Newsletter - 17th August 2019
Last
chance to save 30% at British Newspaper Archive EXTENDED
Birth rate hits record low in England & Wales
Surprise, surprise: delivery of wills delayed
Tip from the Forum: Victorian 'certificates' cheaper during
August
Diabolical forged certificates
Continuing series: Growing up in London
1930-1960
Are you a farmer or a hunter-gatherer?
Wacky company seeks gullible customers
Half-day courses on Irish research
Review: Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet
Review: Cowards Die Many Times
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 9th August)
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
save 30% at British Newspaper Archive EXTENDED
There are two ways of getting
12 months unlimited access to the newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive - one is to take out the top Findmypast
subscription (a Pro subscription costs £156 at the UK site), the other
is to subscribe to the British Newspaper Archive directly (normal cost £80).
However, until midnight on
Sunday 18th August you can save a massive 30% on a 12 month British Newspaper
Archive subscription, bringing the cost down to just £56 - which is amazingly cheap
when you consider that you're getting access to more than 33 million pages and
over 400 million articles - numbers that will continue to grow during the
period of your subscription.
Of course, there's nothing
worse than having to plough through page after page of search results that
you've seen several times before, which is why being able to restrict your
search to articles added between two dates or after a given date, is so useful.
This is just one of the extra search options that you get when you subscribe to
the British Newspaper Archive directly - it makes an enormous difference,
especially if you have common surnames in your tree (or, like me, surnames that
are also place names
To save 30% on your
subscription - and support LostCousins at the same time - please follow this link.
UPDATE: the discount didn't
work on Sunday but it is now working again today (Monday). I haven't been told
when the offer will be closing, but will update this newsletter when I find out.
Birth rate hits
record low in England & Wales
According to the Office for
National Statistics the birth rate in England & Wales hit a new low in 2018
- it has decreased from a high of 20.5 live births per 1,000 population in 1947
to just 11.1 in 2018, and the average number of children born to women during
their lifetimes has fallen to 1.7, well below the replacement rate.
So when Prince Harry says that he and his wife Meghan,
Duchess of Sussex, will have no more than 2 children they're talking about an
above average number (though below average for the British Royal family).
You can find out more about
the ONS survey here.
Surprise,
surprise: delivery of wills delayed
Last month I reported an 85%
drop in the cost of post-1858 wills from the Probate Service, bringing the cost
down from £10 to just £1.50 - and not surprisingly this big reduction has
resulted in a vastly-increased demand, with numerous people reporting to me
that estimated delivery dates have been and gone.
Since none of your orders are
likely to be truly urgent I recommend waiting patiently,
rather than sending in complaints or making enquiries - this would only slow
the process and increase the workload for the hard-pressed staff.
The LostCousins Forum (see
next article) is a good place to find out whether there are other people
experiencing the same problems with websites, family tree programs, or anything
related to the hobby we love.
Tip from the
Forum: Victorian 'certificates' cheaper during August
Uncertified copies of birth. marriage,
and death certificates issued by the Australian state of Victoria will be
slightly cheaper during the month of August - see this page
on the official website. August is 'Family History Month' in Australia, so you
might find that other states have similar offers - if so, please don’t contact
me, instead post the information on the LostCousins Forum here.
Tip: most readers of this
newsletter could qualify for membership of the forum, which is free, simply by
completing their My Ancestors page. Provided you focus on the 1881 Census it
shouldn't take you more than an hour to earn an invitation - and as you'll
probably find a 'lost cousin' in the process, the effort will be doubly
worthwhile! Much more productive than an hour spent watching TV, and healthier,
too.
Diabolical
forged certificates
Edward in Australia sent me a
cutting from the Bolton Chronicle of 11th April 1868 which reported the
sentencing of one George Phillips, the son of a registrar, for forging certificates
of birth and death - he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour, which was quite
a light sentence given the gravity of the charge. I thought it would be
interesting to look back at earlier court appearances, to find out the
background to this case - and searching the British Newspaper Archive I found this
article in the Stonehaven Journal of 20th February:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY
BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by permission of Findmypast
The plot was simple enough - Phillips
would reply to advertisements for missing persons, hand over a death
certificate, then pocket the reward. The authorities, however, came up with a
cunning plan - they placed an advertisement offering a reward to anyone who
could tell of the whereabouts of a Mr William Cauldwell
Cook. Since no such person existed Phillips was arrested when he handed over a
forged certificate to the woman he presumed was the
mother of the missing man.
