Newsletter
- 20th April 2017
10 days to
change your world ENDS 30TH APRIL
ANZAC Day: Free access to Australian & New Zealand records ENDS TUESDAY
The 1915 National Register revealed EXCLUSIVE
A man of his time: Bernard Mallet, Registrar General 1909-20
The evolution of ethnicity estimates
April 25th is DNA Day! SAVINGS START NOW
The oldest marriage certificate I've ever seen
Are there questions you wished you'd asked?
Husband and wife discover they are twins
What is the most popular birthday?
Review: Tracing Your Army Ancestors
Review: The
Last Queen of England
How London tube stations got their names
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 11th April)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it searches ALL of the newsletters since
February 2009, so you don't need to keep copies):
Whenever possible links are included to the websites or articles
mentioned in the newsletter (they are highlighted in blue or purple and underlined, so you can't miss them). If one of
the links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're using adblocking
software - you need to make the LostCousins site an exception (or else use a
different browser, such as Chrome).
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!
10 days to change your
world ENDS 30TH APRIL
One of the most exciting things that can
happen to a family is to discover a previously unsuspected family line - and to
celebrate the 13th Birthday of LostCousins on 1st May, I'm making the website
FREE until the end of April. This gives you 10 days to make connections with
cousins all over the world (around one-third of all the matches at LostCousins
involve relatives who live on different continents!).
Q
What does free mean - after all, the newsletter is free, and it has always been
free to search for cousins?
Although
it's always free to search for cousins, you normally need to be a subscriber to
initiate contact with someone new.
Q
How can I best take advantage of this offer - what should I actually do?
Searching
for your 'lost cousins' is simple - just click the Search button on your My
Ancestors page and every relative you've entered will be compared against the
millions of relatives entered by other members; you'll find out within seconds
whether there are any matches. Naturally, the more relatives you've entered the
more likely it is that one of your entries matches one of your cousins'
entries.
Q
Which is the best census to use?
The
best censuses to use are the ones which are free online. Best of all is the
1881 Census, because that's the one we've been using since 2004 - so it
produces 10 times as many matches as all the other censuses added together.
enter everyone you can from the 1881 Census before starting on other censuses.
Q
But who should I enter?
It's
natural to start with your direct ancestors and their immediate families, but
in practice the relatives most likely to connect you to your cousins are the
members of your ancestors' extended families - their grown-up brothers &
sisters, their nephews & nieces, and their cousins.
Q
How many people do I need to enter in order to make a match?
LostCousins
members have between them already entered almost 6% of all the people recorded
in the 1881 England & Wales Census - so when you enter someone there's a 6%
chance of a match, in
other words rather better than the odds of scoring 3 when you throw two dice.
The odds aren't so good for the Scotland census, but it's still better than the
odds of throwing two sixes.
Q
Can I tell how the other person is related to me before I contact them?
Most
of the time you can - just click on their name or initials to view the My
Contact page for the relationship. It shows which relatives you've both entered
and how you are related to them - and whether the person you've been matched
with is a cousin, only related to you by marriage, or connected in some other
way. All contacts are worth following up, but you'll probably want to give priority
to cousins.
Q
What if my new cousin doesn't reply before the end of April?
So
long as you make the match and click 'Make contact' before the end of April it
doesn't matter when your relative responds. And if you don't get a response
within 14 days there's no need to give up - just ask me to send a reminder on
your behalf.
Q
Is there anything else I should know?
The
LostCousins matching system has NEVER made a mistake - there are no 'hints',
and no 'hot matches', there are only matches. Very occasionally a member has
identified the wrong individual on the census - but this is such a rare
occurrence that the accuracy rate exceeds 99.8%.
Q
It all sounds great - but how do you know that any of my cousins are members?
If
you have mostly British ancestry then statistically there are around 200 LostCousins
members who are your 6th cousin or closer - all of them family historians (like
you and me).
ANZAC Day: Free access to
Australian & New Zealand records ENDS TUESDAY
Both Ancestry.com.au and Findmypast.com.au
are offering free access to Australian and New Zealand records to commemorate
ANZAC Day, which is on 25th April. Both offers start from Friday 21st April and
run until ANZAC Day - look out for promotional offers when the free access ends
(I'll add them to this newsletter when I get the details so that you can both
grab yourself a bargain and support LostCousins).
