Newsletter
- 22nd June 2017
180th
Anniversary of Civil Registration approaches
Question: is
it legal to marry your aunt?
Free access to British and Irish records at Findmypast ENDS MONDAY
LostCousins is completely free this weekend! ENDS MONDAY
Maureen recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours List
Goode news: still knocking down 'brick walls'
Canada: millions of Ontario records to go online
Good news: Nigel Barnes will be back very soon! EXCLUSIVE
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
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180th
Anniversary of Civil Registration approaches
In little more than a week's time it
will be the 180th Anniversary of the commencement of Civil Registration in
England & Wales on 1st July 1837. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the GRO were
able to mark the occasion by announcing that, after evaluating the recent PDF
trials, they would be offering PDF copies on a permanent basis?
In the June 2017 issue of Genealogist's Magazine (the journal of
the Society of Genealogist) there's a fascinating article by LostCousins member
Gwyneth Wilkie entitled 'Some reactions to the introduction of civil registration'. We all
know that there was confusion at the time, some of it caused by members of the
clergy who had misgivings about the new system, and the author quotes from
numerous contemporary sources including this notice from the Registrar General:
Note:the above images are from Google Books
As family historians
we're fortunate that most parents continued to have their children baptised
even after 1837 since this provides us with a second source of information -
one that usually corroborates the information in the civil register. When it
comes to marriages the two sources are - or should be - identical, but
discrepancies did occur, and possibly still do.
For example, according to the marriage
certificate I obtained from the local register office in 2002 my great-great
grandmother Mary Ann Burns gave the name of her father as James Brown, which
really had me guessing - but the church copy of the marriage register, which I
only thought to check several years later, shows his name as James Burns. Both
registers were signed by the participants, so it's surprising that none of them
noticed - or were they, perhaps, persuaded to sign an incomplete entry?
But it's not always the church copy of
the register that is right - in the July 2017 issue of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine Hazel Picton
provided an example where the marriage register had the wrong forename for the bride's
father, but the certificate she ordered from the GRO showed the correct name.
Question: is it legal to
marry your aunt?
In the same magazine
another reader wrote with the question "Why is my ancestor, Sarah Butcher,
described as being the wife and aunt of her husband?".
The expert response was clear: "It
was, and is, allowable to marry one's aunt and I am not sure why attention was
brought to this fact in the parish registers…." (you should be able to see
the full question and answer here).
But is that correct?
When I was writing about cousin marriages a few months ago I did quite a lot of
research into the 'prohibited degrees', and the definitive source of
information on this topic is surely Rebecca Probert's book Marriage Law for Genealogists. Professor Probert states that until
1835 such marriages were voidable, which meant they would be annulled by a
court if someone objected - but from 1835 onwards they were automatically void.
Note:
you definitely wouldn't have wanted to marry your aunt
between 1650 and 1660 - during that period the penalty was death.
There are some countries where avunculate
marriage is permitted but, according to Wikipedia, Australia is the only
English-speaking country where it is currently allowed. Here's the answer I
would have given to the reader:
"In England marriages between a man
and his aunt or between a woman and her uncle have always been against
ecclesiastical law, however if - as in this case - the marriage took place
before 1835 it was not automatically void; someone had to object to the court.
It's possible, therefore, that the vicar was highlighting the situation in the
hope that someone reading the register - perhaps the bishop - would take legal
action."
It's interesting to note that from 1835
you couldn't even marry your spouse's aunt or uncle - even though there was no
blood relationship. Such marriages were automatically void until 1931 when it
became legal to marry a deceased spouse's aunt or uncle (but not until 1960 was
it legal to marry a divorced spouse's aunt or uncle).
By now you can probably understand why
my copy of Marriage Law for Genealogists is so
well-thumbed!
Tip:
The Book Depository offers Professor Probert's book for £10 including free
Worldwide delivery - follow this link to
support LostCousins.
Free access to British
and Irish records at Findmypast ENDS MONDAY
Findmypast have well over a billion
records in their British and Irish collections, and until midnight (London
time) on Monday 26th June almost all of them will be completely free! All they
ask in return is that you register with them if you haven't already done so - and
there's no catch, you won't be asked to provide credit card or bank details. (Of
course, if you have registered with them previously you can simply log-in.)
This isn't an exclusive offer, but by
using the links below to go to your local (or preferred) Findmypast site you'll
make it easier for me to negotiate exclusive offers in future:
Everyone has their own opinion as to
whether Ancestry or Findmypast is the best site, but if you have British or
Irish ancestors you'll eventually need access to BOTH - which is why this free
weekend is so useful.