Continuing
series: Growing up in London 1930-1960
My schooldays weren't the
best days of my life - I saw school (and university) as little more than a
means to an end. Nowadays teachers aren't allowed to touch pupils, even if they
are injured or crying, but in my day the slipper and the cane were a constant reminder
of who was in charge. These extracts from Peter Cox's wonderful Growing Up In London, 1930-1960 are not so very different from my
own experiences:
"When
I was eight or nine the teacher insisted on pronouncing my name ‘Vine-Stine’. She
knew German and thought she was being clever. But it was from Russia, not Germany,
pronounced ‘Ween-steen’. Teachers had to know best,
so she refused to change it."
"My
new imposed surname began with Z, so I was always last in any roll call and it was
constantly mispronounced. Not knowing how to defend myself from mockery, I
became difficult and aloof, and retreated into offended haughty silence, which surprisingly
did not actually do me much harm in the long run. I became known as the
Countess."
"Corporal
punishment for (only) boys was unquestioned. One of my classmates, Ralph, was whacked
virtually every day, twice on each hand. Tears streaming, he’d return to his
seat with his stinging hands tucked into his armpits. Harry was a horrible
little scroat who’d finger Ralph for crimes he hadn’t
committed.
We had a Harry at my junior school
- he was actually called Daniel, but the word 'scroat' sounds very appropriate (I wish I'd known it at the
time). We had a couple of Ralphs too - twins John and David seemed to be
victimised by our form teacher, who mercifully disappeared in the middle of the
school year.
There will be more extracts
in future issues of this newsletter. Based on the reminiscences of U3A members,
Growing Up In London, 1930-1960 was
published in hardback at £20 in 2015, but is now out of print (the last few
copies were snapped up by lucky LostCousins members -
there is a single used copy available on Amazon at £32.20 plus shipping). Thanks
to the generosity of the author, a LostCousins member himself, you can download
a free copy in PDF format by logging-in to your LostCousins account and going
to the Peter's Tips page.
Note: not sure whether you
are a LostCousins member? You are if you received an email from me telling you
about this newsletter - and in text of the email you'll find the email address
under which your account is registered (which may not be the one at which you
received it). Use the 'Password reminder' link in the website menu if you've
forgotten how to log-in.
Last month I published
some extracts from Growing Up In London, 1930-1960 which mentioned toothpowder,
prompting a lot of correspondence from readers who remembered Gibbs Dentifrice
- which seems to have been the only toothpowder which came as a solid block. I
published a follow-up article
but the emails kept flooding in, including some from readers who still had examples
of the jigsaw puzzles and board games that were used to encourage children to
clean their teeth regularly.
The board game (on the left)
is in the possession of Kathleen, who also has the rules - I think it was a bit
like Snakes & Ladders. The jigsaw photo (on the right) came from Elisabeth
and features the Lord Mayor's Show. Children were told "your teeth are
ivory castles" - if you look closely at the board game you might just be
able to make out the words 'health and happiness' on the castle at the top.
You can see an example of a
colour advertisement from 1923 if you follow this link
to eBay.
Are you a farmer
or a hunter-gatherer?
There are two quite different
ways of approaching DNA testing for genealogical purposes: this was brought
home to me in the past week when I had a long discussion with a LostCousins
member who's still going about things much the way I did from 2012 (when I
tested with Family Tree DNA) to 2017 (when I tested again, this time with Ancestry).
I can’t remember exactly how
many matches I had when my Family Finder results first came through 7 years ago,
but it was probably in the region of 500. This seemed like a lot at the time,
but I soon realised that most of them were so distant that figuring out how I
was related to more than a handful of them wasn't going to be easy - particularly
since many of them hadn’t uploaded a tree, and in any case searching trees wasn’t
FTDNA's strong point (it still isn't).
The approach which I dub
"hunter-gatherer" is to work independently from your documented cousins,
hunting for the links between you and your genetic cousins and gathering what
information you can to help. Having tried it for 5 years it isn’t the way I'd
choose to work, partly because it’s very time-consuming but also because the
potential is limited. Why? Because this approach works best when you have a chromosome
browser and when you can see all of your shared
matches. Ancestry doesn’t provide either of these, which means that hunter-gatherers
are inevitably going to be fishing in a smaller pool.
And it's not just a smaller
pool, it’s a considerably smaller pool. I currently have 21226 matches with
genetic cousins at Ancestry but only 1163 at 23andMe, which is the only company
that has carried out anywhere near as many tests as Ancestry (the number is low
because most of 23andMe's customers tested for health purposes, so have opted
out of cousin-matching). At FamilyTreeDNA, where I
tested in 2012, I now have 2496 matches; at MyHeritage I have 4507 - still just
a fifth of the number I have at Ancestry.
