Newsletter - 9th February 2018
Not all women
wanted the vote; not all men had it
Save on 12 month subscriptions to Findmypast
Marriage within the prohibited degrees
An impossible marriage certificate
Revealed: why so many online trees are rubbish EXCLUSIVE
Why you don't need to understand DNA
Why you should be phased by Ancestry DNA
How to find articles from past newsletters
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Not all women
wanted the vote; not all men had it
On Tuesday 6th February 1918
women over the age of 30 who owned property were given the right to vote in the
UK. But it wasn't only men who were against 'Votes for Women' - according to
this article on the BBC
website there were many women who agreed with them (more than 337,000 women are
said to have signed a petition organised by the Women's National Anti-Suffrage
League).
One of the objections made by
the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League was that "the complex modern
State depends for its very existence on naval and military power, diplomacy,
finance, and the great mining, constructive, shipping and transport industries,
in none of which can women take any practical part". Goodness knows what
they would have thought about our women Prime Ministers, each of whom took
charge at a crucial time in our history - or the many women who took over men's
jobs during the Great War. Indeed, it was the way in which women played their
part in the war effort that finally swayed public opinion.
As we look back it's also worth
remembering that there were many men who weren't able to vote before 1918 -
though you wouldn't know this from the Parliament website, which erroneously states
"Universal manhood suffrage was finally achieved in 1884".
In reality there were around
5 million adult men who were only able to vote after the passing of the 1918
legislation - previously there were property requirements which restricted the
number of voters to just 7.7 million at the 1910 General Election - by the time
of the 1918 General Election there were 12.9 million men registered to vote,
despite the casualties of the Great War. Many of those who died in the Great
War never voted - either because they were too young, or because they were too
poor to qualify; some were volunteers, but most were conscripts. The phrase
"Not in my name" could well have been used by them.
Note: there's an interesting article
on the Essex Record Office blog about suffragettes from Essex who went to
prison for their activities, while this article on the BBC
News site focuses on 7 objects, including - most poignantly - the unused return
half of Emily Davison's return railway ticket to Epsom on Derby Day. British Newspaper Archive has just added all
issues from 1912-18 of 'The Suffragette' including the special memorial issue for
Emily Davison.
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Marriage
within the prohibited degrees
In the last issue
we looked at the case of Joseph Nash, who attempted to marry his stepmother in
1851, but was unable to because a bystander interrupted the proceedings
immediately before the celebration of the marriage. Until 31st August 1835
marriages in England & Wales within the prohibited degrees were voidable,
but only if they were challenged within the lifetime of the couple - as soon as
one of them died the marriage was deemed valid.
Once new legislation came
into force in 1835 any subsequent marriage within the prohibited degrees was
automatically void, and this applied whether the couple were related by blood
or marriage. So even if the marriage of Joseph and Ann Nash had proceeded, it
would have had no legal effect. The only way round the law would have been to
sponsor a personal Act of Parliament, an expensive and time-consuming course of
action, with no guarantee of success.
Note: I found it very interesting reading the May 1980
discussion
in the House of Lords in connection with the Edward Berry and Doris Eilleen
Ward (Marriage Enabling) Bill: they were stepfather and stepdaughter, but she
was already married when he married her widowed mother, so there was no
question of her being 'brought up' by her step-father, and they were only 4
years apart in age. Sound arguments were put forward on both sides, and these
were clearly taken into account when the law finally changed in 1986.
As far as I can tell the same
restrictions currently apply to both marriages and civil partnerships (with the
exception that parties to a civil partnership must be of the same
gender). This page
from the bill that became the Civil Partnership Act 2004 sets out the
prohibited degrees in detail.
Tip: one of the books I refer to most frequently is Marriage Law for Genealogists, by Professor
Rebecca Probert, then Professor of Law at Warwick University, but now at Exeter.
She takes a very complex and confusing topic, and turns it into something that
you and I can make sense of.
An
impossible marriage certificate
The marriage that didn’t take
place between Joseph Nash and Ann Nash is possibly unique in being recorded in
the contemporary indexes of the General Register Office as if it had had
happened, so - as mentioned in the last newsletter - I ordered the certificate,
not really expecting to get one. Here's what I was sent:
As you can see, it's
virtually identical to the church copy of the parish register, so considering
it's quite clear the marriage didn't take place I'm quite surprised, though delighted,
that the GRO went ahead and issued the certificate. Since last week I've also
found out a little more about this story from a relative who is a LostCousins
member, and it's hard not to feel sympathy for Joseph and Ann.