I understand that the records excluded
from this weekend are the 1939 Register, newspaper articles, and - for privacy reasons
- two modern records sets, the UK Electoral Registers 2002-14 and the UK
Companies House Directors 2002-14. But you'll still have over 1.1 billion
records to view over the next 5 days, which means that if you wanted to look at
every single one you would have to look up 2546 every second of every day (or
over 9 million every hour).
Tip:
you may have noticed that on several previous occasions Findmypast have
followed up a free access opportunity like this one with a subscription offer -
so I suggest you make a note to check this newsletter for updates on Tuesday 27th
June!
LostCousins is completely
free this weekend ENDS MONDAY
With free access to the censuses at
Findmypast, there couldn't be a better time to investigate the branches on your
family tree so that you can add extra relatives to your My Ancestors page - especially since every direct ancestor or blood
relative you add represents an entry in my Summer Competition (and, by the way,
relatives from the 1881 Census count double!).
You'll find full details of the
competition and prizes here,
but take another look at this original Royal autograph that I'm donating as the
top prize:
Queen Mary was the wife of George V and
paternal grandmother to our present Queen - she died just a few weeks before
the Coronation in 1953.
The LostCousins site will be completely
FREE this weekend - this means you won't need to be a subscriber to contact the
new cousins you find. Even if you don't plan to enter any new relatives you
should still log-in and click the Search
button on your My Ancestors page to
find out whether you have any new matches.
Tip:
if you've forgotten how to log-in click here and enter
your email address (the one that appears near the end of the email that told
you about this newsletter).
Maureen recognised in
the Queen's Birthday Honours List
I'm delighted to announce that LostCousins
member Maureen Selley, Secretary and former Chairman
of Devon Family History Society, was awarded the British Empire Medal in the Queen's
Birthday Honours List.
Maureen is one of those people who seems
to get everywhere - including Genealogy
in the Sunshine in both 2014 and 2015, where she was always happy to help out others less experienced than her (which meant most
of us!).
Another LostCousins member who has been
recognised for her work in the field of family history is Jan Gow in New Zealand, who was awarded the Queen's Service
Medal in the 2012 New Year's Honours List. On 5th July she's going to be in
England, giving a talk at the Society of Genealogists entitled Tracing Family History in New Zealand:
Discovering Ancestral Footprints - for more information, or to book please
follow this link.
Tip:
if there's someone you know who deserves recognition for their efforts - and
not necessarily in the field of genealogy - you can nominate them for an honour
here.
Goode news: still
knocking down 'brick walls'
Just recently I've spent more time on my
family tree than for a long, long time - partly to get away from the awful,
awful news out there, but also because my DNA matches have provided me with a
chance to knock down some of my oldest and most infuriating 'brick walls'.
For example, I've been trying to find
the baptism of my 3G grandmother Elisabeth Goode for the best part of 15 years.
She lived until 1864, so I know where she was born - or, at least, where she
thought she was born - and I've got a pretty good idea of when she was born from
the ages in the censuses and on her death certificate.
But whilst there's a Goode family
baptising children in the parish of Great Barton around the right time, I can't
find her baptism in the register. The entries for the period are extremely hard
to read, so perhaps if I was able to persuade the archivist to let me see the
original register I might spot the missing entry - but in the meantime I've had a DNA match at Ancestry with someone who
also has Goode ancestors in their tree, and not only did they live just 10
miles from Great Barton, some of them lived in the village where my prospective
4G grandparents were married.
This is just one of many recent examples
where I've been using DNA to provide clues or substantiate hypotheses relating
to my 'brick walls'. Another relates to my great-grandmother Emily Buxton, who
was born out of wedlock in 1842, but whose mother had the foresight to record
the alleged father's name as Robert Roper when she registered the birth (in the
early days of civil registration it was possible to do this even if the father
didn't attend).
But such an entry isn't proof - and
there was nobody with the right name and the right occupation on the 1841
Census, so I began to wonder whether it was a 'red herring' until a couple of years
ago when I discovered that in 1826 a Robert Roper living less than 10 miles
away in Mendlesham had been involved in bastardy
proceedings relating to another illegitimate child. Was he a serial adulterer,
I wondered?
