Newsletter - 16th February 2019
Free access to Ancestry.co.uk this weekend ENDS MONDAY
Continuing
mystery: Kate Luard's missing birth registration
MASTERCLASS: finding birth
certificates in England & Wales
Cousin marriages account for a high proportion of infant deaths
February 25th - a date for your diary
Do you have ancestors from Wales?
You
say 'pajama', I say 'pyjama'
Man gives birth - or how TT turned out to be XX not XY
Belgian ex-King faces DNA demand
Review: Waking Up to the
Facebook Catastrophe
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous newsletter (dated 8th February 2019)
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!
Free access
to Ancestry this weekend ENDS MONDAY
Until midnight on Monday 18th
February Ancestry.co.uk is offering free access to all UK and Irish records -
over 1 billion of them. This offer only applies at the UK site, and might be
restricted to users who live in the UK or Ireland - that's something I can't
check.
To take advantage of the
offer please follow this link.
Please note that you'll need to log-in or register in order to take advantage
of the offer - but you won’t have to provide payment details.
Ancestry in Australia are
providing free access to over 274 million Australian, New Zealand, and UK
marriage records, as well as to many of their immigration records. This free
access offer ends at midnight on Sunday 17th February - click this link
for more information.
Members who took part in my
New Year Competition reaped most of the benefits - and I'm not talking about
the fabulous prizes, but the connections to living relatives who are
researching the same ancestors. I was particularly delighted to receive this
email from Shirley:
Since
inputting new information in December, I have had 3 matches with 'lost cousins'
come through. I have been in contact with these people, two from Canada and one
here in England. They have each been very helpful to me and I have been able to
knock down a number of brick walls and now, with the help
of my Ancestry membership, I have been able to add many more distant cousins to
my family tree.
The
major use of these new contacts though, has been to validate that the information
I have gleaned from Ancestry about direct ancestors is correct, which is a real
joy!
In addition to this, I am sure
I have made at least one new friend. I have been doing my tree on and off for
20 years now, but never felt so connected before, so once again Thank you so
much!
It's the last bit that really
brought a smile to my face - family history might seem to outsiders to be a
rather solitary pursuit, but it certainly doesn't need to be that way.
Continuing
mystery: Kate Luard's missing birth registration
This series of articles will
be of interest for anyone who wants a better understanding of how the registration
system in England & Wales did, and didn’t, work in the 19th century.
Just to make it clear, although
I recently reviewed a book of Kate Luard's letters, I don’t have a particular interest in the family. Nor am I trying to find
out when Kate Luard was born, or when she was baptised (I already know the
answers). What does interest me, though, is why the birth registration for Kate
Luard is missing from the GRO indexes - both the contemporary indexes and the
new ones. Is it feasible that a middle class family headed by a Church of
England vicar would register the births of some children but not others? And if
so, why?
Whilst prior to 1875 there
was no penalty for failing to register a birth (although there was a penalty
for late registration), there are relatively few instances of unregistered
births after the 1840s - and yet, not only is Kate's birth missing from the
indexes, so are the births of some of her siblings and cousins. And yet most Luard
births were registered, so it doesn’t
seem that there was any principle at stake.
Alternatively, is it possible
that a birth could be registered at a local register office, but not be
recorded in the registers at the General Register Office? Entries submitted to
the GRO were copied from the local registers, using the same numbers, so any
gap should have been obvious. But perhaps the system wasn't completely foolproof?
Over at the LostCousins Forum
we've also been looking at other possibilities (you can see the discussion here
but you won’t be able to post messages yourself unless you are a member of the
forum). For example, might Rev Bixby Luard and his wife Clara have adopted a
child and brought her up as their own? As you'll see from the forum discussion
there is a twin girl in a nearby parish whose birth was registered, but who then seems to vanish - there is no baptism,
no burial, and no death record.
I decided to examine the
baptism registers for Aveley, the parish where Kate Luard's father was the
incumbent, and where she was baptised on 28th July 1872. Kate's baptism was
entry 796 in a baptism register with 800 numbered entries (8 on each of the 100
printed pages). I started by checking the first 10 entries in the next
register, which was first used on 1st September 1872 - I was able to find birth
registrations for all of them, mostly in Orsett registration district in the
3rd quarter of 1872 (the quarter in which Kate's birth would almost certainly have
been registered, as she was born at the end of June).
