger brother he hadn’t seen for 73 years. Sadly they didn’t have much time together – Roger passed away in August – but he must have died a much happier man. This story has been published in newspapers around the globe, but if you would like to know a little more, this article in the Guardian isn’t behind a paywall.

Over 6 million Sheffield & Rotherham records online NEW

Ancestry have made available over 6 million parish records for city of Sheffield and the town of Rotherham, both in South Yorkshire: there are baptisms up to 1923, marriages up to 1948, and burials as recent as 1998 which makes it the largest collection of parish records for Sheffield and Rotherham anywhere online.

Sheffield and Rotherham, Yorkshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812

Sheffield and Rotherham, Yorkshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1923

Sheffield and Rotherham, Yorkshire, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1948

Sheffield and Rotherham, Yorkshire, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1998

Some of the records can also be found online at Findmypast, who have over 20 million Yorkshire parish records, as well as hundreds of thousands of other records from Sheffield which currently aren’t found at Ancestry. You can see a list of Findmypast’s Yorkshire record sets if you follow this link.

Mother “faked DNA test and birth registration”

In a current court case a mother is accused of faking a DNA test to deprive her former partner of access to his son, and of registering her new partner as the father. The story has been widely reported, but this is the only article I could find which isn’t behind some sort of paywall.

Cases that end up in court are often the tip of the iceberg – is this an indication of yet another thorny issue that the genealogists of the future are going to have to get their heads around?

Tips to remember

I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of things I’ve learned over the years that I’ve forgotten. So I’m always grateful when someone says “have you tried such-and-such”, because now and again I haven’t, either through lack of time or because it slipped my mind.

It’s a long time since I’ve written a general article about searching the census, because census records were amongst the first British records to go online, which means that most readers of this newsletter have at least 20 years’ experience of searching the census. One consequence of this is that although there are over a dozen Masterclasses on key topics, there isn’t a Masterclass on searching the censuses. And yet, as I was reminded when John wrote to me on Sunday, there are some things that we come across so infrequently that they can easily be forgotten.

John sent an example from the 1901 Ireland census where the forenames and surnames of the members of the household have been entered in the wrong columns, turning Charles Evans into Evans Charles. I’ve seen similar examples in other censuses, as many of you will have done – but occurrences are few and far between, so it isn’t going to be the first thing we think of when we can’t find someone in the census, and given the busy lives many of us lead, we might not think of it at all. On the whole we’re probably more attuned to coping with transcription errors than mistakes in the original documents – which is one reason why so many of the articles in this newsletter highlight errors in primary sources.

There was another email on Sunday that acted as a wake-up call – Jennifer wrote in with a tip about finding images in transcript-only record sets. Again it’s one of those things that seems obvious when you know about it, but which can easily be missed – not least because the major genealogy websites change the presentation of records frequently. For example, at some point in the last few years Ancestry hived off the Source information for a record into a separate tab:

Looking at the record it’s not immediately obvious that there are two tabs, which is why I’ve put a red ring round the word Source in the example above. I know from the number of members who’ve struggled to find census references when entering relatives on their My Ancestors page that not everyone has spotted this change, and whilst the information you’ll find under the Source tab varies, sometimes it’s absolute gold dust.

Remember the actual records are rarely owned by Ancestry, Findmypast, FamilySearch or whoever – indeed they may not even be owned by the record office that holds them. And even if a document is owned by a record office, there may be restrictions on how it can be reproduced. For example, sometimes gaps in the coverage of parish registers occur because a particular incumbent has not given the appropriate permissions – though there can be other explanations, such as a particular register being repaired at the time the remainder of the registers were scanned.

Most of you will be very familiar with FamilySearch, though I suspect that we all use the site less often than we used to, simply because there are now so many records available at other sites. Indeed, since FamilySearch has licensed billions of transcribed records to sites like Ancestry and Findmypast, you might have gained the impression that you no longer need to visit the FamilySearch site.