Tip:
Australia is around 9 hours ahead of the UK, so by the time you read this
newsletter the offers will probably have already started; these offers are not
available through other sites around the world, but they are open to all.
Please click the banners below so that
Findmypast and Ancestry know that you've come from LostCousins (it puts me in a
stronger position to negotiate on your behalf):
Tip:
Ancestry are only offering free access to 26 million military records, but
Findmypast are offering free access to all 96,318,385 records in their Australian
and New Zealand collection. If the Ancestry link takes you to the subscription page
simply click the Ancestry logo (top left) to go to the home page.
The 1915 National
Register revealed EXCLUSIVE
In the last newsletter
I explained that the 1915 National Register was supposedly destroyed in 1915 -
but that more than 2000 National Registration forms were discovered in the
Gloucestershire Archives and had been transcribed by LostCousins member David
Drinkwater. What I was unable to do at that time was to show you examples of
the forms - but I now have permission from
Gloucestershire Archives to do just
that:
Note that although both of these women
lived in Gloucestershire, Lady Alice, wife of the 5th Baronet Ricketts, was in
Scotland on Registration Day (15th August 1915), so she completed the Scottish
version of the form. In England & Wales there were different forms for
males and females, although - as you can see from the blank example below - the
main difference was in the note at the end:
Since the last newsletter I've also been
able to confirm that Westminster Archives hold 9 boxes of forms which have not
been catalogued, but which are apparently separated into males and females and
organised alphabetically. I'm planning to be in London one day towards the end
of May, so if possible I'll include a visit to Westminster Archives in my
itinerary - but if you’re planning to make a trip before then, let me know, and
I'll give you the references under which the records are held.
Wiltshire and Swindon Archives also hold
an "Indexed register of new registrations in the Pewsey civil registration
district", whilst East Sussex hold registrations forms, enumerator's
memorandum books, registers of arrivals and new registrations, plus an envelope
of posters and forms. They're both places that I'm personally unlikely to visit
in the foreseeable future (except, in the case of The Keep, through the pages
of Nathan Dylan Goodwin's wonderful novels),
so perhaps someone else can take a look?
I've also been informed that the Society
of Genealogists has the register for Yeovil - and there are more records at
Gloucestershire Archives than have already been transcribed. Why not check what
your local archives hold - you might make an exciting discovery!
The first National Register was a bit of
an afterthought - by Registration Day the Great War had been under way for over
a year - and it was regarded by some as a failure. A top civil servant,
Sylvanus Percival Vivian, wrote a critical report and according to Roger
Hutchinson, whose book I reviewed
in the last issue, Vivian was appointed Deputy Registrar General at the end of
1919 with instructions to report on the organisation of the General Register
Office. However he was told to report direct to the government, rather than via
the Registrar General Bernard Mallet (Hutchinson erroneously dubs him Mallett), and this perceived insult resulted in Mallet's
resignation. Vivian took over in time to organise the 1921 Census, and he was
also responsible for the 1931 Census and the 1939 National Register.
I'll be writing about Sylvanus Vivian in
a future newsletter - but in the meantime I'd like to tell you a little about his
predecessor....
A man of his time:
Bernard Mallet, Registrar General 1909-20
Bernard Mallet became Registrar General
in 1909 and, with Dr T. H. C. Stevenson (who had been appointed Superintendent
of Statistics in the same year), he conceived the idea of introducing questions
on marital fertility into the 1911 census in order to test claims by eugenicists
that the 'lowest' social classes were out-breeding the middle classes.
Bernard Mallet became Life President of
the Eugenics Society in 1928 having published a number of articles on eugenics,
including one in 1922 entitled 'Is England in danger of racial decline?'. Today
we might view that as a racist viewpoint, but in fact it was the poor that he
was prejudiced against - he wasn't complaining about migrants or refugees
(though no doubt some of them were indeed poor, having lost everything in their
homeland), and in fact his own great-grandfather had travelled from France in
1800 to escape the Revolution.
