Newsletter
- 13th February 2015
Tithe
maps online at The Genealogist NEW
Save
£20 on Diamond subscriptions to The Genealogist
Ancestry
publish Gloucestershire parish registers NEW
Findmypast
add US travel and immigration records
Naked
man leaps onto roof of bus
CHALLENGE:
can you find the missing marriage?
British
Newspaper Archive passes 10 million pages
LostCousins
passes 2.5 million mark
Genealogy in the Sunshine - programme revealed
Family
Tree DNA and Findmypast announce partnership
AncestryDNA
launching in the UK
Families
of babies switched at birth to receive $2m
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 6th February) click here, for an index to articles from 2009-10
click here, for a list of articles from 2011
click here and for a list of articles from
2012-14 click here. Or use the customised Google search below
(that's what I do):
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!
Tithe maps online at
The Genealogist NEW
Last April I reported
that The Genealogist had transcribed 11 million tithe records from 11,000
parishes across England & Wales, and that they were planning to digitise
the tithe maps.
This week The Genealogist announced that
fully-linked maps for 4 counties (Middlesex, Surrey, Buckinghamshire and
Leicestershire) are now online, with maps for other counties to follow in the
coming months. The black and white images
have been digitised from microfilm - see the example above - as many of the
original maps, which can be larger than a room, have deteriorated over the
years. The next stage of the project - and, perhaps the most
lengthy one - will be the conservation and digitisation of the colour
originals.
There is an excellent guide to tithes on
the National Archives website - you'll find it here.
Save £20 on Diamond subscriptions
to The Genealogist
The tithe records and tithe maps are
only available as part of a Diamond
subscription, which is the most expensive, so I've negotiated a £20 discount
for readers of this newsletter. To take advantage of this discount, which unlike
most offers will also apply at renewal, follow this link.
By the way, as of this week their Starter and Gold subscriptions now include all of the England & Wales
censuses from 1841-1911.
Ancestry publish
Gloucestershire parish registers NEW
On Wednesday Ancestry added over 3
million records from Gloucestershire parish registers. These links will take
you direct to the relevant search pages:
Gloucestershire,
England, Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1813
Gloucestershire,
England, Baptisms, 1813-1913
Gloucestershire,
England, Confirmations, 1834-1913
Gloucestershire,
England, Marriages, 1754-1938
Gloucestershire,
England, Burials, 1813-1988
I shall enjoy searching for my wife's
Gloucestershire ancestors (it will be so much easier than looking for her Welsh
relatives!). However these records don't include Bristol, since the registers
are not held at Gloucestershire Archives.
Today Findmypast
added over 850,000 transcribed parish records for the part of Bristol which falls into Gloucestershire (a
smaller part was in Somerset); sadly I couldn't find the baptism of Mary
Wheatley, my great-great-great grandmother who was born in Bristol according to
the censuses, but we all know how unreliable her evidence is as to her own
birthplace!
Tip:
a free resource that I've found very useful in researching my wife's
Gloucestershire ancestors is the Forest
of Dean website.
Findmypast add US
travel and immigration records
This week Findmypast unveiled a new collection with 75 million US records based
on passenger lists or naturalizations. There will clearly be some overlap with
their existing Passenger Lists Leaving UK
1890-1960 records, although this new collection covers a longer time
period, and arrivals records sometimes give different information from the
departure records. Also, a quick check suggests that at least some of the
records are available at other sites such as FamilySearch or Ancestry -
nevertheless I'm sure there will be quite a few new discoveries made!
Gesher Galicia is a website for people with relatives
from Galicia, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire,
but now split between Poland Ukraine. Whilst the primary focus is on
researching Jewish roots the records span all the ethnic and religious groups
that once lived in this region. Searching the 320,000 records is free, but there
is also a subscription option which provides added benefits and helps to
support this non-profit site. Many thanks to Beulah for recommending the site -
she found a lot of her husband's family there.
You might think that there wouldn't be
too many people with the name Sarah Pleasant Willmore
baptised in a given year, so Gordon was confused when he discovered that some
people recorded her death in 1833, whilst others had recorded her marriage in
1848. Could there really be two people with such a rare combination of names?
When Gordon viewed the baptism register
page at Ancestry he was absolutely amazed - not only were their two girls
baptised on the same day in the same church, according to the register they
were both born on the same day (to different parents, of course). Check out the
St Matthew, Bethnal Green baptism register for 1822 if you want to see it with
your own eyes!