The story begins 15 years
earlier, in 1836 when Joseph Nash, then about 30 years old, was courting a
young widow, Ann Hare (nee Bonner), whose husband Michael had died a couple of
years earlier at the age of just 29. Michael was a miller who had commissioned
the building of a new windmill at Heckington, Lincolnshire in 1830. But before
Joseph could marry Ann, his father Sleightholme (or Sleighton) Nash made her
what must have been a better offer, even though he was considerably older than
she was - according to this contemporary newspaper report from the Leicester Mercury dated 13th August
1836:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED used by kind permission of Findmypast
How humiliating it must have
been for Joseph to disown his intended bride in favour of his own father!
Sleightholme and the young widow were married by licence, as you can see from
the marriage register:
Once he had control of the
mill Sleightholme tried to sell it, as you can see from this article from the Stamford Mercury:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED used by kind permission of Findmypast
It didn't sell, and when
Sleightholme died in 1847 it passed to Joseph, who also tried - unsuccessfully
- to sell the mill. You can find out more about Heckington Windmill, the
world's ONLY working 8-sailed windmill here.
Revealed: why so many online
trees are rubbish EXCLUSIVE
I'd always thought that the
reason there are so many errors in so many public trees at Ancestry is because
the owners of the trees were ignorant, careless, or stupid. But this week I
discovered that they’re simply doing what they've been advised to do - by
Ancestry!
The shocking truth was
revealed in this article
from the FamilySearch wiki:
This seems to have been
written some years ago, and I haven't been able to identify the webinar
referred to - so it’s possible Ancestry subsequently changed their advice.
Nevertheless anyone who did see the webinar, and anyone who has read this article
at FamilySearch could be forgiven for uploading a dodgy tree. Well, almost.
I wouldn't advise anyone to
create a public tree at Ancestry, let alone a speculative one - but if you do,
please ensure that the title of the tree makes its nature absolutely clear. You
could, for example, call it 'Speculative XXX tree', but why not go the whole
hog and call it 'Rubbish XXX tree - copy at your peril'?
Please spend a minute or two checking
the entries on your My Ancestors page
using the grey arrows - that's why they're there. You only need to click one
arrow per household, so make sure your entries are sorted by household before
you start, otherwise it'll take you much longer.
When you click an arrow it
carries out a census search using the references you've provided - if you don't
get any search results this almost always means that you've entered the wrong
references (the same applies if the wrong names appear, but bear in mind that
the search results will often extend to two pages).
Tip: you might think this advice doesn't apply to you,
because you don't make mistakes. Believe me, everyone makes mistakes!
And if you haven't completed
your My Ancestors page yet be
prepared to face my wrath when you write in. I've spent 14 years of my life
creating and running LostCousins with one simple objective: to connect cousins
around the world, So every time I get an email from a member who isn't taking
part it's like being kicked in the teeth.
Tip: it doesn’t matter what you write to me about,
I'll almost always carry out a quick check of your My Ancestors page.
Why you don't
need to understand DNA
I get lots of emails from
readers who tell me that they don't understand DNA - but the fact is you don't
need to understand it, any more than you need to know how a combustion engine
works in order to drive a car!
It's true that with the very
first consumer DNA tests you did need to understand a little about how DNA is
inherited, just as car drivers in the early 1900s needed to be able to tinker
with the engines when their cars broke down, as they frequently did (at least,
that's the impression I got from watching Genevieve, and I have to say it wasn't a
lot better when I got my first car, a 1965 MGB!).
But when you take a modern
DNA test, like Ancestry DNA, it simply doesn't matter - because there is no
complicated pattern to the way autosomal DNA is inherited. You get half of
yours from each parent, they got half of theirs from each of their parents, and
so on - it really couldn't be simpler. You surely don’t need me to tell you
that the amount of DNA you share with each of your 2 parents is greater than
the amount you share with each of your 4 grandparents (or each of your 32
great-great-great grandparents). It's equally obvious that the amount of DNA
you share with a close cousin is likely to be much higher than the amount you
share with a distant cousin, so more distant connections might not be
detectable.