I then turned to the last
page of the previous register, the page on which Kate's baptism was recorded. I
was able to find most of the infants in the birth indexes, but there were three
which I couldn't find - entries 796, 797, and 798. The first was for Kate
Evelyn Luard, the second (on the same day) was for Lucy Ellen Groves (parents Samuel
& Mary Ann), and the third (on 25th August) was for Reginald Thomas Francis
(parents Alfred & Harriett Selina). This certainly hints at some error in
the registration system, and if so it is very unlikely
that a single parish was affected - I'd expect it to affect other parishes in
the same sub-registration district.
Although it's easy to find
out which parishes are in the same registration district using this index on the UKBMD website, and the
names of the sub-districts are given, you can’t easily find out which parishes
are in each sub-district. I eventually found this page
at the National Archives which provided the information as it was at the time
of the 1851 Census. Over the next few days I'll be checking whether births for
children baptised around the same time in other parishes are recorded at the GRO
(so far I've checked Grays
Thurrock - there were no omissions).
MASTERCLASS: finding
birth certificates in England & Wales
It's very frustrating when you can't find an ancestor's birth
certificate - but often the 'brick wall' only exists in our imagination. Let's
look at some of the key reasons why a certificate can't be found....
· The
forename you know your ancestor by may not be the one on the birth certificate
Sometimes the name(s) given at the time of baptism would differ
from the name(s) given to the registrar of births; sometimes a middle name was
preferred, perhaps to avoid confusion with another family member, often the
father. Although it was possible to amend a birth register entry to reflect a
change of name at baptism, most people seem not to have bothered.
There can be all sorts of reasons why a different forename is used - one of my
ancestors appears on some censuses as 'Ebenezer' and on others as 'John' (which
I imagine was the name he was generally known by). In another family the
children (and there were lots of them) were all known by their middle names.
· Middle
names come and go
At the beginning of the 19th century it was rare to have a middle
name, but by the beginning of the 20th century it was unusual not to have one. Some
people invented middle names, some people dropped middle names they didn't
like, and sometimes people simply forgot what was on the birth certificate.
For example, one of my relatives was registered as Fred, but in 1911 his father
- my great-grandfather - gave his name as Frederick.
· The
surname on the certificate may not be the one you expect
If the parents weren't married at the time of the birth then
usually (but not always) the birth will be indexed under the mother's maiden
name; the main exception is where the mother was using the father's surname and
failed to disclose to the registrar that they weren't married. In the early
days of civil registration some illegitimate births were indexed under the
surnames of both parents (the examples I've seen are from the 1840s), but this
anomaly was corrected when the GRO recompiled the indexes in the 21st century.
Surname spellings were not fixed in the 19th century, and some continued to
change in the 20th century (the spelling of my grandmother's surname changed between
her birth in 1894 and her marriage in 1915). Many surnames of foreign origin
changed around the time of the First World War - even the Royal Family changed
their name.
· You're
looking for the wrong father
Often the best clue you have to the identity of your ancestor's
father is the information on his or her marriage certificate. Unfortunately marriage certificates are often incorrect -
the father's name and/or occupation may well be wrong. This is particularly
likely if your ancestor never knew his or her father, whether as a result of
early death or illegitimacy. Not many people admit to being illegitimate on
their wedding day - and in Victorian Britain illegitimacy was frowned upon, so
single mothers often made up stories to tell their children (as well as the
neighbours).
If the groom's name is the same as the name given for his father you should be
especially wary - when you're struggling to find a birth it is a strong hint that
the father isn’t who the marriage register says he is. However
it might only be the surname that's wrong - illegitimate sons were often named
after their putative father.
Whether or not the birth was legitimate young children often took the name
of the man their mother later married, so always bear in mind the possibility
that the father whose name is shown on the marriage certificate is actually a
step-father.
· You
may be looking in the wrong place
A child's birthplace is likely to be shown correctly when he or
she is living at home (few mothers are going to forget where they were when
they gave birth!), but could well be incorrect after
leaving home. Many people simply didn't know where they were born, and assumed
it was the place where they remembered growing up.
The most accurate birthplace is the one given by the father or (especially)
the mother of the person whose birth you're trying to track down; the least
accurate is likely to be the one in the first census after they leave home. Enumerators
also made mistakes, and sometimes added extra information - for example, my great-great
grandmother was born in Lee, Kent but the 1851 Census shows her as born in Leith,
Scotland. Clearly the enumerator could have misheard 'Lee' as 'Leith', but he
wouldn't have mistaken 'Kent' for 'Scotland'. Another common error made by
enumerators was to switch the birthplaces of the head of household and his wife.
· You
may be looking in the wrong period
Ages on censuses are often wrong, as are the ages shown on
marriage certificates - especially if there is an age gap between the parties,
or one or both is below the age of consent (21). Sometimes people didn't know
how old they were, or knew which year they were born
but bungled the subtraction; ages on death certificates can be little more than
guesses, or may be based on an incorrect age shown on the deceased's marriage
certificate. Remember too that births could be registered up to 42 days
afterwards without penalty, so many will be recorded in the following quarter -
and they could be registered up to 365 days afterwards on payment of a fine.