Tip:
I suspect the parents of the two children were cousins because rare name
combinations tend to be repeated within a family. For example, there have only
ever been three births registered in the name Florence Minnie Calver, but they
are all relatives of mine who were born between 1875-79.
One was my grandfather's sister, the other two were
his first cousins.
In my last four newsletters I've
included Masterclass articles to help you work through some of the key problems
that we all encounter in our research. Every problem has a different solution,
but for me there are two imperatives that should infuse everything we do:
Use the following links if you want to
re-read any of the four Masterclasses:
Tracking down
pre-1837 baptisms and marriages
Extending
your tree beyond 1911
Let's see whether you can apply the
principles you've learned in order to solve my challenge - but first another
brief tutorial on 'brick walls'....
Naked man leaps onto roof
of bus
On Wednesday evening a naked man leapt
from the top-floor of a three-storey building in Braintree onto the roof of a
double-decker bus. You might think this has nothing to do with knocking down
'brick walls' - indeed, some faint-hearted readers may even be shocked by the
thought of a naked man - but read on....
The building caught fire early on
Wednesday evening, while the man was in the shower. Passers-by who realised the
man's plight hailed an empty bus and asked the driver to help. The driver
bravely reversed his bus close to the burning building, allowing the trapped
man to jump from the window of the burning building onto the roof, where he
stayed until firefighters arrived. It took them 8 hours to get the fire under
control, so when Essex Fire and Rescue's Dave Barritt
said: "If the bus hadn't been there we would be having a much more serious
and sombre conversation" he wasn't exaggerating (you can read all about
the incident in this BBC News report).
Still don't see the connection? This
story demonstrates how you can sometimes solve problems by utilising the
available resources in a way that were never intended to be used: take the
census, for example - it wasn't devised to meet the needs of family historians,
but as an aid to government in administering the nation.
Perhaps that's a bit obvious - after all
the census is the bedrock of British family history - so consider instead the
way that records are used as census substitutes in countries where (or for
periods when) censuses don't exist, such as Griffith's
Valuation in Ireland, or the 1939 National
Register in Britain. Consider too the family reconstitution techniques described
in my last newsletter, which could enable you to create a reasonably accurate
list (or census) of the inhabitants of a parish at almost any point in time
using parish records.
Another example: many people wouldn't
think of looking in the death indexes for a birthdate, or to find a marriage,
but that's how I often use them, as you'll see from this 2012 newsletter article.
When we're trying to knock down 'brick
walls' our ingenuity can be our best friend, but it can also be our enemy. If
we're always looking for short cuts we'll miss solutions that can only be found
through painstaking information gathering. When you're looking at parish
register entry do you scan the other entries around it? That's how I knocked
down one of my 'brick walls' - two children with different surnames and
different fathers were baptised on the same day, but I noticed that they had
the same mother.
Jill wrote this week from Australia to
tell me how looking through the marriage register knocked down one of her
'brick walls':
"Just
had a big breakthrough, thanks to you encouraging everyone not to think of
brick walls. I doubled my efforts to find more on Sarah Bull before her
marriage in 1853 and on census in 1851. I looked again at hermarriage
certificate in 1853 even though I have the original cert and have traced her
witnesses. Just on a whim I went to the previous page of marriages. There was
her brother John getting married at exactly the same time! I am just so excited
I have more to go on."
Would you look in army records for clues
to a marriage? That was the catalyst for the chain reaction that led to my
latest challenge, and whilst you might wonder how solving puzzles from the
family trees of others is going to help you with your own tree, consider this:
most top sportsmen and women spend far more time practising than they do
competing. As one is reported to have said: "The more I practise, the
luckier I get" - why should it be any different with family history?
CHALLENGE: can you
find the missing marriage?
When we think of war cemeteries we think of poppies
and neat rows of stone crosses - but it wasn't always like that, as you can see
from the photo that Miriam sent of her great uncle's grave. She told me about a
discovery she'd made after reading the last newsletter:
"My
grandmother's brother Christopher (Kit) Bowman fought with the 9th Durhams in WW1 and died in June 1915 aged 23. I had often
wondered whether he had married before he went to war but couldn't prove it.
Your link to WW1 Soldiers' Effects on a free Ancestry weekend was the perfect
combination and I went straight to look - and there he was or, rather, there
was the name of his widow Martha who received £1 2s 6d. I am delighted to have
found that out, but would you believe it I can't find a record of their
marriage!"
I could indeed - there are a number of
reasons why a marriage can't be traced, one of the most common being that the
couple didn't actually marry at all!
