Newsletter – 16th April 2025
Last chance to get the best test for the lowest-ever price UK & US ONLY
Biggest ever discount at Findmypast SAVE £100
Free presentations from family history societies
Baptism or christening? You may be able to help….
An unusual error on a birth certificate
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 11th April) 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!
Last chance to get the best DNA test for the lowest-ever price UK ONLY
Shortly after the last newsletter was published I discovered that Ancestry UK were offering a phenomenal discount on their DNA test, and as it was originally going to end yesterday (Tuesday) there wasn’t time to let everyone know.
Fortunately the offer has been extended by 2 days, and now ends at 11.59pm on Thursday 17th April. It still doesn’t give you much time to get your order in, but fortunately you don’t have to decide who will be testing before placing your order.
At £29 (plus shipping) it’s half the price of the last discounted offer in March, and represents a saving of more than 60% against the full price of the kit. Yes, you do need an Ancestry subscription to take full advantage of the results, but if you don’t have one you’ll have the opportunity to buy a 3-month Worldwide Membership for just £1 extra.
Please use the link below so that there’s a chance LostCousins will benefit from your purchase:
Ancestry.co.uk – ANCESTRY DNA FOR £29 (PLUS SHIPPING) UNTIL 17TH APRIL
By the way, Ancestry pay for shipping BOTH ways, so the charge of £9.99 for the first kit and £4.99 for each subsequent kit in the same order is more reasonable than it might seem.
Ancestry in the US are also offering 60% off DNA tests, bringing the price down to $39 plus taxes and shipping. The offer lasts for just 30 hours – it starts at 6pm ET Wednesday and ends at midnight ET Thursday 17th April. It equals the lowest price I can recall seeing, but I can’t be 100% certain that it’s the lowest ever.
Hurry, AncestryDNA is 60% off. Offer ends 4/17.
Biggest ever discount at Findmypast SAVE £100 – ENDS TUESDAY
If you read the last newsletter you’ll already know that Findmypast are offering £100 off a 12 month EVERYTHING subscription at their UK site, bringing the cost down to just £99.99, and there are similar half-price offers at their other sites around the world. All offer the same records, so it's up to you which site you choose - it doesn't matter where you live.
It’s 10 years since there has been an offer as good as this, and I don’t know if there will ever be such a good opportunity again. I had an email this morning from a member who is absolutely delighted:
“I just wanted to say thank you for flagging up the FMP 50% off offer in the last newsletter. I haven't subscribed to them for many years but that offer was too good to pass up. I'm amazed how much the site has improved and I've already found some things to add to my tree. I wouldn't have known about the offer without you so thanks again. I'm now all fired up to continue my research.”
I do feel sorry for existing subscribers, who can’t take advantage of this offer, but the more subscribers there are, the more Findmypast can afford to invest in new records, so at the end of the day everyone is going to benefit one way or another.
This offer is NOT exclusive to LostCousins but you’ll ONLY be helping LostCousins when you use the relevant link below (and turn off your adblocking software and VPN, if any ):
Note: there are smaller discounts on shorter subscriptions, but as the discount only applies to the first payment it’s not nearly such a good deal. For example, if you took out a monthly subscription, by the beginning of month 5 you would have spent more than if you’d bought a 12 month subscription through this offer, and if you bought a quarterly subscription you’d have paid more by the beginning of month 4.
Free presentations from family history societies
Tomorrow morning (Thursday) at 10am the Family History Society of Cheshire will be demonstrating what they can offer to new members, and you can sign up to view the presentation on your My Events page at the LostCousins site (you’ll need to log-in, of course). If you can’t make it tomorrow for any reason register anyway, so that I can let you know when the recording is available to view.
There are four recordings already available on your My Events page: Hertfordshire, Suffolk, and two West Yorkshire societies, Huddersfield & District, and Calderdale were the first to take advantage of this new initiative. After all, there’s only so much you can learn by looking at the society website – the real gems are often hidden away in the Members’ Area. (To be fair, it’s not so very different at LostCousins – we have our Friends Only page, as well as the Peter’s Tips page.)
Some of the societies have put together special offers for new members who join after watching their presentation – although there’s a time limit: for example, you’ve only got until 22nd April to take advantage of the Huddersfield offer, and until 30th April for the Suffolk offer.
