Newsletter
- 6th May 2016
Today is
the centenary of my father's birth!
My
great grandfather was illegitimate - or was he?
How
easy it is to be fooled by records
Yorkshire
Collection complete at Findmypast BREAKING NEWS
Another
10 million US marriage records online
Ancestry
slashes DNA cost for UK researchers
Red Cross
WW1 volunteer records now complete
Notebooks
in a skip - an amazing story
Doing
the Lambeth Walk - Nazi style
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Today is the centenary of my
father's birth!
It's true that 2016 is 400th anniversary
of Shakespeare's death, but for family historians it's our own family that
really matters - and today my father would have been celebrating his 100th
Birthday were he still alive.
1916 must have been a traumatic year for
my grandfather: in January he lost his brother at Ypres, and with conscription
being introduced for single men in March, then
extended to married men in May he too would be on his way to France before
long. But more of a worry, I suspect, was how my grandmother might feel after
the birth of her second child - when my uncle was born in 1910 she had suffered
from post-natal depression so severe that she spent 7 months in a lunatic
asylum. There was no way of knowing how she would react after the birth of my
father.
I wonder whether the decision to have a
second child might have been influenced by the course of the war - by the
summer of 1915 it was clear that conscription was inevitable. It turned out to
be a good decision by my grandparents - their eldest son died of tuberculosis
at the age of 25, so had my father not been born there would have been nobody
to carry on the family name (only one of my grandfather's three brothers lived
long enough to have children, and they were both girls).
My great grandfather
was illegitimate - or was he?
My father never mentioned his
grandmothers, who both died in 1923 when he was 6 or 7 years old, but he used
to talk a lot about his grandfathers, especially John Calver - who worked as a
gardener for most of his life, but ended up with a greengrocer's shop in what
is now High Street North, Manor Park (at the time it was called White Post
Lane).
The image above shows his marriage
certificate - and as you can see, there are no fathers' names or occupations
shown. Normally this omission indicates that the individual was illegitimate -
and in the case of my great-grandmother you would be right in that assumption.
However, John Calver was the legitimate
child of John Calver and Sarah Bray - I have both his birth certificate and
their marriage certificate. He wasn't even their first child - their eldest
son, also called John, had died in infancy.
It's perfectly clear to me what happened
- on his wedding day my great-grandfather was a perfect gentleman, sacrificing
his own reputation in an attempt to deflect attention away from his bride's
unfortunate circumstances.
Of course, this is a rare example -
you're much more likely to come across a marriage certificate on which the
details of a fictitious father are given - but it does serve to demonstrate
that we have to take everything we
come across in our research, even official certificates, with a pinch of salt!
How easy it is to be
fooled by records
If you search through the burials for St
George's Chapel, Deal - part of the Canterbury Cathedral Archives collection at
Findmypast - you'll find several entries which refer to "the W. of Jas Crambrook", presumably the wife of James Crambrook. Here's one of them:
© Dean and Chapter of Canterbury; used by
kind permission of Findmypast
You'll find entries in 1832, 1834, and
1836 (and there are others) - was Mr Crambrook really
unlucky in his choice of wife, or was there something more sinister going on?
The first thing I noticed was that the
entries weren't written in a printed register, as all burial entries should
have been after 1813 - so I went to the Canterbury Cathedral Archives website
and did some searching. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get
sensible results from the online catalogue, but eventually I made some headway
- the entries weren't from a burial register, they were from the Sexton's Notebook.
Fair enough - you might think that if
anyone knew about burials it would be the sexton who digs the graves - but
that's not the complete extent of the sexton's role, and looking through the
notebook I came across entries that were clearly baptisms and marriages.
Eventually I realised what the 'burials'
really were - they weren't burials at all, but churchings,
the ceremony in which a mother who has given birth is blessed. Each of the
entries but one occurred in the same year in which a child of James and his
wife had been baptised - the one exception must have been a child which was
still-born, or died unbaptised.
I hadn't come across a Sexton's Notebook
before, so I'm not at all surprised that the transcribers misinterpreted the
entries - would you have known any better, I wonder?
Yorkshire Collection
complete at Findmypast BREAKING
NEWS
As I was finalising this newsletter I
received a press release from Findmypast which announced that their massive
Yorkshire Collection has been completed with the addition of more than 5
million more parish records. They've also added a hotch-potch
of other Yorkshire material from parish magazines to school registers and local
histories - and whilst it will be pot luck whether you find an ancestor in
those records, what a great addition to your family history it would be!
The final tranche of 2.2 million Yorkshire Baptisms takes the total to over
4.4 million; 1.4 million Yorkshire Marriages
have been added, making a total of 2.2 million; 203,000 new records bring the
total of Yorkshire Banns to 541,000; and
1.5 million Yorkshire Burials have been
added, bring the total to more than 3.2 million.
Not every parish is included - there's a
very useful breakdown by parish and event here.