You ignore FamilySearch at your peril! For a start there are image-only record sets which have yet to be transcribed, and there are also some record sets which have been transcribed but where the transcribed record does not link to a specific image. Furthermore, whilst FamilySearch microfilmed parish registers for most English counties many years ago, the agreements entered in those pre-Internet days didn’t allow for them to be published online – which is why many microfilmed records are only available online at LDS Family History Centres or at affiliated libraries such as the Society of Genealogists.

I mentioned earlier that FamilySearch have licensed billions of transcribed records to other genealogy sites, but I can’t think of any image collections that they have licensed. When you discover a record at Ancestry or Findmypast that has no obvious link to an image, you shouldn’t assume that there is no online image. You may not have to look very far – you might find that the Family History Library film number is given in the record (remember to check the Source tab). If so, it might be a clickable link (though remember that whilst FamilySearch is free, you still need to logged-in at the site in order to view records or carry out a search). But so long as you have the film number you can carry out a search at FamilySearch.

Whether you use Ancestry, Findmypast or any other site as your first port of call, don’t assume that just because they don’t have an image of your ancestor’s record, you won’t find it anywhere else. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious – for example, if you had found the record for the aforementioned ‘Evans Charles’ at either Findmypast or Ancestry there would have been a link to the transcript at the National Archives of Ireland website, and from that page one more click will take you to an image of the form. But most of the time it won’t be quite so easy…. Still, if family history was that easy, everyone would be able to do it!

LostCousins is completely FREE ENDS MONDAY

Although LostCousins is mostly free, just like this newsletter, there’s normally a small membership fee if you want to be able to initiate contact with someone new (ie someone in the New Contacts section of your My Cousins page).

However, because I don’t want any keen family historians to miss out on ‘lost cousins’ just because they can’t afford £10 for 12 month’s membership, there have always been several periods each year when all members can make new contacts without having to pay – so until midnight on Monday 30^th September you can make as many new contacts as you want with family historians who are researching your ancestors and have entered at least one of the relatives on your My Ancestors page. Of course, the more relatives you’ve entered – especially from the 1881 Censuses – the more connections you’ll make, so now’s a good time to fill in the gaps. Even if you only have a small tree of 1500 relatives there will be about 300 of them who were alive in 1881, so that’s the sort of minimum you should be aiming for (assuming most of your ancestors were British).

Tip: ALL of your living cousins are descended from collateral lines, the lines that branch off from your direct lines, so the best way to find them is to enter the relatives from the branches. Start with your ancestors' siblings then continue with their cousins. A good approach is to start with everyone you know about in 1841 – whether or not you can find them on that census – then track each branch and twig through the censuses until you get to 1881.

Why would you want to connect with a ‘lost cousin’? Because two heads are better than one when it come to knocking down ‘brick walls’ – and most LostCousins members have been researching long enough to have dozens, or even hundreds of ‘brick walls'. There’s a limit to how much any of us can achieve on our own, no matter how experienced we might be.

As an added incentive, every direct ancestor or blood relative you enter will also count as an entry in our annual competition – I’ll be announcing this year’s prizes over the next few weeks, and as usual they’ll include opportunities to attend exclusive online events with star speakers.

When you find a cousin…..

One of the most important features of LostCousins is the privacy and confidentiality that it offers to researchers who might be wary of publishing information online. For a start, all the information we enter comes from published censuses – and in any case nobody else can see your entries (apart from me and the computer that works the magic). Even after you have connected with a cousin they won’t be able to see your My Ancestors page – pretty much all they’ll know is which of the relatives they’ve entered on their own My Ancestors page also appear on your page.

They won’t even know your name unless you agree to make contact, and even if you do they won’t find out your email address unless you choose to exchange addresses with them. But if you decide that you want to exchange email addresses, as most members do once the connection has been established, please don’t make the mistake of putting your email address in a message – it puts unfair pressure on the other member. Instead, indicate your willingness to exchange addresses by clicking the the red question mark symbol opposite their name on your My Cousins page and choose Allow email addresses to be exchanged from the pop-up. A little courtesy goes a long way – but there are additional advantages to exchanging email addresses this way, for example if the other person changes their address you’ll see the new one automatically.

