Newsletter – 15th July 2025
Manorial records FREE TALK
Reader’s question: GRO indexes
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 6th 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):
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I was fascinated to see a letter in the August 2025 issue of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine from a reader who has been able to trace her ancestry back 13 generations on one ancestral line to her 11G grandfather Thomas Austen of Horsmonden in Kent.
That in itself isn’t unusual: at that level in our tree we have over 8000 ancestral lines (8192, to be precise), so most researchers who have been researching for as long as the typical LostCousins member are likely to have gotten back 12 or 13 generations on at least one of their lines, whilst those fortunate enough to have found a ‘gateway ancestor’ will have a tree that goes back even further.
What is unusual is that the reader has identified the same Thomas Austen as the 5G grandfather of Jane Austen, the novelist – which by my calculations makes the two of them 6th cousins 6 times removed.
However, it wasn’t that part of the letter which piqued my interest – it was the comment that “The scientific reality is that Jane and I probably only share about 0.05% of our DNA, but so what? It’s a very precious 0.05%!”
This didn’t sound right to me, and as a lot of readers of this newsletter are also subscribers to Who Do You Think You Are? magazine I thought I’d better do some calculations of my own. After all we may not share an ancestor with Jane Austen, but over half of the people reading this have taken a DNA test so it’s important that we get things ‘in proportion’.
Thomas Austen is just one of the reader’s 11G grandparents, and although the letter writer doesn’t make it clear, I’m going to assume that she and the eminent novelist are both descended from the same spouse (if, indeed, Thomas had more than one). So how much DNA are we likely to have inherited from any one pair of 11G grandparents?
This is easy to answer – since we have 8192 ancestors at that level in our tree, the average amount we have inherited from any one couple is going to be 2 divided by 8192, or 0.0244%. That’s slightly under half of the 0.05% quoted in the letter, but it is at least in the same ballpark.
However, it might surprise you to know that we don’t inherit DNA from all of our ancestors, as this blog post explains. The more generations you go back, the less likely it is that you will have inherited any DNA at all from a specific ancestor, and if you look at the chart in that blog post you’ll see that the chance that the letter writer inherited any DNA from a specific pair of 11G grandparents is about 18%.
But so far we’ve only looked at one side of the connection. Those of you who have taken a DNA test will know that it’s not just about how much you have inherited from the ancestors you share with a cousin, it’s whether the two of you have inherited some of the same DNA. Jane Austen would have had 64 pairs of 5G grandparents – which means it’s very unlikely that any of the segments she inherited from Thomas and his wife would overlap with the DNA that the reader inherited.
Put it another way, it’s almost certain that the letter writer shares absolutely no DNA whatsoever with the novelist – not 0.05%, as suggested in the letter to the magazine, but 0.0000%!
Note: I did attempt to confirm whether Thomas Austen was the 5G grandfather of Jane Austen but none of the online trees I found showed him on Austen’s direct paternal line (he could, of course, be on another line – marriages between cousins were quite common in middle-class families).
If you want to discuss any aspect of this article (or the following article) please don’t write to me, instead post on the LostCousins Forum so that others can benefit from your observations. I read all posts on the forum and add my own contributions when appropriate. If you’re not yet a member of the forum check your My Summary page to see whether you qualify to join.
For many of us, finding a ‘gateway ancestor’ is the best hope of getting back before the start of parish registers in 1538. A ‘gateway ancestor’ is an ancestor who connects your family line to well-documented historical lineages, often leading back to nobility, royalty, or other prominent historical figures – they serve as a link between your own carefully-documented research and genealogies compiled long ago.
While some gateway ancestors do represent legitimate historical connections, many claimed lineages to famous historical figures are questionable at best. Professional genealogists recommend verifying sources carefully and being sceptical about claims of royal ancestry – their historical predecessors were usually more interested in pleasing their employers than uncovering the truth, which might well have been less palatable.
The fact that a family tree was compiled long ago doesn’t necessarily mean that it is accurate. Though many records haven’t survived, those that have are usually more accessible and easier to search than they would have been 40 years ago, let alone 400 years ago.