Analysing the 1911 Census he noticed
that not only were the poor more likely to have children who were feeble-minded
or disabled, they were likely to have more children - and he believed this
would inevitably lead to the decline of the English race. Here's a quote from
Mallet's article 'Registration in relation to eugenics', published in the Eugenics Review in 1922 - you can read
it in full here:
"Pedigree
stock books are designed for the eugenics of animals, and it is obviously
impossible to press the analogy too far in dealing with men and women. It is
for statesmen and eugenists to decide what measures
can safely and properly be taken to encourage good stock and deter the
multiplication of the unfit…."
Mallet was railing against families like
that of my great-grandparents John Bright and Rose Stevens. The 'fertility
census' of 1911 showed that 5 of their 9 children had died (all of them before
reaching the age of 5), and 2 of their surviving children were described at
various times as feeble-minded or backward. Even my grandmother might have been
regarded by Mallet as a burden on society, since at the time of the 1911 Census
she was in a lunatic asylum, recovering from post-natal depression. What a
family - and yet their great-grandson is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical
Society, the organisation of which Bernard Mallet was President from 1916-18.
I've even been in a meeting with the current Deputy Registrar General, and I
don't think he went away with the impression that I was feeble-minded, at
least, I certainly hope not!
Of course, we have to read what Mallet
wrote in the context of the times in which he lived - after all, in the 1930s
many people thought Hitler was a jolly fine chap. Despina Stratigakos,
author of the 2015 book Hitler at Home, is reported
to have said that:
"….the
propaganda machine wrongly gave Germans the feeling that they knew who the real
Hitler was. It was dangerous because it made him likeable. People would feel
like they knew the true Hitler, the private man behind the Führer mask and that
maybe this person was not as bad as all of the news coming out of Europe seemed
to suggest."
I suspect there are some modern
politicians who will also be perceived very differently through the prism of
history!
The evolution of
ethnicity estimates
If you've read my articles on DNA over
the past 10 years you'll know that as better tests and better ways of analysing
results have become available I have revised my opinion about the value of DNA
testing to the average family historian.
I started writing about DNA testing a
decade ago, at a time when the only tests available to genealogists were mtDNA and Y-DNA tests, both excellent ways of potentially resolving
certain hypotheses about ancestors in your direct male
or direct female line, but utterly useless for the remaining 99% of our trees.
However, to make those tests appeal to a wider market the companies who offered
them focused on their ability to reveal 'deep ancestry', ie
where your direct line ancestor would have been living 20-50,000 years ago. In
some cases they even purported to tell customers about their ancient ancestors'
lifestyles - and gave them names!
That hocus pocus worked on some people,
but not on me. As I explained at the time, if you go back far enough we all
share the same ancestors, and whilst there's some dispute as to precisely how
far one has to go back to reach that point, it's almost certainly less than
20,000 years. So we're all descended from the same ancient ancestors, just in
different proportions, and by different genetic routes.
In 2010 Family Tree DNA launched their
Family Finder test - it may not have been the first autosomal DNA test, but it
was the first one that came to my notice (thanks to Katherine Borges, Director and
co-founder of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy). Autosomal DNA is
passed on by both parents to all of their children, so it can potentially tell
us about any of our ancestral lines, although in practice its reach is only
about 250 years. Nevertheless, that timescale takes in sufficient of my 'brick
walls' to make it very interesting - the downside is that the segments of DNA
aren't labelled, so we don't know which ancestral line they came from.
So the testing companies came up with
another wizzy idea, which was to deduce our ethnicity
from our atDNA. This worked fairly well for inhabitants
of the New World whose ancestors came from different continents, but for those
of us in Britain discovering that our ancestors came from the British Isles or
Western Europe didn't really enlighten us - particularly since the results
weren't consistent between siblings or between testing companies (some of you
might remember my article
Don't expect meaningful DNA results
from last June).
The problem with those sorts of analyses
is that their accuracy is dependent on the representativeness of the reference
populations - and this is why everyone was so excited when Living DNA announced
last autumn that they would be using data collected during the People of the
British Isles project, because they are able to break down the British
Isles into 21 areas (you can see my results here).
