Newsletter – 15th
July 2024
Extra DNA savings in Australia ENDS THURSDAY
The London
Metropolitan Archives change name
Miles from home:
knocking down a ‘brick wall’ with DNA
Another grandmother,
more secrets
Ancestry Pro Tools: a
first look
Gardeners Corner:
time for a rethink
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Extra DNA savings in Australia ENDS THURSDAY
If you live in
Australia or New Zealand you can
save 30% on DNA tests at Ancestry.com.au until Thursday 18th - it's the best deal I can recall this year.
Most
serious family historians have already taken a DNA test, but if you want to
target a specific ‘brick wall’ it frequently helps if you can persuade a cousin
who shares the same ‘brick wall’ ancestors to test. It doesn’t matter whether
they’re actively researching their tree – all that matters is that they’re
prepared to help you with your research by providing some key evidence.
Ideally you’ll want to choose someone who shares only
the ‘brick wall’ ancestor(s) – which will often mean asking a 3rd or
4th cousin to test. Don’t assume that just because you’ve never met someone they’ll be reluctant to help – in my experience very
few people will refuse to take a test in order to help their own cousin (just
make it clear that you’ll be paying!).
When
you order a test from Ancestry you don’t need to tell them who is going to be
testing – in fact, you can delay naming the person right up to the point where
they take the test. So you can place an order at the
offer price knowing that you won’t be wasting your money.
I
suggest you log-out from Ancestry before clicking the link below or the banner above – thanks for
supporting LostCousins!
Tip: you may be able to
get a 3 month World Membership for just $1 when you order a DNA test - you'll find out when you click the link
above and enter the code ORIGIN30
The
London Metropolitan Archives change name
I
used to be a frequent visitor to the London Metropolitan Archives back until
about 15 years ago, when Ancestry put the parish registers and many of the
other records online. Conveniently sited near to the Society of Genealogists
(now a little further away) and the Family Records Centre (long gone), it was
one corner of my golden triangle of research.
Following
the results of a survey which indicated confusion around the use of the word
‘Metropolitan’ in the name it has been decided to change to ‘The London
Archives’.
I’m
not sure when the new name takes effect – the website hasn’t changed yet – but
I’m glad I took the time to visit the site because I discovered the Court of
Orphans, which looked after the interests of the underage children of deceased Freemen
(you can find out more here).
There’s
nothing secret about the change of name for the London Metropolitan Archives,
but name changes in our tree may not be obvious – indeed, sometimes they’re
incredibly well-hidden.
The
next three articles are about grandparents who changed their name – I hope you
find them interesting as well as instructive. But before you make a start, there’s
a name change story which involves the goalkeeper for the England football team
– you’ll find it here.
Miles from home: knocking down a ‘brick wall’ with DNA
Many
thanks to Carmel in Australia for allowing me to share her account of how she
helped her DNA matches in Canada discover the true identity
of their grandfather:
When following up an Ancestry DNA match of
125 cm from Canada, I found that various members of the Canadian family had
tried to make sense of it, but after many years of research they were still
none the wiser.
Their grandfather, Frederick Arthur Miles,
had arrived from England around 1906. Frederick had apparently been adopted as
a child by Noah Miles & Emma Cleaver, but little else was known other than
the fact that he had been in the British navy. However, the name Cooke had been
mentioned, and as the surname Cook appeared in my tree this was a possible
lead.
Using Ancestry Shared Matches I
deduced that the connection was through my paternal grandmother Hursey Wilde
(1872-1942) who emigrated from England to Australia in 1895. Her mother was
Eliza Cook.
I should mention that I am lucky to have
inherited a family Bible which was started by her great uncle John Strutt
(1778-1855), who was the parish clerk at St Peters, South Weald, Essex. It
sparked my interest in family history, and I was thrilled to see that John’s
writing in the church records was the same as in the Bible: he obviously used
the church records to list family names dating back to 1777 in the back of the
Bible. However, in this instance there was nothing in the Bible to guide me.