Personally I'd rather fish in Ancestry's much larger pool, even
though they don’t have a chromosome browser and restrict shared matches to
close matches. The good news is that those things don’t matter nearly as much when
you're a "farmer" like me.
My definition of a farmer is someone who is more proactive than reactive, planting the
seeds of success by encouraging cousins to test, quite possibly paying for
those tests, and almost certainly managing (or playing a part in managing) the
results. For example, apart from my own DNA results I manage or co-manage the
results for my brother and seven 1st, 2nd, or 3rd cousins - so when I'm utilising
the strategies in my Masterclass
(see last issue) I've got many, many more opportunities to find genetic cousins
who can help me knock down my 'brick walls.
I didn’t personally pay for all
of those 9 tests, but even if I had done it would have been money well spent -
because time is money and, even at the minimum wage, the hundreds of hours I've
saved would pay for the tests many times over. Ancestry is so much easier,
simpler, and quicker to use than other sites because DNA and family trees are
so well integrated. The ThruLines feature can lead to
some great discoveries - if I had a choice between ThruLines
and a chromosome browser I know which I'd go for!
Tip: since around half of
active LostCousins members have already tested their DNA, finding 'lost
cousins' is a great way to save money you might have spent on a DNA test for a
known cousin.
But it's not just about time
and money, it’s also about results - all of the
'brick walls' I've knocked down with the help of DNA have collapsed as a result
of matches at Ancestry. True, I've found some great cousins at other sites, and
have several clues that may pay off in the future, but 7 years after I first
tested there's still only one site that has helped me knock down any of
my 'brick walls', and that's Ancestry. Nobody likes paying for the same thing
twice, but it's sobering to think that had I not taken the plunge and tested
with Ancestry in 2017 I'd probably be just as sceptical about DNA as many of
you.
Incidentally, Ancestry users
can transfer their results to most of the other sites to get extra matches. But
you can't go the other way - Ancestry don’t accept transfers (nor do 23andME at
the current time), and that's why I almost always advise testing with them. Even
if it costs slightly more to test with Ancestry, the 'cost per cousin' is far
lower.
Note: are you wondering
what the difference is between a documented cousin and a genetic cousin, and
why it matters? See this article
from June.
Ancestry are celebrating Father's Day in Auatralia with a big discount
until Sunday 1st September (I believe this offer will also be available in New
Zealand, but the sale price of $90 is in Australian currency). Ancestry have by far
the largest database of genealogical DNA results, so you'll find many more cousins
than at any other site. Please use this link
or click the banner below to make your purchase so that LostCousins can also benefit:
Family Tree DNA's August sale continues, with savings from $20 upwards.
The pick of their tests is the 37-marker Y-DNA test, since FTDNA are the only
mainstream company offering standard Y-DNA tests for genealogical purposes.
Tip: some companies which
sell autosomal DNA tests include Y-DNA but their results
are not compatible with standard Y-DNA tests. If you know what SNPs and STRs
are you'll understand why.
To buy any of FTDNA's tests
at sale price and support LostCousins at the same time please use this link (note: do not
use FTDNA links in newsletters prior to August 2019; they probably won't work,
but even if they do, LostCousins won’t benefit from your purchase).
MyHeritage have extended their UK Summer Sale by a week - the
price of a test is reduced from £75 to £59 until Monday 19th August. Order 2
kits and shipping is free. Please use this link
so that you can support LostCousins.
MyHeritage sell their test in
some European countries where Ancestry don't market theirs, so if you have
recent ancestors who came from continental Europe (or living cousins in the
countries where Ancestry don’t sell) it's worth considering their test.
Finally, for dog lovers who
want to know more about their best friends, the Wisdom Panel DNA test is
discounted by £15 until Monday 26th August when you follow this link
and use the code DOGDAY19
Wacky company
seeks gullible customers
One of my distant DNA cousins
has a PhD in genetics, so when he mentioned on Twitter that he'd come across a
peculiar DNA service on sale in the Westfield Centre I thought I'd take a look. I'm not going to give the company concerned
free publicity which it doesn’t deserve, but it's a good opportunity to remind
you that if you order a DNA test from a provider which hasn't been recommended
in this newsletter you’re probably throwing your money
away.