That's all you really need to
know. But if you do want to know more, take a look at the table on the ISOGG
website, which indicates how much DNA - on average - you will share with
different relatives. This is incredibly useful if you were adopted, or have a
recent ancestor who was illegitimate, and have multiple close or fairly close
matches with people who are known to be related to each other. In a future
article I'll explain how you can narrow down the range of possible
relationships.
Why you should
be phased by Ancestry DNA
Ancestry's DNA test may not
be the cheapest autosomal DNA test, but because they have by far the largest
database of tests results it's the best option. Size isn't everything, however
- what they do with your test results is also crucially important.
Ancestry use a proprietary
algorithm called Underdog to phase your
raw data. This may not mean a lot to you, but it makes an awfully big
difference to the quality of the DNA matches you get. And here's why…..
We have two sets of autosomal
chromosomes, one from our father and one from our mother. This means that when
your data is compared with that of potential cousins a match will be found if either
the DNA you got from your father or the DNA you got from your mother
matches at that point. Indeed, because the other person also has two sets of
chromosomes there are 4 ways in which a match can be made.
This would be OK if your DNA
results were neatly divided into two piles, one from your mother and one from
your father, but they're not - they're all higgledy-piggledy. So you can get
cross-over matches, where one part of a cousin's DNA segment matches your
father's DNA, and another part matches your mother's DNA. This can easily make
it appear that there's a match when in reality there is none - and that's why short
matching segments of DNA tend to be ignored; indeed, the shorter the match the
more likely it is to be spurious.
The good news is that
Ancestry use an algorithm to phase your data, ie split it into two neat piles.
And they do that for everyone else who has tested with them. Whilst no phasing
algorithm can be perfect, Ancestry reckon Underdog
is 99% accurate (you can read much, much more about phasing and Ancestry's
solution in this paper
written by Ancestry researchers).
What does this mean in practice?
It means that Ancestry's matches should be more reliable - that when Ancestry
say you share a segment of DNA with another user, you can be reasonably sure
that the other person is a cousin of yours. There will still be a proportion of
spurious matches, but there should be fewer. It also means that you'll be shown
as sharing less DNA with a cousin than if you compared your results at another
site, such as GEDmatch or Family Tree DNA. This applies even if you and your
cousin both tested with Ancestry, because when you download your raw data from
Ancestry it is unphased.
It's difficult enough figuring
out how you're connected to your genetic cousins when the match is genuine -
the last thing you want is to spend hundreds of hours trying to pin down spurious
matches. Or to be distracted by false leads when we're researching a match with
someone who really is a cousin.
For example, Family Tree DNA
tell me that I have an X-chromosome match with my cousin Fiona - but since our shared
Ancestry is on my father's side it must be spurious (my X-chromosome came from
my mother - I got a Y-chromosome from my father). When I looked more closely I
discovered that the supposedly matching segment is just 3.17cM long - so very
likely to be spurious.
Ancestry identify Fiona as a
match to me but determined that we had only one 8.9cM segment in common; by
contrast FTDNA show that we share 60cM in total with a longest segment of 16cM.
Since we're 6th cousins Ancestry's statistics are lot more believable - most
6th cousins wouldn't show up as a match at all.
Note: in the early days of genetic genealogy
researchers were short of matches, so there was a tendency to 'clutch at
straws'; now we get more matches than we can possibly investigate - which means
a more selective approach is required.
In my 22nd January newsletter
I asked how many DNA matches you had, and explained that the figure Ancestry
display only includes the closest matches - most of us will have 10,000 to
20,000 matches in total, possibly more. I also explained that to calculate how
many matches you have in total you only need to know how many pages of matches
you have - because there are 50 to a page.
What I didn't point out is
that you can jump from one page to another, you don't have to go through one
page at a time - simply type the page number in the box and press Enter:
For example, you might type
in 200, which will display matches from 9951-10000. With a little bit of
experimentation you'll soon figure out how many matches there are in total,
though it's really only of academic interest, since it’s not the number of
matches but what you do with them that matters, which is why I wrote the
Masterclass article What
to do with your autosomal DNA results
An offer has just started at
Ancestry.com - if you're in the USA you can buy tests for just $69 (plus
shipping) until midnight Eastern time on Sunday 25th February. Please use this link so that you can save
and support LostCousins at the same time!
If you're in Canada you can save $30
when you use this
link: Ancestry.ca (the offer runs until 25th February).