In my experience, where the marriage certificate shows 'of full age' it's
often an indication that in reality at least one of them was under 21. It was
only very recently that vicars were given the power to require evidence of age
and identity.
· The
birth was not registered at all
This is the least likely situation, but it did happen occasionally
- most often in the first few years of registration, though it wasn't until 1875
that there was a penalty for failing to register a birth. To be certain that a
birth wasn't registered you would need to have almost as much information as
would be shown on a birth certificate - so it's a possibility you can safely
ignore.
· The
GRO indexes are wrong
This is also quite rare, but did happen
occasionally - despite the checks that were carried out. Fortunately
the indexes that the GRO made available on their website in November 2016 were
compiled from scratch, so most indexing errors will have been eliminated
(although inevitably some new ones were introduced).
· The
GRO indexes have been mistranscribed
Transcription errors can prevent you finding the entry you’re
looking for - so don’t confine your searching to a single website (none of them
is perfect). Bear in mind that the indexes at Ancestry for the period up to
1915 were provided by FreeBMD, so you’re likely to
get he same results from both sites, although FreeBMD
will have include some corrections that aren't reflected in the Ancestry
database. Similarly the indexes at FamilySearch were
provided by Findmypast.
How can you overcome these problems? First and foremost
keep an open mind - be prepared to accept that any or all of the information
you already have may be wrong. This is particularly likely if you have been
unable to find your relative at home with their parents on any of the censuses.
Obtain all the information that you can from censuses,
certificates, baptism entries and other sources (such as Army records). The
GRO's new birth indexes show the mother's maiden name from the start of civil
registration - the contemporary indexes only include this information from July
1911 onwards. And don’t assume that the same information will be shown in the
baptism register as in the birth register - if the birth was registered before
the baptism the forenames could be different. (Whilst it was possible to update
the birth entry following the baptism - hence the final column on birth
certificates - this rarely happened.)
Make use of free searches - the GRO's online index of historic births
is completely free, though the search options are very limited, with very poor
fuzzy-matching. Furthermore, although maiden names are included from 1837
onwards you can’t search on maiden name only. Findmypast
offers much better search options, and you probably won’t need a subscription
because a free search provides a lot of information. Although maiden names currently
aren't recorded for every birth
between 1837-1911, the fact that you can search by maiden name alone is
incredibly useful
The less information you can find, the more likely it is that the
little you already have is incorrect or misleading in some way. For example, if
you can't find your ancestor on ANY censuses prior to his marriage, you can be pretty certain that the information on the marriage
certificate and later censuses is wrong in some material way.
Don't assume that just because something appears in an official
document, it must be right. Around half of the 19th century marriage
certificates I've seen included at least one error, and as many as half of all
census entries are also wrong in some respect (I'm not talking about
transcription errors, by the way). Army
records are particularly unreliable - one of my relatives added 2 years to his
age when he joined the British Army in 1880, and
knocked 7 years off when he signed up for the Canadian Expeditionary Force in
1914.
Some people really were named Tom,
Dick, or Harry but over-eager record-keepers might assume that they were actually Thomas, Richard and Henry. My grandfather was
Harry, but according to his army records he was Henry (just as well he had two
other forenames - which were recorded correctly - otherwise I might never have
found him).
Consider how and why the information you have might be wrong by
working your way through the list above - then come up with a strategy to deal
with each possibility. Sometimes it's as easy as looking up the index entry for
a sibling to find out the mother's maiden name; often discovering when the parents
married is a vital clue (but don't believe what it says on the 1911 Census -
the years of marriage shown may have been adjusted for the sake of propriety).
If you can't find your ancestor on any census with his or her
parents then you should be particularly suspicious of the information you have
- it's very likely that some element is wrong, and it is quite conceivable that
it is ALL wrong. Tempting as it is to hold on to clues when you have so few of
them, sometimes you can only succeed by letting go, and starting from scratch.
Middle names that could also be surnames often indicate
illegitimacy - it was usually the only way to get the father's name on the
birth certificate. Unusual middle names can provide clues - I remember
helping one member find an ancestor whose birth was under a completely
different surname by taking advantage of the fact that his middle name was
Ptolemy!
Make use of local BMD indexes where they exist (start at UKBMD),
and don't forget to look for your ancestor's baptism - sometimes we forget that
parents continued to have their children baptised after Civil Registration
began. Consider the possibility that one or both of the parents
died when your ancestor was young - perhaps there will be evidence in workhouse
records. Have you looked for wills?