Ancestry DNA have taken a slightly
different approach, using data submitted by their own users to come up with Genetic
Communities. I can't judge yet how well this is going to work, because my
brother (who is the only member of my family to have tested with Ancestry so
far) has only been allocated to one of these communities, Southern English, but
I'm sufficiently enthused that I'm going to test with Ancestry myself the next
time they have a sale. Family Tree DNA have recently updated their myOrigins
feature, but so far I'm underwhelmed by what I've seen - they seem to have some
catching up to do.
Of course, the main reason most of us
test our DNA is to find living cousins and knock down 'brick walls'; if the
hints we get from the various analyses of our ethnicity help us to knock down
'brick walls', that's a bonus.
April 25th is DNA Day! SAVINGS START NOW
DNA Day commemorates the completion of
the Human Genome Project in April 2003, and the discovery of DNA's double helix
in 1953 - and the major DNA companies are all likely to offer discounts over
this period. In fact some of the sales have already started:
LIVING
DNA
There are substantial discounts from 1pm
(London time) on Thursday 20th April until the same time on Wednesday 26th
April; please use the link for the area where you live:
USA Canada UK Europe Australia
Best
for: people with British, or mostly British, ancestry who have already tested
elsewhere but are looking for a more refined analysis of their origins
ANCESTRY
DNA
You can save 20% or more on the usual
price (excluding shipping); and please bear in mind that you can often save shipping
when you order more than one kit at the same time. Please use the link for the
area where you live, and make sure you order before 26th April when the offers
end:
US (starts Friday) Canada (starts Friday) UK
(active from 23rd April) Australia (details awaited)
Best
for: people who want to find living cousins in order to break down 'brick
walls', and who don't want to get involved in the details of DNA
FAMILY
TREE DNA
FTDNA are slashing $20 off the price of
Family Finder, bringing it down to just $59 (plus shipping), and there are also
reductions on most of their Y-DNA and mtDNA tests.
The offer starts today and ends at 11.59pm (Central Time) on 27th April - please click
the banner or link above so that you can support LostCousins.
Best
for: those who want to get involved in the 'nitty gritty' of DNA, using the
Chromosome Browser to look at shared segments across multiple cousins; the only
major company offering tests worldwide at the same price
Tip:
you can test with Ancestry and transfer your results to Family Tree DNA - but
you can't go the other way.
The oldest
marriage certificate I've ever seen
The first recorded reference to the
church of St Michael's Bassishaw in London's Basinghall Street dates from 1196; sadly it was one of many
churches in the City of London to be destroyed in the Great Fire of London.
Rebuilt between 1675-79, it was eventually demolished in 1900 and the site now
forms part of the Barbican complex.
On 15th July 1805 St Michael's Bassishaw was the venue for the marriage of John Barrett to
Maria Yorke - you can see the original marriage register in the London
Metropolitan Archives collection at Ancestry.
But what you won't usually find are marriage certificates, certified copies of
register entries - indeed, until Mike sent me this example from his collection
I'd never seen a marriage certificate that had been issued before the
introduction of Civil Registration in 1837:
This certificate was issued in 1810 and,
as it happens, was certified by the same curate who presided over the ceremony
in 1805 - though it would have been equally valid had it been signed by his
successor. Note the embossed stamp in the top left hand corner - you might just
be able to make out the words FIVE SHILLINGS. This was a large sum of money in
those days - more than a day's pay for the average worker - so I don't suppose many
certificates were purchased. In fact, it makes the £9.25 that the GRO charge seem
relatively modest!
Do you have an older certificate in your
collection, and if so do you know the circumstances in which it was issued?
Note:
I have seen one older certificate, but it relates to a clandestine marriage -
in Mark Herber's Ancestral
Trails there is a photograph of a 1738-39 certificate (held in the National
Archives).
This week the death was reported of Emma Morano, who was born in Italy on 29th November 1899 - she
was the last person alive to have been born in the 19th century, and one of
relatively few people to have lived in three centuries. A quick search at
Findmypast reveals that there were 46 people recorded in the 1901 Census who
were aged 102 or more, and thus born in the 1790s, though I suspect that a
thorough examination would reduce the numbers somewhat.