But even when a marriage did take place
it can be difficult to find - for example, if (unbeknown to us) the bride was a
widow, she would almost certainly have married using
her first husband's surname. However it wasn't a factor on this occasion
because neither Miriam nor I knew what Martha's surname was - or at least, we
didn't on Wednesday morning. By Wednesday afternoon we knew just about
everything, and that's when I realised what an interesting challenge this would
make for readers of this newsletter.
Your challenge is to find out whether or
not Christopher and Martha married, and either provide the index entry for the
marriage or explain why they didn't marry (if that's the conclusion you've come
to). In either case provide brief evidence in support of your conclusion, but
do not send me any images as the chances are I've already seen them.
I'll give you a little bit of extra information
to get you going - Christopher was born in Gateshead, his mother's maiden name
was Armstrong, and on the 1901 Census his age is shown incorrectly as 11.
Tip:
you'll need a subscription to either Ancestry or Findmypast to solve this
challenge - you won't be able to gather sufficient evidence if you only have
access to free sites. Whilst the Soldiers' Effects register entry shows C J
Bowman, not Christopher Bowman, it's definitely the right entry as his army
number tallies with the one shown on wooden cross in the photo above.
As I might well use this puzzle at Genealogy in the Sunshine next month I
certainly won't be publishing the solution before then - this gives you at
least a month to find the answer (although it really shouldn't take much more
than an hour). There will be two prizes of a free LostCousins subscription -
one for the first member who comes up with the right answer, and the other for
the member who comes up with the best answer (my decision is, as ever, final).
To submit your entry use any of the LostCousins email addresses, including the
one that I wrote from when I told you about this newsletter: please use
"Bowman challenge" as the subject/title of the email.
Don't ask me for advice - that wouldn't
be fair to others. All the information you need is in this newsletter, or can
be found using either Findmypast or Ancestry. Remember that I've already solved
the challenge, so you won't be helping Miriam by taking part - but you will be
helping yourself by exercising and enhancing your research skills.
WARNING:
until I've published the solution in the newsletter please do NOT discuss this
challenge online, especially not on Facebook or Twitter, or post hints on any
site since by so doing you will spoil the challenge for others. However, by all
means pass on a link to this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested
- publishing the link online is fine (anyone who follows it will see this
warning).
Whether or not Benjamin Franklin
actually said "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall
all hang separately" it's a reminder that we can achieve far more when we
collaborate with others.
Just look at the story about the burning
building and the double-decker bus - if the man in the building hadn't
attracted the attention of passers-by, and they hadn't prevailed on the bus
driver to use his vehicle, the story would have ended very differently.
They didn't know each before Wednesday,
just as you don't know your 'lost cousins' - but together they were able to
find a solution. So often we assume that our cousins can only help us with the
lines which we share, but as I told a group from the East of London Family
History Society last Saturday, a fresh pair of eyes can often spot something
that we've missed, even though it's been staring us in the face.
When you're helping others ask them
tough questions - don't take what they tell you at face value otherwise you'll
end up down the same rabbit hole as them! For example, somebody said to me the
other day "I know from his marriage that he came from XXX and his father
was YYYY" - at which point I reminded them that fathers' names don't
appear in English marriage registers until the commencement of Civil
Registration in 1837, and that the parish shown isn't necessarily the one where
they were born. In other words they'd gathered the information from somewhere
else, but in their own minds thought that it came from the marriage register,
which gave it a veneer of accuracy that it probably didn't deserve.
These days the newspapers are full of
inflation and deflation, but the real challenge for family historians Is
conflation, when we take several pieces of information from different sources
and manage to convince ourselves that they all came from the same incontrovertible
source. For example, the other day someone said something along the lines of
"I know my great-grandmother was born on DD/MM/YYYY because that's what
she told my grandmother".
When I hear something like that alarm
bells start ringing, because I know from my own experience that people remember
birthdays, not birthdates. Birthdays may be celebrated every year, but after a
certain point we don't focus on the age, do we? My wife struggles to remember
how old her mother is, but she knows the date of her birthday - and I'm sure
she isn't the only one. I've known people who couldn't remember their own age -
and they weren't people with dementia.
British Newspaper Archive
passes 10 million pages
There are now over 10 million pages from
British and Irish newspapers in the British Newspaper
Archive (they are also available through Findmypast as part of your
subscription - though you'll need a World subscription to see both British and Irish
papers).
