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Newsletter – 15th July 2024

 

 

Extra DNA savings in Australia ENDS THURSDAY

The London Metropolitan Archives change name

Name changes

Miles from home: knocking down a ‘brick wall’ with DNA

My grandmother’s secrets

Another grandmother, more secrets

Ancestry Pro Tools: a first look

Gardeners Corner: time for a rethink

Stop Press

 

The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 4th July) 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!

 

Ancestry AU

 

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!

 

3 Months Ancestry plus DNA for $90

 

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).

 

 

Name changes

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 grandmother’s secrets

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

 

Crocus

 

Sarah Raven

 

 

Stop Press

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Peter Calver

Founder, LostCousins

 

© Copyright 2024 Peter Calver

 

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