Newsletter – 20th August 2025
Adoption charity shredded irreplaceable files
Pearl Harbor logbook recovered after more than 80 years
Railway accident victims’ headstones restored
Do you have medical ancestors?
Free books can still be in copyright
Did you ever have a Pepys diary?
Vera Lynn’s audition records released 90 years on
Worried about the demise of Windows 10?
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 6th 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):
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Fifteen years ago I wrote an article for this newsletter with the title Why doesn't the Data Protection Act protect data? The irony is that, despite the name, the legislation doesn’t protect data – whilst it prevents personal data being misused, it does nothing to stop it being destroyed. Indeed, the legislation actively encourages organisations to destroy data that they no longer need – without first offering it to the individuals concerned. It’s our personal data – shouldn’t we have a say in what happens to it?
For example, in the last issue I mentioned that I had obtained brief details of my 1954 treatment for a broken leg from my GP records. What I didn’t mention was that I had previously attempted to access the hospital records, only to be told that they had been destroyed. I ran into a similar problem when I attempted to obtain a copy of my primary school records, also from the 1950s – they too had been destroyed.
Before writing that first article in 2010 I had raised the matter with Kenneth Clarke (now Baron Clarke of Nottingham) who, as Lord Chancellor and Minister of Justice, was then responsible for the administration of the Data Protection Act. A specific example I quoted was the destruction by hospitals of patient records after a period of as little as 8 or 10 years, without those records first being offered to the patient or their personal representative.
The Minister wasn't convinced by my arguments: "I doubt that one person in a million is interested in seeing their hospital records", he said, somewhat superciliously. It didn’t surprise me that when, as a former Health minister (from 1982-85 and 1988-90), he was called to give evidence to the Infected Blood Inquiry in 2021 his attitude was criticised by victims and their families – it was described as "arrogant, pompous and contemptuous" by their barrister.
Something else untoward happened in 2010 – the landing cards for the ‘Windrush generation’ of migrants were surreptitiously destroyed by the Home Office, something that was only revealed 7 or 8 years later when the scandal broke. (In the interests of balance I should point out that the decision to destroy them had been taken under the previous government.)
At least we had a chance to object to the destruction of post-1858 wills when this was proposed in January 2024 – although we’re still waiting to find out whether we will ever gain access to the original documents!
Adoption charity shredded irreplaceable files
For an example of wanton destruction of personal information you need look no further than this appalling example.
I wonder what happened to the records of TraceLine, a similar service that was operated by the GRO until 2008?
Pearl Harbor logbook recovered after being discovered in a waste basket
We have recently commemorated the 80th anniversary of VJ-Day, so the discovery of a logbook from the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor that has been missing for decades is timely (see this Washington Post article for the full story). Covering a 16 month period from 1941-42, the logbook not only records the attack on 7th December 1941 which brought both Japan and the US into World War 2, but also the little-known second attack on 4th March 1942.
Somehow the logbook ended up at a US Air Force base in California, and was thrown away in the 1970s. However, a civilian employee though it looked interesting and asked if she could keep it.
Half a century later, her son and his partner rediscovered the book and wondered if it might be valuable: fortunately the dealer they contacted reached out to the National Archives in Washington, who confirmed that it was still Government property, and acquired the book for the nation (you can see a scanned copy of the book here).
A happy ending? Yes and no. I was a little surprised to read that the couple who found the book received nothing but a pair of National Archives T-shirts: it’s hardly an incentive for members of the public to ‘do the right thing’.
A recent article in The Economist referred to a discussion paper published in 2018 by Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol and Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren of the London School of Economics, and which I hadn’t previously read.
Professor Burgess commented at the time: "Our analysis clearly shows that immigrant students have a more positive attitude to education than native students. People who emigrate are naturally more aspirational and risk-taking. Such grit and determination is passed from parents to children and we’ve seen how this then manifests in the school environment."
My most recent immigrant ancestors arrived in Britain more than 200 years ago, so I can’t judge whether this was also a factor for them, but I can certainly see parallels with more recent generations. In the immediate post-War period you didn’t need to be a migrant to want your children to succeed – my working class parents had come through the Depression of the 1930s and survived the Second World War, so it was natural that they would want their children to have better opportunities and take advantage of them.
When the Children’s Commissioner for England released Part 1 of her Independent Family Review in September 2022 she made some interesting observations – all of which might seem obvious to us, but perhaps aren’t so obvious to the younger generations:
When families invest in themselves and spend quality time with each other, children and parents’ well-being is higher.