Note: you’ll need to communicate by email if you want to send attachments.

What links the future to the past?

As family historians we rediscover the past, piecing together records and remembrances to create an archive that honours the achievements of our ancestors – because rich or poor, skilled or unskilled, educated or illiterate, famous, infamous, or anonymous, without any one of them we wouldn’t be here today.

We live in a golden age of genealogy – right now it’s easier to research than it has ever been before. Thanks to the online resources available – and the ease of connecting, communicating, and collaborating with other researchers – we can aspire to research all of our ancestral lines, whereas even a generation ago most genealogists focused on just a handful of lines.

But it won’t necessarily be even easier for the next generation, or the one that follows – indeed it could be more difficult, thanks to the virtual elimination of handwritten records and correspondence and the lower frequency of baptism and marriage. There’s also the impact of data protection legislation, which has resulted in many records being destroyed rather than preserved.

So, to answer the question in the title of this article – we’re the link between the future and the past. We owe it to our ancestors to ensure that future generations know at least as much about them as we do – the challenge is, how can we do that if we don’t have children or grandchildren who are keen to continue our research? I’d like you to write to me with your suggestions and I’ll publish the best in a future newsletter.

Tip: please consider both the advantages and the disadvantages of your proposed solution – writing a book or putting a tree on Ancestry isn’t a perfect answer!

Save on the best DNA test UPDATED

The Ancestry DNA test is the only one that I can whole-heartedly recommend – and I’ve taken ALL of the tests from ALL of the major companies. But it’s a bit more expensive than some of the competitors tests, so it makes sense to place an order when there’s an offer on.

You can currently save around 25% at Ancestry’s UK and Australian sites: although the offers originally mentioned in thie issue ended in September they have been replaced in October by new offers with similar savgins on DNA kits.

Please use the relevant link below so that you can support LostCousins with your purchase (if it doesn’t seem to work first time log-out from Ancestry then click the link again):

UK: Save 25% on AncestryDNA®. Terms Apply.

AUS/NZ: Early Gifting Campaign - Delve Deeper with Ancestry® and Save Up to $59

Remember that you don’t need to name the person who will be testing when you place your order. And do make certain that, whoever is testing, you not only read my DNA Masterclass, but follow the steps set out there – otherwise you’ll be wasting your time as well as your money!

Confusion over ethnicity

There was an article in the Guardian today about Irish ethnicity – though strangely, considering it’s written by an historian, it seems to be more focused on immigration since 1900 than in earlier centuries. Nevertheless it did remind me of the furore over the casting of a white actor as Heathcliff in a new film version of Wuthering Heights (see this BBC News article). Not having read the novel this puzzled me at first – especially since previous Heathcliffs have included Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, and Ralph Fiennes – but a little research soon confirmed that Heathcliff, a foundling rescued from the streets of Liverpool, is described in the book as having dark skin, and possibly a Lascar.

Thousands of non-Europeans arrived in Britain through Liverpool (and other ports) in the 18^th century, and there must be many amongst the LostCousins membership who can trace their ancestry to one of them. If you are descended from one of those arrivals you should have a much better chance of tracing that line using DNA than a typical African American, who will have numerous ancestral lines which originate on the African continent, making it more difficult to distinguish to separate one from another. I’d certainly be interested to know how successful you have been.

Forgotten story of escaped PoW found in auction

Regular readers will know that I often come across items of relevance to family history at auctions – although sadly I can’t often afford to buy them – so I was interested to read this BBC article about the discovery of an 80,000 word handwritten wartime diary that has now been published.

Tip: if you haven’t already read the WW1 journal of William Donn, who featured in this newsletter last month, you’ll find it on the Peter’s Tips page at the LostCousins site. You don’t need a subscription, but you will need to log-in.