Coincidentally my last newsletter
featured a photograph of another woman who lived in the 19th, 20th, and 21st
centuries - the bride in the wedding photo is Grace Violet Goodfellow,
who was born on 29th March 1899, married in 1928, and died on 13th July 2000
aged 101. It makes it particularly poignant that her family photographs ended
up being bought by a stranger.
Do you have anyone in your family tree
who lived in three centuries?
Note:
for the purposes of this article I'm assuming that the 20th century began on
1st January 1900 (as most people now think), not 1901 (as some would argue).
For a discussion of the topic see the letters published in The Times on
1/1/1900.
Are there questions
you wished you'd asked?
If only we'd asked the right questions
when we were younger! So often we're faced with 'brick walls' or other
conundrums that could easily have been knocked down had we thought to ask relatives
from earlier generations when they were still around - just knowing that
someone spoke with a particular accent might save us hundreds of hours of
fruitless research.
But you can't turn the clock back - or
can you? In a recent edition of Your Family
History I noticed these advertisements:
This is not an endorsement - personally
I'd rather spend my money on a DNA test, or employing a professional
genealogist. But I do wonder whether anyone has ever knocked down a 'brick
wall' after consulting a medium…..
Husband and wife discover
they are twins
A married couple in Mississippi who
visited a fertility clinic discovered that they were twins! Both were adopted
as infants after their parents died in a car crash, but neither was aware that
they had a twin. You can read more about this story in the Mississippi
Herald.
This story is actually a hoax - indeed the
Mississippi Herald doesn't exist. Nevertheless given the multiplicity of ways
that babies are now conceived I suspect that one day it will be
routine to take DNA tests before marrying - just as it was once necessary to
take a blood test in the US.
What is the most
popular birthday?
In December 2015 the Office for National
Statistics published
an analysis of births in England & Wales between 1995-2014 which concluded
that 26th September was the most popular birthdate - indeed, late September and
early October are generally popular (it must be something to do with those long
winter evenings).
Earlier this year Significance magazine published an extended analysis which covered
the 36 years from 1979-2014: the results were broadly similar, though the most
popular date for this longer period was a day earlier - 25th September. But the
researchers also noticed that births dropped significantly between 24th-27th
December - and that births were lower on Sundays than any other day of the
week. Indeed in most years there were, on average, fewer births on Sundays than
on public holidays - which seems surprising at first, but perhaps isn't so
surprising when you consider that most public holidays fall on Mondays.
You can read the full article here.
Review: Tracing Your Army Ancestors
To the best of my knowledge I don't have any direct
ancestors who served in the army prior to the First World War, and after
reading Simon Fowler's excellent book I'm not surprised - if you didn't get
killed outright by the enemy the chances were that you'd die of your wounds, or
from dysentery, cholera, typhoid or one of the other diseases that caused
needless deaths. Things changed a bit when Florence Nightingale got involved in
the Crimea but, even so, it wasn't until the Great War that more men were lost
to the enemy than to generally preventable diseases.
Now in its 3rd edition, Tracing Your Army Ancestors: a guide for
family historians is
amazingly comprehensive: the 17 chapters and 4 appendices take us through the
surviving records chronologically, geographically, by rank, and by gender, as
well as focusing on key topics like pensions & pensions records, discipline
& desertion, casualty records, and medals & other honours (including
mentions in dispatches). There are also guides to army numbers and the way that
the army was organised at different times in our history - overall the book
covers the best part of 500 years. Not only do we learn what there is, we find
out what there isn't - either because it hasn't survived, or because it
wouldn't have been recorded in the first place (for example, war diaries are a
fairly recent invention).
Many of you will be appalled, as I was,
to discover that the system of purchasing commissions was not abolished until
1871, even though a Royal Commission concluded in 1856, after the Crimean
debacle that it was "vicious in principle, repugnant to the public
sentiment of the present day, equally inconsistent with the honour of the
military profession and the policy of the British Empire and irreconcilable
with justice." Even as late as 1902 an officer needed a private income -
pay was still based on rates laid down during the Napoleonic Wars - but on the
other hand, during peacetime their duties were undemanding and they probably
spent more time wining & dining, flirting and hunting than soldiering.