Children who are close to their parents do better in their exams, they go on to get better jobs and they are more likely have a higher hourly income at the age of 25.
Having a stable and loving home, whatever form that takes, is linked with children’s future success. Their happiness. And their ability to form healthy and happier relationships.
According to the report only 56% of children born at the start of this century had both parents living at home for their entire childhood, compared to 79% of children born in 1970. I suspect that the figure was higher still for children born, as I was, in 1950.
Of course, many of our ancestors would have been less fortunate – not because of marriage break-ups, but as a result of the premature death of one or both parents. For example, my great-great grandmother Mary Ann Burns was just 7 when her mother died, and 9 when her father died – consequently she grew up in the workhouse.
In my article earlier this month about Margaret McAvoy I didn’t mean to give the impression that the M’Avoy form was necessarily ‘wrong’, only that is was one of several ways that her surname could have been written. When all the written examples are the same it’s natural to assume that it’s the ‘right’ way, and that other ways are ‘wrong’ – but I wanted readers to have a wider perspective.
Another excellent example, one which I might well have chosen, is the name M’Naghten – well known to lawyers because of the M’Naghten Rules, drawn up by the House of Lords in 1843 after Daniel M’Naghten was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. The victim, Edward Drummond, was a civil servant who – it was supposed at the time – M’Naghten had mistaken for the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Robert Peel.
Although the form M’Naghten is almost universally found in modern writings which refer to the killer, or to the rules that his acquittal inspired, the original trial report used the form M'Naughton whilst the records of Bethlem and Broadmoor asylums (where he spent the rest of his life) use McNaughton and McNaughten.
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Ancestry
In a 1981 book about the case, Richard Moran – Professor of Criminology at Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts – uses McNaughtan throughout, on the basis that this was how Daniel and his father signed their name. Incidentally, Moran came to the same conclusion as me about the use of an inverted apostrophe by printers as a substitute for a superscripted ‘c’.
The important thing to remember is that the spelling of our ancestors’ surnames is not sacrosanct: they themselves may have used multiple spellings and even if they didn’t reporters, clerks, and clerics probably did. As one member with a McName discovered, Liverpool newspapers were still overwhelmingly using M’ rather than Mc in the late 1800s, and even into the early 20th century (thanks, Robert!).
Irish names often cause problems – and not just for genealogists. I’ve mentioned this pronunciation guide before and it’s well worth a look if you missed it last time.
Finally, a modern example of someone who objected to how his surname was shown – you’ll find it here. But will you spot the spelling error on the same page?
Note: there is an interesting discussion here of a 2022 case in which the defendant, though apparently delusional, was found guilty of attempted murder.
Railway accident victims’ headstones restored
I missed this BBC News article in 2014, about the restoration of the headstones for Thomas Scaife and Joseph Rutherford – who died after the boiler of an experimental locomotive they were working on exploded on the Lickey incline, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in 1840.
The headstone for Joseph Rutherford was erected by his widow in 1841; the memorial for Thomas Scaife was added the following year by his former colleagues. Sadly both headstones were vandalised in the 1950s (see the first picture in the BBC report), and the cost of restoring them was in the region of £10,000.
If you want to know more, there is a 2023 article on the website of the Railway Work, Life & Death project.
Do you have medical ancestors?
To the best of my knowledge none of my ancestors were medically-qualified, but if you have doctors or nurses in your tree the recent addition to The Genealogist of medical registers and directories containing nearly 200,000 names might be of interest. The publications include The Medical Register 1897, The Medical Register 1906, The Medical Register 1939, Medical Directory for Ireland 1856, Register of Nurses for Scotland 1947, and Register of Nurses for Scotland 1948.
If you’ve been thinking for some time of trying The Genealogist (perhaps to get access to their tithe records and maps, or the 1910 Land Valuation) the bad news is that their subscription has increased – a Diamond subscription now costs £169.95. The good news is that there is a lifetime discount available when you click this link: not only will you save £51, you’ll get a free subscription to Discover Your Ancestors in your first year, which means that in the first year you’ll save over £75 in total.
Whenever I visit Amazon.co.uk there seems to be a different subset of the Tracing You Ancestors series from Pen & Sword books on offer at 99p (which is quite a bargain – most normally sell for £4.99 in Kindle format, or £14.99 as a paperback).