Using my Common Ancestors matches at
Ancestry I made a tree of those relating to the Cook line (about 15 of them),
along with their DNA. This tree showed that the connection to my Canadian
cousins was very probably through one of Eliza Cook’s siblings. Uncle James
John Cook 1824-1884 who was married, had 4 sons & 7 daughters, so that
branch seemed the best bet.
Around this time I
connected with a DNA match from Western Australia who had come upon a number of
‘brick walls’, and the shared DNA of 21cM showed she too was related. So now there were 3 of us on the trail.
The first real breakthrough was finding a boy
aged 7 with Emma Cleaver’s parents in the 1891 census. The name given was
Arthur F Cooke, and he was shown as a visitor, place of birth not known.
Emma was not there, having married Noah Miles
in 1888. But in 1901 there is a 17 year-old son named
Frederick living with Noah and Emma in Sevenoaks, Kent – it must be the same
boy:
© The National Archives – All Rights
Reserved. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
We then found the birth registration for an
Arthur Frederick Cook being born in 1884 to James John Cook (bricklayer) and
Emma Cleaver:
Apologies for the partial copy received from
the GRO – the mother’s maiden surname is confirmed as Cleaver by the index
entry.
James & Emma had had another child John
James, born in 1882, but he had sadly died 5 months later.
The fact that James & Emma had two
children demonstrates that it was more than a casual
relationship, but there was still a conundrum: who was James John Cook? Was it
the father with 9 children, or was it one of his sons?
Not only was there a son named James John, there was another son named John James. All three of them
were married with children, and all three of them worked in the building trade.
Time to take another look at DNA: if Emma’s
affair had been with the father, it would make my cousins in Canada 3rd
cousins, for which (according to the coloured chart in Peter’s Masterclass) the
average shared DNA is 73cM, with a range of 0cM to 234cM. So
the shared DNA of 125cM is on the high side, well within the range.
But if Emma had got together with one of the
sons, then my cousins in Canada would by 3rd cousins once removed – for which
the average match is significantly lower at 43cM, with a range of 0cM to 192cM.
So DNA is pointing towards James John Cook senior,
rather than either of his sons. And since he died in December 1884 (of
pleurisy, at age 58), that would explain why the affair came to an end.
However the occupation given
for James John Cook senior in censuses and upon his death was plasterer, rather
than bricklayer. Then again, his son James John is also shown as a plasterer in
the 1881 Census – only John James, who was a few years younger, is recorded in
1881 as a bricklayer.
The good news is that there is another way to
determine whether it was James John Cook senior, or one of his sons, who had a
relationship with Emma Cleaver. If it was one of the sons then half of his DNA
will have come from his mother, Martha – and some of that DNA will have been
inherited by his descendants. So if my cousins in
Canada search their matches they find that some are connected through Martha,
they’ll know that one of her sons was the father.
Carmel’s
story is a reminder that when we take a DNA test it’s not just about knocking
down our own ‘brick walls’, there will be plenty of times when you can help one
of your genetic cousins to break down one of their ‘brick walls’.
My
paternal grandmother died before I was born, so I never knew her; both of my
grandfather’s died when I was 4 years-old, so I barely knew them. But my
maternal grandmother, who was the youngest of the four, didn’t die until May
1969 by which time I was 18 and she was 75.
We
used to spend quite a lot of time together because she lived with us, although
from 1958 when we moved to a slightly larger house she
was in a granny flat, though I’m not sure the term it would have been described
in those terms in the 1950s.
Note:
I found several 1949 mentions of ‘granny flats’ in the British Newspaper
Archive, but they were clearly referring to purpose-built accommodation for
elderly people living on their own.
Nan
taught me some of her favourite musical hall songs, but if she told me about
her younger days it didn’t register – apart from the Sidney Street Siege of
1911, which was apparently close to where she was working at the time.