Tip: a lot of companies selling
DNA tests will include the words Ancestry DNA in their write-ups. Do NOT
confuse the tests they offer with those offered by Ancestry. Price is not a
good guide - in my experience the more expensive a test is, the more likely it
is to be useless..
Half-day courses
on Irish research
Next month the Society of
Genealogists are running two half-day courses at their London premises. On the
morning of Saturday 14th September Roz McCutcheon and Jill Williams will be
talking about " Tracing your Irish
Ancestry - for Beginners and Refreshers", then in the afternoon they'll
follow up with " Moving your Irish
Research On".
The cost is £20 for each
course (SoG members get a 20% reduction), and you can
find out more if you visit this page.
When I last checked there were only 5 places remaining for the morning course,
and 11 for the afternoon course, so book now to make sure of your place.
If you have Irish ancestry
but can’t get to London, take a look at the book review that follows.....
Review: Tracing
Your Irish Family History on the Internet
As someone who has yet to
discover any Irish ancestors I'm always very careful to refer to experts in the
field, such as Claire Santry, whose website I've mentioned several
times, and Chris Paton, whose Irish and Scottish background provides a valuable
perspective. When I was looking for someone to speak about Irish family history
at the Genealogy in the Sunshine conferences I
organised a few years ago I turned to Chris, who is not only a genealogist, author,
journalist, and blogger, but also an excellent speaker.
At the time the first edition
of Chris's Tracing Your Irish Family History on the
Internet had recently been published, and it collected 4 and 5 star reviews
on Amazon - the only exception was someone who was just starting out and needed
a beginner's guide to family history generally. (If every family history book
was designed for beginners they'd be jolly repetitive
and tedious to read for the rest of us - and what a waste of paper!)
Any printed book that refers
to Internet sources soon becomes out of date, so after 6 years this 2nd edition
is very welcome - though commendably Chris Paton does his best to futureproof the
links by recommending the use of the Internet Archive and suggesting Google
searches (both good options if you come across an expired link in one of my old
newsletters). Incidentally, he's also spot on when he
says that deep links to council websites are likely to have the shortest life!
There's an amazing amount of
information crammed into 190 pages - very little space is wasted on photographs
or screenshots. Chapter 1 looks at the range of websites, both free and paid - if
you're thinking of buying a subscription or credits it's important to know what
you'll be getting (and what you won't be getting). Chapter 2 deals with
vital records - civil registration, parish registers, and other sources such as
wills and notices in newspapers. It's the longest chapter in the book at 40
pages, and rightly so; the guide to what is and isn’t available from the GROs
in Dublin and Belfast is exceptionally good.
Chapter 3 focuses on censuses
and census substitutes, such as land records and electoral records. Chapter 4 looks
at occupations (not the occupation of Ireland by the British, but the work that
people did); official records of those in the armed forces, the Merchant Navy,
the police, and criminals are the most likely to have survived, but there are
some useful suggestions for those whose ancestors were involved in other
occupations. Chapter 5 looks at the events of 1912-23 that ultimately resulted
in the partitioned Ireland that we see today.
Chapters 6 to 9 provide
information and links specific to the 32 different counties; Chapter 10 deals
with Ireland's diaspora and the record sources that will help you track them
down. I can't vouch for the accuracy of all the information as it's not my
field, but I have every confidence in the author (and, after all, this is the
2nd edition of a book that was very well-received first time around). One quibble
- if you read the section on DNA you’d probably be discouraged from testing with
Ancestry, which would be a great shame, but readers surely aren't going to be
buying the book for advice about DNA tests which they can get free from this
newsletter!
If you’re in the UK you can
buy the book from Amazon Marketplace for just over £10 including shipping, a
big reduction on the published price of £14.99, but even if you have to pay
full price you will get your money's worth out of this book (and probably many times
over).
Thoroughly recommended to
anyone who is struggling with their Irish forebears - the only bad news is that
the book isn’t due for release in North America until November/December (but I've
included an extra link which might possibly enable you to buy a copy from
England rather sooner):
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Wordery
Note: using these links
will allow you to support LostCousins, even if you end up buying something
completely different from the same site.
Review: Cowards
Die Many Times
Although this is the third novel
by Peter Hey that I've reviewed, and the third to feature a Shakespeare
quotation as its title, it’s only the second book to feature genealogist Jane
Madden, who we first met in When Beggars Dye (you can read my review here).