Two years ago I recommended Putting the Record Straight, a series of short videos by professional genealogist Dave Annal, and linked to an episode in which he demonstrated how an error in an 1860 book was copied by later authors and subsequently ended up in nearly 20,000 Ancestry trees.
I recommend watching the video again – it’s less than 8 minutes long – and it’s as clear an example as you could imagine of a seemingly plausible baptism being accepted without first making sure that the child didn’t die in infancy. Such a basic error!
What I didn’t notice at the time was that the 1860 book shown in the video also refers to John’s younger brother Edward, who was supposedly baptised two years later, in February 1604:
© Image copyright The London Archives – All Rights Reserved. Used by kind permission of Ancestry
Sadly this child also died in infancy:
© Image copyright London Metropolitan Archives – All Rights Reserved. Used by kind permission of Ancestry
As I write there are 35,851 Ancestry trees which give the wrong baptism information – and, presumably, the wrong parents.
Manorial records FREE TALK
Often the only way to trace ordinary people before the introduction of parish registers is through manorial records – so it’s worth knowing a little about them.
On 7.30pm on Wednesday 16th July there is a free Zoom talk by Philip Saunders, who has spent most of his career as an archivist with Cambridgeshire Archives Service. Although organised by Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Family History Society it is open to all – please follow this link to register.
(I've now found out that the talk will be recorded, but only for the benefit of members of the society - though an annual e-membership only costs £9)
If you aren’t going to be available on Wednesday, or if you want to be extra well-prepared for the talk, there are numerous online resources which provide information about manorial records. For example, on the University of Nottingham website there is an Introduction to manorial records which includes a useful glossary of terms that you are likely to come across, and this Research Guide on The National Archives website is essential reading.
A series of posts on the Essex Record Office (ERO) blog provides a useful reminder of how the poor were supported in earlier centuries, and how we might be able to learn more about our ancestors’ lives from the surviving records. Whilst the examples come from the ERO archives the lessons to be learned can be applied across England.
- An introduction to settlement papers
- Bastardy in early modern north-Essex
- The secrets of settlement papers
Prior to the Reformation the poor were supported by the (Catholic) Church, but the dissolution of the monasteries meant that the parish took over responsibility, funded by parishioners – initially through voluntary contributions.
You’ll find an extensive collection of Quaker records for Britain and Ireland at Findmypast and whilst you might think that they’re not relevant because your ancestors weren’t Quakers, you might be surprised how many non-members appear in the records.
Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to identify non-members without viewing the original images – this useful piece of information hasn’t been indexed. I also noticed that some the transcribed burial records were misleading – in one case the wrong burial place was recorded; in another the name of the deceased’s husband had been indexed as if it was the name of her father.
The good news is that for a handful of English counties (Durham, Essex, London & Middlesex, Norfolk and Suffolk) you can download spreadsheets from the website of the Quaker Family History Society – and these have much more detailed information.
Note: Ancestry also have a collection of Quaker records which you’ll find here. The records I checked did have the correct burial places, but to find them you have to type the burial location on the Any Event line (and not on the Death line) of the Search form.
Leslie Lemon of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, who has just celebrated his 106th birthday, attributes his longevity to his love of custard – with or without rhubarb from the garden. He is one of a dwindling band of survivors from the 1921 Census:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
This BBC News article suggests that he signed up before war was declared, so I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t find Leslie in the 1939 Register, but it was more difficult to find his parents than I expected – and you can see why:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Findmypast
John Lemon has knocked 8 years off his age, and Elsie 5 years – I suspect they were keen to support the war effort, and thought that they were less likely to be accepted if they gave their true ages.
According to the BBC article, when Leslie left the army in 1946 he was a corporal – however his application for campaign medals, which he signed, shows him as a private.
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used by kind permission of Ancestry
It may be that he was an acting corporal during his war service, or was promoted to corporal whilst serving in the Territorial Army after the war – the writing in the bottom right corner suggests that he was awarded the Efficiency Medal, which was given for long service in the Territorial Army (but perhaps one of the military experts reading this will put me right!).