After Easter there are two more events: London Westminster & Middlesex are presenting on Monday 28th April, and on Tuesday 22nd April there’s a chance to get a sneak preview of the Secrets and Lies conference that will be taking place in Peterborough this September. Book either or both through your My Events page.
Baptism or christening? You may be able to help….
Genealogist and author John Wintrip has asked whether LostCousins members can help with a project he is working on:
There is no distinction between the terms ‘baptism’ and ‘christening’ in the Canons of the Church of England, there is no distinction today, and there is no mention of any distinction in a recent book on this topic. However, it appears that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the term christening was used by some clergymen to refer specifically to reception into the Church in the presence of the godparents and congregation, as distinct from baptism, the sacrament of anointing with holy water, with the result that ‘christened’ or ‘publicly christened’ is found in place of ‘received into the Church’ in a few parish registers.
For example, at Bottesford in Leicestershire the practice between 1797 and 1802 appears to have been for children who were baptised privately (which can be inferred from the day of the week) to be recorded as ‘baptised’ and for those who were baptised in church on a Sunday as ‘baptised and christened’. Other parishes in which such a distinction has been noted include Kington WOR, Jeffreyston PEM, Thornton DOR and Hayton CUL.
I would be grateful for details of any other parishes in which such a distinction was made, and in particular any annotations in parish registers that may shed further light on this phenomenon.
John Wintrip
research@jwgs.co.uk
If you were fortunate enough to attend the presentation on marriage registers that John Wintrip gave to LostCousins members in 2023 you’ll know that he is an expert on parish registers – so the fact that he is asking us for help is quite an honour!
An unusual error on a birth certificate
If you came across the following birth index entries (taken from FreeBMD) you might reasonably assume that Iris V Kidd and Margery A Kidd were twins, possibly even identical twins.
Those entries are based on the contemporary quarterly indexes produced by the General Register Office for England & Wales (GRO). But if you search the birth index at the GRO site you’ll find just one entry:
But go back a couple of years and you’ll find this entry:
Quite a mystery, unless you know the story behind it all. But first let’s look at the birth certificate for Iris Veness Kidd:
This is a 1950 copy of the register entry issued by the GRO, then based at Somerset House in London – the original certificate, if there ever was one, doesn’t seem to have survived. There is a note at the right-hand end which explains that there was a clerical error, though I think when you hear the story, you’ll agree that it was more of a misunderstanding. The birth was registered on 28th December 1925, but the correction was not made until 22nd January 1926, three and a half weeks later – on the instructions of the Registrar General for England & Wales.
Apparently when the child’s father went to register the birth the registrar asked him “What is your daughter’s name”, and without thinking he replied “Margery Alice”, giving the name of his 2-year-old daughter rather than the new baby. I suspect that quite a few errors arose as a result of misunderstandings like that!
Registrars rarely make mistakes – they’re trained to be accurate. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of 19th century clerics, some of whom seem to have resented the amount of paperwork they were expected to do after civil registration began in 1837.
This page from the marriage register of St Thomas, Bethnal Green shows how badly things could go wrong:
© The London Archives. All Rights Reserved. Image used by kind permission of Ancestry
What seems to have happened is that the participants in these two marriages signed blank register entries – you can see that in the first entry the profession of the bride’s father is only partly written, which suggests that the writer stopped when he realised his mistake.
One side effect of this unfortunate error is that the marriage of William Haynes and Emily Amelia Sodo hasn’t been indexed by Ancestry in their London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1940 collection. On the other hand, the marriage has been correctly indexed by the GRO,
Was the marriage legal? Clearly the correct information was sent to the GRO, so I have no doubt that whatever the defects in the church’s marriage register, the marriage was valid.
We’re fortunate that after 1837 there are multiple records of church marriages – otherwise I might never have solved the mystery of my great-great grandmother, whose father was shown as James Brown in the register of the local registrar, but correctly shown as James Burns in the church register. Mind you, had it not been for Ancestry DNA and Findmypast’s Catholic records it would still be my most frustrating ‘brick wall’ – anybody who thinks you can research properly without making use of all the available evidence is doomed to be disappointed!
This is where any major updates and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error first reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check again before writing to me, in case someone else has beaten you to it......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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