Not your relatives?

Have you entered someone else’s relatives on your My Ancestors page? Over the years quite a few members have entered their spouse or partner’s relatives, which is understandable because that’s something that you can do at sites like Ancestry (though personally I think it’s a bad idea, for a whole range of reasons).

At LostCousins the aim is to connect people who share the same ancestors, so entering someone else’s relatives would prevent the system working correctly. Let’s suppose that you entered your husband’s relatives – this is how you can quickly and easily copy them to a new account in his name:

Assuming you are already logged into your LostCousins account, the first step is to click the REFER A RELATIVE button on your My Referrals page in order to generate a referral code for your husband. Do not enter an email address - all you need is the referral code, which will be allocated at the end, but it's worth mentioning now that you can use the same email address for both accounts so long as they have different passwords. In fact, that's usually the best option.

You'll be presented with a list of all your My Ancestors entries. Click the check box to select each of your husband's relatives, and if you need to change the relationship this is a good time to do it.

Once you have selected all of your husband's relatives (but none of your own) click the SUBMIT button at the bottom of the page, and make a note of the referral code, because you'll need to enter this when you register an account in your husband's name.

Now log-out of your LostCousins account and click JOIN NOW in the menu. Fill out the registration form, remembering to enter the referral code in the box at the bottom. Now click the REGISTER button and make a note of the password for the new account. Note: your browser might try to be helpful by entering some of the information for you - if it's right, no problem, but if it’s wrong, change it.

Log into your husband's account and go to the My Ancestors page - you should see his relatives and none of yours. Now is a good time to enter the Ancestor Numbers for his direct ancestors - you can read them off the blank Ancestor Chart (there's a link at the bottom of the My Ancestors page).

Once you've done that, go to the My Summary page and make a note of the membership number (shown near the top). Log-out from your husband's account and log back into your own, then go to your My Details page. About halfway down you'll see the heading Joint subscription. Enter your husband's membership number in the first box, and choose Spouse or partner from the dropdown menu for the second box. Now click SUBMIT to save the change.

Finally go to your My Ancestors page and delete your husband's relatives one by one - just click on the person's name to display the Edit Ancestor page and click the blue DELETE button at the bottom of the page.

By spelling everything out in detail I’ve probably made it sound more long-winded than it really is – for most members the whole process will take about 15 minutes.

Tip: linking the accounts together will allow you to benefit from a joint subscription (should you wish to support LostCousins). If you already have a single subscription contact me once you’ve completed the process described above, and I’ll upgrade you to a joint subscription free of charge.

1910 Land Valuation

In the last issue I reported that The Genealogist had added records and maps from the 1910 Land Valuation, which can be a wonderful resource, even if your ancestors didn’t own the house they were living in. However, at the time I couldn’t find an online map showing the up-to-date coverage of this unique resource, and I eventually discovered that there wasn’t one.

The good news is that I was able to persuade The Genealogist to provide me with a map for this newsletter – the counties shown in red are the ones currently included – and they’ve also agreed to extend the subscription offer!

Preview: The Hollywood Strangler

If you’re intrigued how DNA can crack decades-old unsolved criminal cases – or just like a good mystery – you’ll be pleased to know that the release of a new book in the Venator Cold Case series is imminent. Penned by Nathan Dylan Goodwin, whose genealogical mystery series featuring Morton Farrier has been a favourite of mine ever since the first novel hit the bookshelves in 2013, the Venator series follows the exploits of a fictional investigative genetic genealogy company in the US.