I still don't know if this was the same
Robert Roper, but there is a chink of light at the end of the tunnel - because
I've got a DNA match with someone who has a Robert Roper in their tree who was
baptised in Mendlesham at around the right time.
I'm not going to bore you by telling you
about all the leads I've found while analysing my 6700+ DNA matches, but I just
wanted you to get a flavour of the sort of discoveries you're likely to make
when you test you own DNA.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to commend my
DNA Special Newsletter - several members told me that it was the first time
they'd really understood what DNA could do, and others asked if they could pass
on the information to fellow members of family history societies and Facebook
groups.
Tip:
whilst I don't allow articles from the newsletter to be republished, you can
give out links to the newsletter or to individual articles without asking my permission. Not sure how to link to an article? Simply
go to the list of articles at the beginning of the relevant newsletter,
right-click the title of the article of interest, then choose 'Copy link' (or
the equivalent for your browser).
A lot of members asked specific
questions, and here are some of the most popular themes:
Q
I have already tested, so is there any advantage in my only sibling testing?
A
You only inherited half of your parents' DNA, and the same applies to your sibling.
However, they'll have inherited a different selection of your parents' DNA,
which means that they'll match with some people that you don't. On average you'll get about 50% more matches when two siblings
test rather than one.
Q
My immediate goal is to find the identity of the father of my paternal grandfather.
He was born out of wedlock and his father’s identity was a closely guarded
secret. From what I was able to determine, the
identity of the father was not even known to my grandfather. My question then
is, would the Y-DNA test be the appropriate test to get?
A
Taking a Y-DNA test is a big gamble - it's quite possible you won't get a
single useful match. By contrast an atDNA test will
produce thousands of matches, and whilst on average only one-eighth of the
cousins you find will be related through each of your great-grandparents,
that's still many hundreds of matches to investigate. Y-DNA tests can be a
useful tool, but they really only come into their own
when you have a putative cousin to compare with, or when the 'brick wall' is many
generations ago.
Q
I am trying to identify the origins of my great-great grandfather, who was born
in France; can DNA testing help?
A
Had you not mentioned France the answer would have been "Yes,
absolutely!" - but because DNA testing is illegal in France the chance of
getting useful matches is low. You'll probably knock down other 'brick walls'
by taking an atDNA test, but unless you get matches
with French-Canadians you're unlikely to find out about your French ancestor.
Q
In Australia this week there was an article on
Insurance Companies that demand access to any DNA tests that those seeking life
insurance have had. I wonder whether the DNA tests Ancestry etc. offer would
create a problem for people in these circumstances? Have you heard about this?
A If someone took a DNA test to find out about their
likelihood of contracting various ailments, then it would be understandable
that an insurance company would want them to disclose that information (just as
they would have to if they went to a doctor and she carried out some other form
of test).
However,
since none of the companies I recommend offer health-related tests there's
nothing to worry about.
Q
I don't have a DNA match with a distant cousin, even though there is plenty of
paper evidence to prove that we are related. What has gone wrong?
A
The more distant the cousin, the less likely it is that you'll have matching
DNA segments, even if you have both inherited DNA from your common ancestors. The
table in this article gives the chance (out of 100) for different
degrees of cousinship - for example, 5th cousins have a 32% chance of being
matched at Ancestry (it's lower at other sites).
Q
I wonder if you can give me your opinion on how I can find out about my
maternal grandfather's origins using DNA. I visited the various stands at the
exhibition but all gave contradictory opinions and I wasn't convinced by any of
them.
A Just
take an atDNA test - you've only got 4 grandparents,
so roughly a quarter of the thousands of matches you get will be with cousins
who are connected to you through a specific grandparent. The real challenge is
to figure out which of those thousands of matches come from each part of your
tree, and that's when it helps to get close cousins to test. Matches that you
share with a given cousin are almost certain to come from the part of your tree
that you share with them.
Q
Is there a DNA test best suited to maternal and paternal sides of a family?
A You
inherit atDNA from both of your parents, just as they
inherited theirs from both of their parents, so atDNA
testing can potentially tell you about all of your
lines. But first complete your My Ancestors page - if you've already done the
research it will only take an hour or two, and if you haven't you'll find it
much harder to make sense of your DNA matches when you test. DNA testing isn't
a substitute for conventional research - it's a last resort for experienced family
historians who are up against 'brick walls'.
Canada: millions of Ontario
records to go online
Ontario Genealogical Society and Findmypast
have announced a deal which will bring millions of Ontario records online.