The images above show the Kindle books which were discounted when I wrote this article, but you can click the link below at any time to see what’s currently available:
Note: LostCousins will receive 3p for every 99p Kindle book you buy using that link – it’s not a fortune, but every little helps!
I mentioned in the last issue that with a Kindle Unlimited subscription (or free trial) you could read some of my favourite genealogical mysteries, including MJ Lee’s wonderful Jayne Sinclair series and the first 7 books in Steve Robinson’s Jefferson Tayte series. I don’t know if I missed it at the time, but I’ve now realised that several of Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s novels are also available through Kindle Unlimited, including the first 8 books in the Morton Farrier series.
You don’t need a Kindle to take advantage of Kindle Unlimited, but you do need to be able to read at least two or three books a month for it to be worthwhile continuing once the free trial runs out – so it wouldn’t work for me, as I rarely have the time to read fiction. But I know from past correspondence that many of you do, so to find out more about Kindle Unlimited please follow the appropriate link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
I can’t tell whether there are free trials available outside the UK. Some non-fiction books, including genealogy books, are available through Kindle Unlimited, but the service is best-suited to books you’ll only want to read once.
Free books can still be in copyright
I can appreciate how frustrating it must be for readers outside the UK who have been unable to obtain a free digital copy of The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland from their local Amazon site, or from Google Books or Google Play Books.
However
it’s important to remind you that just because a book is available free of
charge this doesn’t mean that it’s out of copyright – or vice versa. For
example, this newsletter is free – but it’s still copyrighted (and there are
many good reasons why I don’t allow it to republished by others). And
just to complicate things further, the period of copyright varies between
countries – though typically it’s 70 years after the death of the author.
There can also be copyright in images of works that are themselves out of copyright (parish registers may fall into this category) and, even where there is no copyright involved, restrictions can be imposed by the owners or guardians of the works (this applies to many documents held by record offices – the terms on which they are made available can be quite onerous).
I don’t know why the decision was taken to make The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland available free in the UK, but it might possibly be because the work was financed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which is a UK public body.
Another project financed by the AHRC involves the writings of Alice Thornton which featured in a Guardian article earlier this month (thanks to Chris for drawing it to my attention). Although she was undoubtedly privileged compared to my 17th century ancestors there are few memoirs written by women which have survived, so the insights that the handwritten books provide are extremely valuable – after all, why read an historical novel when you’ve got a chance to read the real thing?
You don’t need a subscription to access the Guardian article but you can also find out about Alice Thornton’s books on this page at the website of UK Research & Innovation, the umbrella body which includes the AHRC. If you want to read the books you’ll find transcribed versions here on the Kings College London website (there are also some sample digitised pages).
The best-known 17th century diarist is Samuel Pepys (pronounced ‘peeps’), whose diaries were first published almost exactly 200 years ago in 1825 (according to this article in History Today). Which provides a chance to mention a quirk of copyright law – unpublished works are often treated differently from published works. Literary, dramatic, and musical works which remained unpublished at 31st December 1988 will remain in copyright in the UK until 31st December 2039 (there is more information here on the GOV.UK website).
Tip: if you download a ‘free’ book from an unofficial site bear in mind the possibility that the file contains a virus or other malware (even PDF files can be affected).
From time to time I visit The Diary of Samuel Pepys website. Towards the end of each day a diary entry appears on the site: currently the latest is for 18th August 1662 when – I was delighted to read – Samuel Pepys rode from London to Bow and thence to Ilford, my home town, before returning to London via Barking and Bow.
Did you ever have a Pepys diary?
In the summer of 1965 I was 14 years old and desperately keen to earn some money during the long school holiday. A slightly older friend of mine worked for a company called Castell Larby, in St Cross Street, a short distance from London’s Farringdon station – and he was able to get me a summer job ‘picking’ orders.
The pay was good, about £5 a week, and as a student there were no deductions, though I did have to pay 13s 4d for a weekly season ticket from my home in Goodmayes (whilst I was too old to pay the child rate, in those days under 18s could get a one-third discount on season tickets).
Why did they need extra staff in the summer? A significant part of their business was wholesaling diaries, including the Pepys brand, which they owned. I didn’t know at the time (in fact, I only discovered it while writing this newsletter) that Castell Bros was founded in 1878 to sell stationery under the Pepys brand – according to this fascinating website it was only later that they started selling diaries. Certainly a fortuitous choice of brand name!