Another 10 million US
marriage records online
Findmypast
have added another 10 million records, which include 30 million names, to their
United States Marriages collection. Some
of these records have appeared online before, but there are 1 million names
which are new, and in my experience it's easy to miss records that are online
at sites which we don't use very often.
I've been using the records to piece
together a branch of my tree in Indiana - I knew from an online tree that I
might have relatives there, but without the documentary evidence to prove it, I
wasn't prepared to add them to my own tree. If only everyone was as cautious!
I was glad of this good news from
Findmypast, because there was also some bad news about US records this week -
according to Dick Eastman's blog
the birth and death indexes have been removed from the New York Public Library
on the instruction of New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
(you can find out more details here).
Note:
the website Reclaim the Records
is a not-for-profit group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open
government advocates who are filing Freedom of Information requests to get US public
data released back into the public domain.
Ancestry slashes DNA
cost for UK researchers
If you live in the UK it's now £20 cheaper
to buy a DNA test from Ancestry
- they've reduced the cost from £99 to £79 (it was even cheaper at the recent
show). The bad news is that the shipping charge remains at £20, and whilst that
covers shipping both ways, it really doesn't cost anywhere near that much.
Even at the new price it's still over
20% more expensive for UK researchers to test with Ancestry than with Family
Tree DNA, who charge $99 for their Family
Finder test (about £69) plus one-way shipping of $12.95 (about £12 when you
factor in the cost of returning the sample).
Of course, it's not just about cost -
you've also got to consider how easy it is to find matches at the two sites. Many
more people have tested with Ancestry - over 1.5 million according to a recent
announcement - but that won't necessarily translate into larger numbers of useful
matches for UK researchers, because so many of those who tested are in the US,
and whilst many of them will have ancestors from the British Isles, they often
don't know their precise origins. In that case, the chances are that neither of
you are going to solve your 'brick walls' any time soon.
You can have the best of both worlds if
you test with Ancestry
DNA, then transfer your results to Family Tree DNA: you get the first 20
matches free, but you then have to pay a one-off fee of $39 (about £27) to get
access to the remaining matches (and there are likely to be many hundreds). It
makes it an expensive route - you're looking at a total cost of £126, compared
to £81 when you go straight to Family Tree DNA. Not so bad if you’re only
paying for one test, but once you realise what's possible you won't stop with
just one test - you'll want your cousins to test as well.
Which brings me on to another thorny
topic: to make use of your DNA matches at Ancestry you need to be a subscriber,
whereas at Family Tree DNA there are no subscriptions to pay. This might not
seem a problem right now - because you have an Ancestry subscription - but what
about next year, or the year after?
Note:
Family Tree DNA have a Mother's
Day offer which is good value for anyone who wants to buy a full sequence mtDNA test; however, there are very few circumstances in
which an mtDNA test will provide useful genealogical
information, so check with me before ordering. The offer runs until Sunday 8th
May.
The GEDmatch
site offers free matching between autosomal DNA results from different sources,
including Ancestry DNA, Family Tree DNA, and 23andMe - it's a great way to find
more matches, and because of the sophisticated tools that are provided it can
be easier to analyse them.
For example, only this morning I spotted
an interesting match from 2012 that I hadn't noticed before - and it's with a
LostCousins member, so one of you will be getting an email from me later today!
The point I really want to make is that
the more people who upload their results to GEDmatch, the more matches we'll
all find, and the less it will matter which company we test with - which is why
I generally advocate choosing the cheapest autosomal test, which for UK
researchers is the Family Finder test from Family
Tree DNA.
Note:
some of you may have noticed that in March uploads of results from FTDNA were
suspended at GEDmatch; it was a bit of a storm in a teacup, which is why I
didn't report It at the time. Uploads have now resumed following a change in numbering.
There are now around 3 million people worldwide
who have taken autosomal DNA tests, most of them family historians - whereas
there are less than 2.4 million with current Ancestry subscriptions. I mention
these amazing statistics because many researchers still think that DNA testing
is something to consider for the future. Well, the future is here!
Of course, making sense of DNA matches
isn't easy - but then it can be a great struggle to make sense of online trees,
many of which are unsourced (or, even worse, mistakenly linked to the wrong
sources) and perpetuate errors by making them easy for others to copy.
There's a great TED
talk about DNA that I watched this week. I don't usually watch online
videos but this one is exceptional - so exceptional that I've embedded it in
this newsletter:
Nevertheless,
DNA testing is just another way of finding cousins, so don't spend out
on a DNA test until you've completed your My
Ancestors page.
We're used to there being a trade-off
between time and money, so it's natural to assume that if you spend out a large
sum on a DNA test you're going to be saving yourself time - dream on! You might
think that it's tedious looking up censuses and keying in data, but believe me,
sorting through DNA matches and trying to make sense of them is much harder,
and far more time-consuming. And, of course, it's infinitely more expensive.
So why use DNA at all, if it's more
expensive and more difficult? Because, to paraphrase the lager advert, it can
reach the parts of your family tree that conventional research may never be
able to reach (because the records don't exist, or were falsified). Most
importantly DNA testing can not only confirm what we know, and contradict what
we think we know, it can also help to knock down seemingly impregnable 'brick
walls'.