The first records, scheduled for release
later this year, will include 3.7 million entries from the Ontario Name Index,
an ambitious project with the goal of including every name found in any publication
relating to Ontario, ranging from registers of birth, marriage & death to
obituaries, memorial inscriptions, newspaper articles and more, together with
2.6 million entries from the Ontario Genealogical Society Provincial Index
including data from censuses, birth, marriage and death registers, references
in books, land records, passenger lists, military records and a host of other
references.
Many of my relatives emigrated to Ontario,
mostly to Toronto, in the late 19th or early 20th centuries - but I didn't know
about any of them until I started to research my family tree. The fact that so
many families from different parts of my tree ended up there suggests that most
people with British ancestry will have cousins in Canada - and I suspect that,
like me, many of you won't know about them.
Ironically the one cousin I haven't been
able to trace in Canada is my great uncle who, according to a family story, was
killed in a logging accident. I'm beginning to think it was a myth: one great
uncle was killed at Ypres during the Great War, and a second died of typhoid in
New York - is it really possible that the third
brother also died a tragic death overseas? Amazingly, until I began my research
my father didn't know that his father had three brothers - he'd only been told
of one, the uncle who "died in a logging accident".
Going back to Canadian records, one of
the best sources of information is the Library and Archives Canada website: you
may recall that last month I mentioned
that digitization of WW1 service files, which is proceeding alphabetically, had
reached Oliver - they're now up to Patterson.
FamilySearch
has a large collection of Canadian records including passenger lists; Ancestry
have many Canadian records including the Drouin
Collection of mainly French-Canadian records.
Although the Essex village of Stansted Mountfitchet is best known for its international airport,
its mediaeval castle (not that there's much of it left), and as the home of
LostCousins, it's also where you'll find Sworders
Fine Art Auctioneers - who on Tuesday will be selling several watercolours by
William Earl Johns, who was born not far away in Bengeo,
Hertford.
William Earl Johns isn't a name most of
you will be familiar with, but I would guess that at least half of you will
have heard of Capt W E Johns, author of the Biggles
books - as a lad I read them all.
Sadly the pictures are well out of my price
range, but I will definitely be going along to have a look at them - and you
can also see them online here,
in an article from our local newspaper.
Good news: Nigel
Barnes will be back very soon! EXCLUSIVE
Nowadays I'm more likely to be reading
genealogical mysteries in my spare time, so after finishing Blood Atonement (reviewed here)
I contacted the author to find out whether there were any more books in the
pipeline.
I must admit I wasn't very hopeful
considering that 8 years have elapsed since the last book in the Nigel Barnes series
was published, so I was over the moon when Dan Waddell told me that a third book
has already been released - but so far only in France. Blood Reckoning will be out - in English - on Kindle later this
summer, and there's also a short story featuring Nigel Barnes coming out around
the same time (Blood Underground).
Even better, Dan told me that he's
working on a fourth novel, which we're likely to see early in 2018. So great news all round for anyone who, like me, has become
a firm fan of the Nigel Barnes series.
Over the past few months I've switched
to using a mixture of sugar with stevia when cooking - it halves the number of
calories for a given level of sweetness.
Cutting out unnecessary calories in this
way allows me to enjoy occasional treats, such as Duck Confit, and I make no apologies
for repeating this recipe from the May 2010 issue of the newsletter:
"It
makes a very economical gourmet meal. Salt the duck legs and cover them in duck
or goose fat (if you have it, use cooking oil if you don't) and heat them slowly
in the oven at 120 degrees for up to 5 hours. Finally remove them from the fat,
sprinkle with sea salt crystals and heat in the oven at 220 degrees until crisp*.
Serve with garlic mash and the green vegetables of your choice - superb!"
* or finish them off under the grill,
which is quicker and reduces the risk of drying out the meat - but be careful
not to let them burn
Sadly over the course of the past 7 years the cost of duck
legs has increased by 50% in my local supermarket, from £2.50 to £3.75 for a
pack of 2, so I generally only buy them when there is a special offer (the last
pair I snapped up for a mere 94p on the reductions shelves, so they tasted even
better!). But when you consider how much you'd pay in a restaurant for food of
this quality it's still a bargain. And one of the great things about this
recipe is being able to keep them in the fridge for ages (just make sure that
the fat covers the meat completely if you're going to keep them for more than a
week).
Did I forget to mention that you should retain
the fat for next time? Even if you started with cooking oil, over time the duck
fat content will increase.
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......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2017 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