Genealogical mysteries tend
to involve at least two intertwined threads and this enjoyable book is no
exception. Similarly the heroes and heroines tend to
have complicated family histories of their own -
whether they were adopted, or come from a broken home (as in the case of Jane
Madden). There's also a tendency for the female leads to be in the police, or ex-police,
and Jane ticks that box too. But that's not a criticism of the genre - more of
an attempt to explain why I and so many others find genealogical mysteries absolutely fascinating!
In Cowards Die Many Times
the main storyline - the father who abandons his family to make a new life for
himself - echoes Jane Madden's own upbringing, although I didn’t realise this
as I was reading the novel, only when I sat down to write this review (it's an
example of how cleverly the author weaves the threads together). Jane is
commissioned by her client, Guy Ramsbottom, to find out how his great-grandfather
- the son of a coal miner - could possibly have trained to become a doctor at a
time when there were no grants or loans.
Jane is fairly new to
genealogy, though she doesn’t let on to her clients; fortunately
her experience in the police has proven to be excellent training - and she also
has a mentor. Her relationship with Tommy is a little like that between Anna
Ames and Steve in Geraldine Wall's series
(another of my favourites); Jane is intuitive, a people person, whilst Tommy is
a computer wiz who comes over as slightly autistic (I don’t mean that as a
criticism, by the way). They're an odd couple, but then they say that opposites
attract. Is there romance in the air? It's not as simple as that, as you'll
discover.....
By now you've probably
noticed that I've told you very little about what actually happens
in the book - and that's deliberate, it wouldn’t be a mystery if I gave the game
away! If you have already read the first book in the series you won’t need my
encouragement to buy the follow-up, but if you haven't I'd recommend you read When
Beggars Dye first, because the threads that carry over from one book to
another help us to get inside the minds of the leading characters.
Both books are available in
Kindle format for the trifling sum of £1.99 each. Remember, you don’t need a
Kindle to read a Kindle book - almost any smartphone, tablet, or computer can
do the job (and the Kindle app is free). But paperback versions are also
available, and fairly inexpensive too, at £5.99
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
PS I forgot to mention that there's
a chapter in the book called LostCousins - it even mentions this newsletter.
Fame at last!
A
complicated family tree
In the last issue I mentioned
the case of a grandmother married to a great-grandfather - which prompted
Valerie to write in with this example from her own tree:
"My
great-great grandmother was married to my great grandfather. Elizabeth Currie
gave birth to a daughter, also named Elizabeth Currie, when she was 16 and unmarried.
Five years later she married bachelor James Neil and the couple had three
children. Young Elizabeth was living with the family in the 1891 census but
recorded as a visitor. Mother Elizabeth died in 1900 and in the 1901 census
young Elizabeth had changed her surname to Neil and was recorded as
daughter/housekeeper.
"Eventually
she became his partner and bore six children, one of whom was my grandfather.
These children were all illegitimate according to their birth certificates and
their father's name was not given. On the 1911 census record the children were
recorded as his grandchildren. The older half-siblings of these children were
also their aunt and uncles and half-siblings of their mother! It has been very complicated
recording the twisted branches of my family tree!"
Had James Neil married his
step-daughter it would have been illegal - indeed, it would still be illegal
today, even though they were not blood relatives. Mind you, considering that the
father of the younger Elizabeth isn’t known we can’t be absolutely
certain that she and her step-father weren't related, in which case the tree
would be even more complicated!
I found this in an 1821 book
(A collection of epitaphs.... by William Graham, Land Surveyor).:
Anyone fancy drawing this
family tree?
August is one of my favourite
months, not because of the weather - which is often disappointing - but because
of the wide range of fruits that can be found in the hedgerows. In the 1950s I
used to pick blackberries with my parents at Hainault, on the border of Epping
Forest, and it gives me great pleasure to be able to do the same 60 years on -
but now I'm also harvesting elderberries, wild damsons, and wild plums of
various types. The sloes aren't ripe enough yet, but it won't be long (I don’t wait
for the first frost - I put them in the freezer instead). With each year that
goes by there seem to be fewer and fewer people picking wild fruit - it may not
be a cost-effective use of my time, but like family history it gives me a lot
of pleasure!
Interest rates on savings
accounts are dropping again, so it's very tempting to invest with peer-to-peer
lenders. You can get a bonus of £100 if you follow this link
and invest £1000 or more for at least a year with Ratesetter
- that's equivalent to 10% on top of interest you can earn. (Note: I'm not a
financial adviser so make sure you know what you’re doing - what's right for me
might not be right for you.)
I've updated the
DNA offers article to include Ancestry's offer in Australia.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
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?