Tip:
when you're completing your My Ancestors page remember that it's the members of
your ancestors' extended families (their cousins, in other words) on the 1881
census who are most likely to connect you to your living cousins. Don't make
the mistake of stopping once you've entered your direct ancestors and their
immediate families!
It's nearly 2 years since I first
mentioned the wonderful historic map collection at the National Library of
Scotland website, and pointed out
that it covers England & Wales as well as Scotland - but there are
thousands of new members who have joined since then, who may not be aware what
a wonderful free resource it is.
It'd also an opportunity to mention that
the collection now also includes maps of WW1 trenches n France and Belgium -
indeed, there are a lot of maps that weren't there last time I visited,
including Estate Maps of Scotland, and maps of Scottish towns, some of which
are 25in to the mile. Maps of English towns are on their way too.
Red Cross WW1 volunteer
records now complete
In February I mentioned
that the project to digitise nearly a quarter of a million index cards for
Great War volunteers was nearing completion - and it was finally completed just
before the end of April. You can search them here.
Notebooks in a skip - an
amazing story
In 2001 two friends of author Alexander
Masters discovered a cache of notebooks in a skip on a building site. This Guardian article
describes how those notebooks (which turned out to be diaries) eventually inspired
a book, A
Life Discarded, which was published yesterday.
I obviously haven't read the book yet,
but the story of the notebooks' discovery and the way in which their secrets
were revealed reminds me very much of the collection of early Victorian
correspondence that I acquired at an auction in 1993 - and which I hope will
one day also inspire a book.
A week ago a wonderful article appeared on the
BBC website about Rudyard Lake, a man-made reservoir that became a tourist
destination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The beautiful setting so
inspired John Kipling and his wife Alice that they named their son after the
lake.....
These demonstration video clips have been cleverly
created to look like authentic footage from an era when even still photography
was relatively new - well worth a look.
Doing the Lambeth
Walk - Nazi style
The
Lambeth Walk is a song from the 1937
musical Me and My Girl - and those of you who were
LostCousins members in 2011 may recall me mentioning that at my father's
funeral my brother and I sang one of the songs that Dad had written just after the
war, and which was loosely based on The
Lambeth Walk.
What I didn't know until recently was
that during World War 2 the music song was used in a short propaganda film
mocking Hitler and the Nazi regime - it's one of the funniest things I've seen
in a long time. There were many slightly different versions released by
different film companies, but this is the version I like best:
There's another centenary approaching -
Sunday 21st May 1916 was the first time that British Summer Time came into
force, enacted as part of the Defence of the Realm Act which was passed just 4
days earlier.
Summer Time was inspired by William
Willett whose 1907 pamphlet The
Waste of Daylight was republished many times - it details numerous
occasions on which time was changed in other parts of the world, and highlights
the fact that there was once a 25 minute time difference between London and
Dublin (both are now in the same timezone).
During World War 2 the clocks in Britain
didn't go back at the end of the summer in 1940, so in the later years of the
war the country was 2 hours ahead of GMT during the summer months, and 1 hour
ahead during the winter. A similar experiment took place between 1968 and 1971, but
on this occasion the clocks were 1 hour ahead of GMT the whole year round.
Recently-published research carried out at
the University of Miami over a period of 5 years suggests that physical
exercise helps to keep the brain younger and fend off dementia, possibly by
keeping down blood pressure and reducing the risk of strokes. This is good news
for me, as I started exercising more regularly just July when I decided to bring
my weight down.
Although I go swimming on holiday, and
play tennis as much as I can year-round, the most regular exercise I get is
based on a fitness program called EA Sports Active 2, which runs on our
Nintendo Wii. I could do the same exercises without a virtual trainer to chide
me, but I suspect I'd be less likely to.
However, I can't do anything else at the
same time - and now that I'm reading a lot more books I decided to get an exercise
cycle that I can use while sitting down in a chair. The DeskCycle wasn't cheap, but considering
I spend up to 14 hours a day sitting in front of a computer I reckoned that it was
a worthwhile investment - and I'm certainly very impressed so far.
It hasn't prevented me from being
diagnosed with idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, which is apparently quite
common amongst people over 60. Personally I'm not yet convinced that my bout of
dengue fever hasn't got some connection to the problem (since the symptoms have
never disappeared completely) but who am I to question the medical
professionals? I'd be interested to hear from others who have been diagnosed
with the same problem - does it get better, does it get worse?
Despite the medical problems that we inevitably
face as we get older, it seems that people between 65 and 79 are the happiest
age group according to research by the Office for National Statistics, so it
seems I'm at the start of a golden age. I can only hope that by the time I get
to 79 they come up with a new survey which reveals that people over 80 are the
happiest!
ScotlandsPeople are offering users a chance to renew their expired credits - log-in, click Buy more credits then enter spring2016 in the voucher codes box.
That's all for this edition - I'll be
back again soon with more news from the wonderful world of family history.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
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