Picking orders was back-breaking work. I was well over 6ft tall, which made it easy to reach the diaries on the top shelves of the cramped stockroom, but getting to the lower shelves was tough – the lowest shelf was just a couple of inches off the floor, and the shelves went back two or three feet, so it wasn’t like picking items off supermarket shelves where you take the item from the front.
I was able to return to work there the following two summers – so if you had a Pepys diary for 1966, 1967, or 1968 it might well have passed through my hands!
Note: in 1950 Castell Bros was bought out from William Collins, the publisher, by K G Collins – who I was given to understand was a member of the Collins family, though I’ve not yet been able to establish whether this was correct. William Collins also sold diaries from 1881 onwards and, coincidentally, was the first publisher of Samuel Pepys diaries in 1825. In 1989 the company merged with a US publisher to form HarperCollins, which is part of the Murdoch empire.
Vera Lynn’s audition records released 90 years on
On Friday, the 80th Anniversary of VJ-Day, the audition recordings made by Vera Lynn at the age of 18 in 1935 were released for the first time. As a teenager in the 1960s I wasn’t a great fan of Vera Lynn, but I still found it exciting to discover that in the 1939 Register she was living in Upney Lane, Barking – just 2 miles from where I grew up:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and used by kind permission of Findmypast
Someone else who made an important contribution during World War 2 passed way earlier this month: John Cruickshank was, at 105 years-old, the last surviving recipient of a Victoria Cross during WW2. I wrote briefly about him in 2022 – this article has some useful links.
Worried about the demise of Windows 10?
I personally don’t have a solution for those who cannot upgrade their existing PC to Windows 11, but Computeractive magazine will be publishing a ‘Windows 10 Survival Guide’ in Issue 718 (dated 10th-23rd September). I’ve no idea what they are going to suggest, but it’s probably worth taking a look before you leap. (Check whether your local library has a digital subscription to Computeractive.)
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts? On Thursday I received an email from Vodafone which read “Here’s your personalised broadband offer: Pro II Full Fibre 900 for just £48 a month on a 24 month term”.
I was somewhat underwhelmed by the offer, since we’re currently paying £47.88 a month for the same plan. You might think that sounds expensive, but it includes a 4G mobile backup which kicks in automatically in the event of the fibre connection failing, WiFi boosters to extend the signal throughout the house (essential because most of the internal walls were formerly external walls), and a landline which we never use, but is handy for friends and relatives who don’t like calling mobile numbers.
Thank goodness I wasn’t tempted, because on Friday – just 24 hours later – I received another email from Vodafone, offering me the same deal for £37 a month. This offer I did accept – don’t tell Vodafone, but there is no other package available in our rural location which offers the same features. Incidentally, when I looked back, I realised that what I am paying now is less than BT were charging me in 2003 for a telephone and broadband service with a maximum download speed of just 0.4mb! Still, even that was better than dial-up….
Talking of dial-up Internet access, I read a few days ago that AOL are discontinuing their dial-up service in the US after 30 years. Unlike many of you I have never used AOL: I began with Cix in the late 1980s, before the World Wide Web existed, and I can still remember my excitement when they made it possible to send emails via ‘the Internet’, as previously I could only contact other Cix users.
No Gardeners Corner article from my wife in this issue so I’m going to take the liberty of writing about the bit of the garden that matters most to me, the orchard. In 2025 we got our first crop of peaches after goodness knows how many years of waiting – though only 5, and 2 of those started to go mouldy before they were fully ripe, but it’s still a success as far as I’m concerned!
Our pear tree is looking good – there are more pears than ever before and they’re larger than ever before, so I’m hopeful that we’ll get some ripe pears in a few weeks’ time. This will be another first – and I’ve already harvested cherry plums for the first time (they’re in the freezer waiting for me to be inspired).
There was another first for 2025 – we harvested just a handful of morello cherries, so not really enough to make anything (with the possible exception of clafoutis). In the end I stoned the cherries and poached them very lightly with sugar, and just enough water to stop the sugar burning. Clafoutis was still an option at that point, but we had some scones and clotted cream, and I had a suspicion that the poached cherries would make a wonderful substitute for jam. I was right – the way the thick, highly-flavoured syrup soaked into the scones… absolutely divine, so I had no hesitation in adding it to my “must do again” list!
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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