Could the witnesses to your ancestor's marriage be
relatives? When my
great-great-great grandfather Joseph Harrison married, one of the witnesses was
a Sarah Salter - who I later discovered (after many years of fruitless
searching) was his mother. Her maiden name wasn't Salter, by the way - nor was it Harrison - and it was only because the Salter name stuck
in my mind that I managed to knock down the 'brick wall'. Another marriage
witness with a surname I didn't recognise proved invaluable when I was
struggling with my Smith line - he turned up as a lodger in the census, helping
to prove that I was looking at the same family on two successive censuses, even
though the names and ages of the
children didn't tally, and the father had morphed from a carpenter to a rag
merchant.
Remember that you're probably not the only one researching this particular ancestor - and one of your cousins may already have
the answers you're seeking. So make sure that you have
entered ALL your relatives from 1881 on your My Ancestors page, as
this is the census that is most likely to link you to your 'lost cousins'.
Finally remember that even when you find the birth certificate the
information might not be correct; for example, if the child is the youngest in
a large family consider the possibility that the mother shown on the
certificate was actually the child's grandmother (see this article
for an example). When a birth was registered by one parent the name of the
other parent could only be recorded in the register if the parents were married
(or claimed to be married); as a result some births
registered by the mother named the wrong father, and (more rarely) some births
registered by the father named the wrong mother. You can see another example of
a birth certificate which names the wrong mother here.
Note: although this Masterclass relates to England
& Wales much of the advice will also apply to searches in other countries.
Cousin
marriages account for a high proportion of infant deaths
In the past I've written in
some detail about the much higher risk of genetic diseases that results from marriages
between cousins, especially 1st cousins, and research into child deaths in
parts of England where cousin marriages are more common has quantified the
problem - see this article
in The Guardian for more details.
Note: the problems occur where cousins have inherited
the same genetic flaws - so the good news is that DNA testing can provide a
very accurate assessment of the risks. However it isn’t
something that routinely happens, even now that the cost of tests has
plummeted.
February
25th - a date for your diary
If you've enjoyed the Adoption Matters series
then I suspect you will find the 25th February episode of the ITV series Long Lost Family particularly interesting.
Sadly I can't tell you any more at the moment - the
information is embargoed until 19th February - but as there may not be another
issue of this newsletter before the programme airs I wanted to make sure that you
put the date in your diary.
Do you have
ancestors from Wales?
There is a half-day (10.30-13.00)
course at the Society of Genealogists in London on Saturday 2nd March entitled Tracing Ancestors in Wales. Led by Gill
Thomas it costs £20 for non-members or £16 for SoG members.
You can find out more and book here
(there were 13 places remaining when I last checked).
When I was a boy nightwear
was almost always made from a fabric called 'winceyette', but it was only
recently that I wondered where the name had come from - and it turned out that
it has quite a complicated history.
It all starts with 'linsey-woolsey',
a fabric with a linen warp and a woollen weft (see this Wikipedia article if, like me, you’re
already struggling to keep up). Linsey-woolsey was an important fabric in the
American Colonies because wool was in short supply, but it's rarely found
nowadays. Occasionally the two parts of the name were reversed, thus 'woolsey-lincey', and sometimes this was abbreviated to
'wincey'.
The term 'winceyette' is derived
from 'wincey' in the same way as 'flannelette' comes from 'flannel'. Both winceyette
and flannelette are napped
cotton fabrics (which gives them a soft feel), but winceyette is napped on both
sides.
You say 'pajama', I say 'pyjama'
I carefully used the word
'nightwear' in the previous article, conscious that if I had referred to most
common form of male nightwear by name I'd have had a
problem deciding whether to write 'pajamas' or
'pyjamas'.
Having subsequently done some
research I now know that the word is derived from pai jamahs, a term used to describe clothing
worn by Muslims in India. The main difference between 'pajamas'
and 'pyjamas' is the former is preferred in the US, and the latter in England -
and Canadians can use either version. Perhaps it's simpler just to refer to
them as PJs?
In the last newsletter I linked
to a Wikipedia page, prompting a reader to write in to tell me about an
omission. In this particular case the member concerned
hadn't looked sufficiently closely - the information was there all the time -
but even if it hadn't been, Wikipedia is a site where the information is
provided by users, so if you spot an error or omission you can change it
yourself!
Tip: in general any site with
'wiki' in the name works the same way.