In Australia or New Zealand use this link (the price is $129 at the moment, which may be the new permanent price): Ancestry.com.au
If you’re in the UK you might
be able to save 20% using this link
(you'll probably need to log-out from your Ancestry account first, especially
if you've bought a test before).
Family Tree DNA are also reducing the cost
of their tests $59 plus shipping (the offer now ends on 17th February). This US dollar price applies
worldwide - follow this link to support LostCousins.
Red or ginger hair occurs
naturally in around 2-6% of European populations, and in most cases sufferers
have two copies of a recessive gene on chromosome 16. My choice of the word
'sufferers' reflects the fact that, to quote Wikipedia, "In
various times and cultures, red hair has been prized, feared, and ridiculed".
In the 19th century red hair
seems not to have been an asset, at least not for young women living in
Cambridgeshire. The Stamford Mercury
reported a very sad tale in the 30th August 1839 issue:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED used by kind permission of Findmypast
I couldn't find a product
sold as Hendrie's hair-dye, but I did find an advertisement for Hendries'
Moelline, which would have been on sale in a perfume shop, and may perhaps have
been misdescribed by the seller:
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD, ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED used by kind permission of Findmypast
Good genealogical mysteries
are like London buses - you wait for ages and then three arrive at the same
time. Even before I'd finished reading File
Under Fathers, the latest in the Anna Ames series from Geraldine Wall, I
received a preview copy of The Vanished
Child, the latest Jayne Sinclair mystery from the Montblanc pen of MJ Lee,
due out on 23rd February (but you can pre-order at a discount price), and then
a review copy of The Wicked Trade -
the new Morton Farrier novel from Nathan Dylan Goodwin, which is out this week!
I'll review all three of
these books as soon as I've finished them, but if you want to order them in the
meantime please use the following links so that you can support LostCousins (as
well as some of my favourite authors):
File Under Fathers - Amazon.co.uk
- Amazon.com - Amazon.ca
The Vanished Child - Amazon.co.uk
- Amazon.com - Amazon.ca
The Wicked Trade - Amazon.co.uk
- Amazon.com - Amazon.ca
How to find
articles from past newsletters
I often receive emails from
members asking how they can find articles from previous newsletters.
There are two ways you can do
this: one is to go back through the newsletters one by one using the links I
provide (each newsletter has a link to the one before - look just below the
list of articles at the top of the newsletter) - this is usually the best
solution when you’re looking for an article that you know appeared very
recently.
The other option is to use
the customised Google search, also found near the beginning of each newsletter.
This will ONLY search the newsletters - you won’t get results from other
websites - so it's a great way to find articles that could have appeared years
ago.
Tip: if you're a LostCousins subscriber you'll find
links to all of my Masterclasses on the Subscribers Only page.
It took nearly two months for
Lloyds Bank to realise what I told
readers of this newsletter on 11th December - that some people buying Bitcoin with
borrowed money would be unable to repay the loans when the price inevitably
crashed. At the beginning of this week they announced
that they would no longer allow
credit cards to be used to purchase cryptocurrencies, and were quickly followed
by Virgin Money.
I can't get through Christmas
without remembering my first proper holiday job, 40 hours a week plucking
turkeys for 2s 6d an hour (not bad money at the age of 13 - it probably wouldn't
be allowed these days). So when our 30 year-old freezer finally gave up a
fortnight ago, something we didn’t notice until several days later (by which
time the food was well-thawed, though still at fridge temperature, thanks to
the weather) the one item I was confident about saving was a turkey I'd bought
at half-price on Christmas Eve. You can't pluck as many turkeys as I have without
knowing the difference between a good one and one that is starting to 'go off'.
I also salvaged a Summer Pudding I'd been saving for a special occasion, and
some bakery items.
"Waste not, want
not" was one of the sayings that informed my childhood, and even today it
pains me to throw food away; fortunately food seems to last much longer than it
used to, provided it is properly refrigerated. For example, I bought some
double cream before Christmas in case anyone who would be coming over the
festive period wanted cream with their coffee, or poured over their dessert -
but in the event nobody did. By the time the first carton was eventually opened
it was nearly 4 weeks past the use-by date, but it was still in perfect
condition, and stayed that way for more than a week, at which point I opened
the second carton, by now 5 weeks past its use-by date - and that too was fine!
17th February: The Findmypast and Ancestry DNA articles have been updated today.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2018
Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or
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