LostCousins passes 2.5
million mark
I didn't notice, but Tim - one of the stalwarts who helps me out with the LostCousins Forum - has
pointed out that last week the total number of entries made by LostCousins
members exceeded 2.5 million for the first time.
Congratulations everyone! Or at least,
everyone who has entered data - because sadly there are still people who come
up with excuses, not realising that it takes less time to enter a household
than it does to send an email to explain why you don't have the time to do it.
Ironically those people think that I'm
the only one they're letting down - but in reality it's
they and their own cousins who suffer. If I get annoyed with them (and I do,
believe me, I do) it's not because it affects me personally, but because I'm
acting as a proxy for the other members who are their cousins.
Tip:
if everyone who receives this newsletter spends just 25 minutes entering their
relatives from the 1881 Census not only would we pass the 5 million mark in a trice,
there would be an additional 70,000 matches between relatives who didn't know
each other and probably never would, but for LostCousins. Around a third of
those matches would be between members on different continents! Now, wouldn't you
like to be part of a project like that?
Genealogy in the Sunshine - next month's programme
revealed
Although I organise Genealogy in the Sunshine myself, it's the speakers who make it a
success - and this year there's a fantastic line-up of speakers and we've got
some really interesting talks to look forward to, as you can see from the timetable of
the main afternoon sessions.
The morning sessions will be smaller,
shorter, more interactive, and optional - I'm told that one eminent speaker
will be offering advice round the pool, and I shall expect everyone to go home
with a suntan!
I'm also organising social events most
evenings to ensure that those who are coming on their own won't be on their own
- unless they want to be, of course. For companions who aren't on the course
there's plenty to do during the day - tennis, swimming, walking across the
cliffs, and birdwatching are the healthy options. As last year, many of those
coming are staying for longer than a week - the additional cost of the
accommodation is often cancelled out by the lower cost of mid-week flights.
Note:
following a last-minute cancellation I still have a
couple of places on the course for anyone who is interested - for an overview
of the course and the beautiful Rocha Brava resort well be staying at next
month follow this link.
Family Tree DNA and
Findmypast announce partnership
The link between DNA and genealogy is
getting ever closer, which is why both last year's inaugural Genealogy in the Sunshine and next
month's event had to feature presentations from Debbie Kennett, who is not only
the UK's leading blogger on the use
of DNA in family history research but also Honorary Research Associate in the
Department of Human Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College
London.
Even more impressive is that Debbie has
been a LostCousins member for 9 years - then again, almost all the
distinguished speakers at Genealogy in
the Sunshine are long-term members!
Yesterday Findmypast announced a
partnership with Family Tree DNA, the company that I and my cousins have tested
with. At this stage I don't know the extent to which the two sets of data (DNA
results and family trees) will be interlinked, but no doubt more information
will come to light in the coming weeks.
AncestryDNA
launching in the UK
Ancestry are already linking DNA results to tree data, but to date
their test has only been available in the US. Now AncestryDNA
have set up a UK website and are taking orders from invited subscribers - so
there's another choice opening up for family historians in the UK.
Choosing the DNA company to test with
isn't a simple decision, so I'm not going to make any recommendations until
I've heard what Debbie Kennett has to say next month.
Families of babies switched
at birth to receive $2m
The families of two French girls who
were accidentally switched at birth 20 years ago have been awarded nearly €2m ($2.3m;
£1.5m) in damages. The error was discovered 10 years ago after one of the
mothers arranged for DNA tests, and was subsequently reported in this
newsletter - but despite the DNA verdict neither mother wanted to swap back.
You can read more about this unusual
story in a BBC News article.
Since Christmas I've been reading Foundation,
the first volume of Peter Ackroyd's History of
England. You might think that the fact that after all this time I'm still only
on page 75 (out of 447) indicates that the book is hard going - but the truth
is that for someone like me, who learned little about history at school
(because it was so badly taught) there's a need to evaluate and think about
what I'm reading.
This first book starts in the
pre-historic period and ends in 1509, the year that Henry VIII came to the
throne - there's so much that I didn't know, especially about the period before
1066 - and whilst I'm never likely to be able to identify my ancestors that far
back I don't really need to because, like most of you, I'm probably descended
from everyone who lived at that time (everyone who has living descendants, that
is). The story of England is, therefore, the story of my ancestors.
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions.
This newsletter is one of the most challenging
I've published - I hope that it helps you to move up to the next level!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 Peter Calver
You
MAY link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
without asking for permission in advance - but why not invite them to join
instead?