Man gives birth
- or how TT turned out to be XX not XY
A transgender man, referred
to as TT in order to protect the identity of his child, is taking the Registrar
General to court in a bid to be named as the father of the child, rather than
as the mother. According to a newspaper report the former woman was able to have
fertility treatment 10 days after legally becoming male - you can read more
about this confusing case here.
Belgian
ex-King faces DNA demand
Four years ago I featured a story
about a woman who dug up her dead father to prove that he wasn't, in fact, her real
dad. Now another woman, Delphine Boël, is insisting
that the former King Albert II of Belgium (now 84, he abdicated in 2013 in
favour of his son Philippe) take a DNA test to prove whether
or not he is her father. You can read more about the ongoing saga in
this Daily Telegraph article.
In the last newsletter I described
how the information in a typical public tree at Ancestry could expose you and
your loved ones to a higher risk of fraud. Understandably, given the other
reservations I've expressed about public trees in the past, this was
interpreted by some readers as a warning not to have a public tree at all.
That wasn't my intention -
because it’s quite possible to have a public tree without the associated risks
to privacy and security. The problem is, if you upload your entire family tree
and rely on Ancestry (or whoever) to hide the profiles of living persons it isn’t
good enough - it's far too easy for someone less scrupulous than you or I to combine the information in the tree with other
publicly-available information in order to reconstruct the missing part of the
tree. So whilst hiding the profiles of living persons
might conform with the letter of data protection legislation, it doesn’t really
conform with the spirit of the legislation - which is, after all, intended to protect
innocent members of the public.
Why do we need to include
living people in our online trees at all? Given the way that online trees
usually work the tree owner probably needs to be there, but why include the
tree owner's siblings and cousins?
I think it’s
time for those who advocate public trees to explain why it’s necessary to
include this information - and if it isn’t necessary, to remove it from their
own trees. The public vs private issue isn't black and white - if you must have
a public tree there are ways of maximising the benefits whilst minimising the
downsides. If the main reason you're considering having a public tree is
because you've tested your DNA, one option is to link a direct ancestors-only
public tree to your results.
Tip: to check whether your Ancestry tree is public or
private (and change the setting, if required) click the 'Trees' tab, then
select 'Create and manage trees' from the dropdown menu. You should see a list
of all your trees; at the right under tools you'll see 'Manage tree'. Click it
and a page headed up Tree Settings will appear. Now click 'Privacy settings' -
you'll be able to see whether your tree is public or private. Even if your tree
is private, I'd recommend that you make it searchable, as this will help your
cousins find you.
Review: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
This book about Mark
Zuckerberg's creation was published on Thursday of last week, just as I was
writing the last issue of the newsletter - so when it arrived
I had to put it to one side. But I started reading as soon as the newsletter
had been uploaded, and found that I couldn’t put it
down - it was as involving as any genealogical mystery, and the way the plot
unfolded was pretty similar too.
The full title of the book is
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
- and it starts by explaining how Facebook users have been suckered into
providing the website with the personal information about themselves and their
contacts. There's a saying which predates the Internet along the lines of
"If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you're the
product", and in the case of Facebook it's very apt.
In fact, the more I read, the
more convinced I was that I'd hit the nail on the head in the article Something in common with Facebook in the
last
issue, where I compared the way that Facebook works with the way that
LostCousins works. But if you read the book you'll
realise that it's not just about the information that Facebook collects, but about
what they do with it - including allowing third parties to have access. (Remember
the Cambridge
Analytica scandal?)
But despite all the bad
things that have happened, so long as there isn't a
better and safer alternative people will continue using Facebook. The most alarming
thing is that because Facebook has over 2 billion users it would be
exceptionally difficult for a benign competitor to become established - and
even more difficult for that competitor to stay in business, given the power
that Facebook has over advertisers.
I've only told you a fraction
of what's in the book, which - even if you don’t agree with everything - is
thoroughly thought-provoking. If you're concerned about what is happening to
society, to politics, and to the world we live in this is a book you simply have to read. There are some recommendations at the end
which I personally think go a little too far - but once you've read the whole book
you might well think differently.
I bought the hardback since
it wasn't a lot more expensive than the Kindle version, and I wanted the
convenience of being able to mark passages with Post-It notes (I know you can
do something similar with electronic books, but sometimes the old ways are the
best). As usual you can help LostCousins remain independent by using the links
below, even if you end up buying something completely different:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
This is where any
major updates and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted
an error first reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check again before writing to me, in case someone else has
beaten you to it......
Finally a reminder that if you received an email telling
you about this newsletter you’re a LostCousins member - which means you can take
part in my project to connect cousins around the world. Half an hour spent
entering relatives from the 1881 Census could not only transform your research,
it could make one of your cousins very happy - like Shirley who I wrote about
earlier!
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?