David kindly sent me this photograph (which he had taken) of a grave in Binham, Norfolk:
His birth was recorded in the quarterly birth index for the January-March quarter of 1922 as Stanley C H Booty, but in the GRO’s new online birth index it appears merely as Stanley Clifford Booty – which demonstrates the importance of using both indexes, rather than just one.
I was in two minds whether to spend £3 on a digital image, but I’m glad I did because it provided the first example I can recall of forenames being updated after registration - the end column is usually blank:
Although it has always been possible to update a birth registration following the baptism of a child, in practice this rarely happened.
Incidentally his father, Stanley Septimus Booty, is shown in the 1921 Census as retired from his role as a director of a medical journal called The Practitioner. Retired at 43 – those were the days!
Reader’s question: GRO indexes
Just after I wrote about the importance of using both sets of birth indexes I opened this email from Michael:
QUESTION: I have an ancestor who appears in the FreeBMD website from which I can examine image of the quarterly data. This gives the correct name, and expected district. I have also located his baptismal entry which ties in.
However, if I search the GRO website, either with as much detail – exact year, all names, maiden name of mother; or as little as possible, surname and sex (M and F used), and single year - his record is not found. I have found all his siblings - using names from relevant census entries. I reported to GRO detailing the above, they have replied there is no problem.
Without precise details of the missing entry I can’t be completely certain, but based on past experience this is what I wrote:
ANSWER: Have you checked whether other births on the same register page have been indexed? There are hundreds of thousands of records which have been omitted from the new indexes – see my newsletter articles on this topic, eg:
https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/xmas19news.htm#GRO
Since they GRO cannot provide digital images for the missing records there is little point adding them to the indexes, especially on a piecemeal basis. It may be that at some point they will scan the missing entries and add them to the indexes, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Note that when I refer above to the register page, I’m talking about the GRO register page, not the page in the local register, nor the page from the quarterly indexes. When you find an entry at FreeBMD you can display other entries on the same page of the GRO register by clicking the page number:
When I click the page number (1906) I get this result:
For most purposes I prefer to use the indexes at Findmypast, but this is one of those occasions when FreeBMD is the best option.
A recent article in The Economist suggests that inverted commas – the punctuation symbols that most of us use to indicate speech or direct quotations (as opposed to paraphrased extracts) – are going out of fashion.
I’ve never believed in following fashion – I either anticipate changes or ignore them altogether – so I can reassure readers that this newsletter isn’t going to ditch inverted commas!
However, having got into ‘punctuation mode’ I decided to check whether I’m conforming to other punctuation norms, which led to the discovery (on the University of Sussex website) of this excellent guide by the late Larry Trask.
There was a time when I frequently received emails written without any punctuation, or all in capitals (which always made me think of ransom notes), or all in lower case. Or which used abbreviations better-suited to text messaging. Thankfully I get far fewer these days… hopefully your experience has been similar.
According to the Bank of England over £6.6 billion worth of old banknotes and coins are squirreled away in piggy banks, lost down the side of sofas, or marooned in the pockets of trousers and jackets that haven’t been worn in years (by my calculations that’s nearly £100 for each member of the UK population).
This BBC article has more information and explains how you might be able to turn your unspendable notes and coins into valid currency.
If you’re a member of U3A and have an interest in gardening you might want to consider joining the U3A Interest Groups Online gardening group that my wife leads (although there’s currently a waiting list as, indeed, is the case for the online genealogy groups). U3A is a wonderful concept, and I look forward to becoming a member when I eventually have the time to take part!
Here in the East of England it has been dry and sunny, but I’m doing my best to help the trees in the orchard by recycling as much water as possible. There are going to be poor crops of plums, gages and damsons this year, especially compared to last year’s bonanza, but most of our apple trees are promising to deliver large crops – provided they get sufficient water. We might even get our first edible peaches and pears this year – fingers crossed!
I’ve noticed that the trees least exposed to the wind have the most fruit, and those which are shielded on one side tend to have most fruit on that side. My guess is that high winds earlier in the year caused the flowers to lose their petals before they had been pollinated. Have you noticed something similar?
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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