Amazingly, all this information is
crammed into fewer than 200 pages, so you really can do what I did, and read it
through from beginning to end - I certainly learned a lot, and I suspect you
will too. For some readers the 5 pages on problem-solving alone will more than
justify the modest cost of the book - the cover price is £14.99, but when I
checked just now it was available for as little as £10 (including shipping
within the UK). Don't be tempted to buy an earlier edition - an enormous flood
of military records have become available over the past few years, partly
because of the WW1 Centenary.
As usual you can support LostCousins by
purchasing via one of the following links (if you buy from Amazon be sure to
look at the prices quoted by third-party sellers, because they can be
significantly lower):
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Wordery The Book Depository
Note:
the book is already out in the UK, but is not due for release overseas for
another few weeks.
Review: The Last Queen of England
Although it's now three years since the 3rd book in
Steve Robinson's series of genealogical thrillers was published, it's a
particularly appropriate time to belatedly publish my review which, thanks to
the release of the The Last Queen of England coinciding with
the inaugural Genealogy in the Sunshine
event, wasn't published at the time.
Why is now a good moment? Primarily
because it is in this book that Jefferson Tayte first
meets two of the key characters in the latest book, Dying Games (which I reviewed
in the last newsletter), but also because you can currently buy the Kindle
version of The Last Queen of England
for the trivial sum of 99p!
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 - its
Latin motto, "Nullius in verba" is
generally translated as "Take nobody's word for it", in other words
don't believe anything unless it is supported by evidence. A fine motto for any
researcher, but a particularly appropriate motto for genealogists, don't you
think?
I won't be giving too much away when I
tell you that at the heart of the book are murders that appear to be linked by
their ancestors' membership of the Royal Society at a time when Queen Anne was
on the throne - it was during her reign that England and Scotland joined
together to create the kingdom of Great Britain, making her both the last Queen
of England and the first Queen of Great Britain.
Jefferson Tayte
has flown into London to attend a genealogy conference - and takes the
opportunity to meet up with Marcus Brown, an old friend who has recently
retired from a senior position at the National Archives. But things don't go to
plan, and before long JT is helping the police with their enquiries - the
question is, can he make the connection between the murders and predict who the
killer's next victim might be?
The story moves at such a cracking pace
that it's almost impossible to put the book down - but just when you think
you've got it all worked out, the author puts another twist in the tale. It's
great fun, as we have come to expect from Steve Robinson, even though I doubt
there is a professional genealogist alive who has been in as many scrapes as JT!
Although it's available as a paperback, The Last Queen of England is best value
as a Kindle book thanks to the current promotion. Indeed you can currently buy
any of the first 5 books in the Jefferson Tayte
series for just 99p each, so It's a great opportunity to catch up on any that
you missed before the release of Dying
Games on 4th May - the following links will take you to a page which lists
them all:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Two weeks ago unidentified remains were
found in the graveyard of St James, Stanstead Abbotts, in Hertfordshire - not
far from where Jefferson Tayte's creator used to
live. The churchyard was cordoned off and the police set up a forensic tent to
protect the site, as you can see in this article
from the local paper - and there was speculation that the remains were human
(perhaps not surprising, considering it was a graveyard). I did wonder for a moment
whether it might the basis of a new Jefferson Tayte
mystery?
But now the truth has come out - and
it's a sad, sad story. You can read all about it here.
Also in the news this week were 5 former
Archbishops of Canterbury, whose remains were discovered beneath a medieval
parish church next to Lambeth Palace, according to this article on the BBC website.
How London tube stations
got their names
There are certainly some strange names
on the London Underground map, and in this BBC article
you can find out how 10 of them acquired their monikers.
Note:
following my article about the Metropolitan Police
pension records I had an email from Richard, who told me that PC George Dixon
was named after the school he attended, which was also the alma mater of the
producer of 'The Blue Lamp', Michael Balcon; George
Dixon Grammar School for Boys was itself named after a Birmingham MP.
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
I hope you enjoyed this edition - I'm
sorry that there wasn't room for Peter's Tips on this occasion, but trust me,
it will be back again very soon!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2017 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