I’ve got a review copy, but there’s no chance of me being able to finish it before the Kindle and hardback versions of the book are released on Saturday (28^th September). But I suspect that most of you won’t wait to be convinced by my review! If you do place an order, please use the relevant Amazon link below so that LostCousins can benefit from your purchase:

Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au

Don’t believe everything you read

Dr Saul Justin Newman at the UCL (University College London) Centre for Longitudinal Studies is part of a team that recently won an Ig Nobel prize – a tongue-in-cheek award for those who carry out unusual research projects. They found – not surprisingly – that areas of the world that claim to have the most centenarians often have poor record-keeping. It doesn’t surprise me: I’m sure we’ve all noticed how people tend to appear younger than they really are in the censuses, but only until they reach 70 or 80, at which point they generally add a few years on. You can find out more about the research in this online article.

However there is one glaring error: in the article Dr Newman says “The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.” If only Dr Newman had read the article I published in April he’d have seen Mr Tinniswood aged 8 years and 10 months at home with his parents in the 1921 Census – not much scope for confusion there!

If that wasn’t sufficient evidence he could have looked him up in the 1939 Register, when he was still living with his parents:

Or he could have splashed out £3 on a copy of John Tinniswood’s birth entry:

I suspect that if my research was as slapdash as that you wouldn’t bother reading this newsletter!

Simon Dee: follow up

In the first newsletter of September I revealed some of the facts behind the fiction surrounding Simon Dee, the former DJ and TV personality. One thing that confused me was the discovery that his father had apparently been a 2nd Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards (part of the army) in 1941, but was gazetted as a 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Marines (part of the navy) in 1942 – it did have me wondering whether there could possibly have been two men called Cyril Edwin Dodd.

I don’t like loose ends – they’re not as important as the ‘brick walls’ that block our route to the previous generation, but they can be just as annoying. So rather than have it nagging in the back of my mind I bought a copy of the 2006 biography of Simon Dee by Richard Wiseman, and was rewarded by the discovery on page 3 of an assertion that “his father was simultaneously a member of the Grenadier Guards and the Royal Marines”, which seems to prove that the entries I found in the London Gazette were indeed for the same person.

I suspect Simon Dee never knew that his father had been court-martialled for dereliction of duty. I also suspect that it was his father who persuaded him to join the Royal Air Force after leaving school – something that his biographer seems to find rather mysterious, perhaps forgetting that young men born before 1^st October 1939 were obliged to perform National Service. Volunteering for the RAF would have been a way of ensuring that he avoided the army and navy, where he might have discovered the truth about his father’s military career – but I can also imagine that the prospect of piloting planes would have appealed to him (though in practice he ended up as a photographer in the reconnaissance unit).

Peter’s Tips

If you’re in the UK remember that 1st Class stamps are going up by 30p to £1.65 on 7^th October, nearly twice the price of 2nd Class stamps (and they’re quite expensive enough!).

This year we had an excellent crop of plums, gages, and damsons so we’ve been eating fruit at every opportunity (and I’ve got at least 20 jars of jam in my store cupboard). Nevertheless it was quite traumatic to discover a week ago that birds had completely stripped the damson tree of fruit – and just when I had some space in the freezer too. In fact, it was trauma upon trauma – the reason there was space in the freezer at all was because the fuse had tripped, resulting in half of the contents thawing. Because it’s in the garage, which has a separate fusebox, we didn’t notice that the power was off for a couple of days, and so for the next week we were eating whatever had thawed (but seemed safe).

On this occasion we were lucky that very little of the food in the freezer was irredeemably spoilt, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it happening again – so I searched online for an alarm that would let us know if the power went off, even if we weren’t home. Eventually I discovered a device made in Italy which wasn’t cheap, but had good feedback from users, and it certainly seems to work very well for me (if the power goes off for more than 10 minutes it sends me an email). At £42 it’s a fraction of what a freezer-full of food might cost – and even if I could claim on my household insurance it probably wouldn’t be worth doing. The little gadget needs wifi to work, but that’s not a problem because if the power goes off in the house and takes out the router I’ll know.

Finally, just to mention that Ancestry are offering discounts on their DNA test for dogs in the UK and in Australia (both offers end on Saturday 28^th September). We have a cat so I haven’t tried it myself.

Stop Press

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Peter Calver

Founder, LostCousins

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