In
November 1915 she married my grandfather, Frederick Robert William Wells, whose
first wife had borne him a daughter before sadly dying of TB, at the tender age
of 25, almost exactly 8 years earlier. As a boilermaker, granddad was in an
exempt occupation, and so their first child, my Auntie Hala, arrived in
September 1916. Hala, or rather, Mahala was my grandmother’s middle name, but
nobody called her by her first name which was Sarah. In retrospect this was
probably because her own mother’ was called Sarah, though as I didn’t know this
at the time I didn’t ask any pertinent questions.
Auntie
Hala was the only one of my grandmother’s three children – all girls – to have
a single forename; her younger sisters both had middle names. At least, that’s
what we all thought, but when Ancestry released their indexes of Essex parish
register entries 5 years ago I discovered that the name recorded in the West Ham
baptism register was Mahala Winifred Sarah Wells.
Something else that I
never heard from my nan was the change in the spelling of her surname: her
birth was registered in 1893 as Sarah Mahala Beamont, but she married in 1915
as Sarah Mahala Beaumont. She wasn’t the only one – the whole of her family
adopted the Beaumont spelling prior to the 1911 Census. The births of her
brothers and sisters were registered as Beamont until 1906, but as Beaumont
from 1908.
Nor
did nan tell me that her mother was an alcoholic: according to Auntie Hala, who
was 21 when her grandmother died, she would drink her way through her husband’s
wages. It certainly explains why my great-grandmother’s cheeks look flushed in
the only photo I have of her – even though it’s black-and-white.
The
biggest skeleton in the closet really was unexpected: According to Auntie Hala,
soon after her parents married her mother was followed in the street by a woman
with a child who claimed that my granddad was the father. I keep wondering
whether one day I’ll have an unexpected DNA match with a half 1st
cousin!
My
grandmother wasn’t the only to keep secrets. A recently-published
book by an established author, Clair Wills, describes what she discovered when
she began researching her own family. I haven’t read Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets
myself, but after reading the reviews I
believe it’s likely to be of particular interest to those with connections to
Ireland.
Another grandmother, more secrets
Staying
with the theme of name changes, and grandmothers who kept secrets, a tale I
heard recently from a LostCousins member was quite staggering in its audacity,
and yet if it hadn’t been for DNA the truth might never have come out.
Much
as I would like to include the story in this newsletter, some of the
information is too sensitive – however it wouldn’t been possible to change the
details and still retain the essential elements.
Fortunately I was able to come
up with a solution: I’ve posted the story on the Peter’s Tips page of
the LostCousins website, which is only viewable by members. This means that
you’ll have to log-in to read it, but I can assure you that it’s well worth
making the effort!
Tip:
if you enjoy reading LostCousins newsletters I recommend that you log into your
LostCousins account from time to time, otherwise you may miss out – members who
have not logged-in for several years don’t receive every issue, and those who
haven’t logged-in for a very long time may not receive any issues at all!
Ancestry Pro Tools: a first look
You
may be aware that Ancestry are offering existing subscribers
a chance to upgrade with a subscription to Ancestry Pro Tools – the cost is
£7.99 per month in the UK, and a similar amount in other countries where it is
available.
Most
of the upgrades relate to Ancestry trees: they’re not of much interest to me,
but you can find out about them here.
What IS of interest to me is the sole DNA feature, Enhanced shared matches,
which allows me to see how much DNA a cousin of mine shares with each of the
matches that we both share.
So
far I haven’t broken down any ‘brick walls’ as a
result of this new feature, but it has given me a better understanding of where
some of my matches with minimal trees or none at all fit on my own tree.
Gardeners Corner: time for a rethink
This
year the weather has been a real challenge for gardeners, but that’s the not
the only thing has prompted a rethink, as you’ll see from my wife’s latest
article – you’ll find it here, on
a dedicated page.
If
you don’t have time to read the article now, or are just interested in bargains,
here are links to some of the current offers that Siân recommends:
Gardening Express Special Offers
Gardening Express - Black Friday in July
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2024 Peter Calver
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