Newsletter – 19th May 2025
How to get YOUR ancestors into the limelight FREE – LAST CHANCE
Magna Carta ‘copy’ turns out to be original
Berkshire parish registers coming to Ancestry
Queen Victoria’s Household Staff
Woman missing since 1962 found alive and well
Ancestors from Essex or Notts?
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How to get YOUR ancestors into the limelight FREE – LAST CHANCE
On Wednesday 21st May we’ll be hearing from Sarah Williams, Editor of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, on the different ways that readers can get their ancestral story published in the magazine. There will also be insights into the interaction between the magazine and the TV series.
The talk will be at 5pm London time (that’s 12 noon in New York, 9am in San Francisco), but will be recorded so that nobody need miss out. Whether you plan to attend live or watch the recording please register on your My Events page, where you’ll also have an opportunity to ask a question in advance (concise general questions are most likely to be answered).
Not a subscriber to Who Do You Think You Are? magazine? In the UK you can get SIX issues delivered to your door for the just £11.99 – just under £2 per issue compared to the cover price of £5.75
To take advantage of this offer – and support LostCousins – please follow this link.
Almost exactly 24 years ago Ancestors magazine was launched by the Public Record Office (now The National Archives). I missed quite a few issues but now have a complete set, courtesy of LostCousins member John Sly, who was the first Editor of the magazine.
Looking through the early issues was a reminder of how different – and how much more difficult – it was to research our ancestors in those days. The 1901 Census had yet to be released: indeed I’m not sure that any of the records held by the Public Record Office were online in those days, as the 1891 Census for England & Wales – the only British census included in my very first subscription to Ancestry – wasn’t published on their site until September 2002.
The importance of the Internet was recognised – the inaugural issue included the first in a series of articles by Peter Christian, who many of you will know as the author of The Genealogist’s Internet – but I can remember that in those days there were many family historians who were yet to be convinced of the importance of computers, let alone the Internet. And, for all but a select few, broadband (or ADSL as we called it in those days) was still some years away.
One thing that hasn’t changed in the past quarter of a century is the confusion caused for the unwary by errors in records. I’m not talking about transcription errors – these can be easily resolved by referring to the original documents or digital images thereof – but errors in historical records.
Issue 11 of Ancestors magazine includes an article by Dr Denis Ashurst (1925-2004), a retired archaeologist whose PhD thesis (which you can download here) had focused on the South Yorkshire parish of Worsbrough. During the course of his research he had transcribed the parish registers for St Mary, Worsbrough from the mid-16th century through to 1812, and it proved to be a more complex – but more interesting – exercise than he might have anticipated.
There were two copies of the entries for 1741-1796, one of which was neatly-written. It transpired that the Archdeacon had directed in 1796 that that a new register be purchased and the entries from 1741 onwards transferred. Also, for some years there are Bishop’s Transcripts (BTs) – so there can be up to three copies of the same entry.
Inevitably there were discrepancies between the different versions. In 6% of the baptism entries there were differences between the registers and the BTs – and that’s not including spelling variations, which affected 9% (so potentially as many as 15% of entries were different). There were also differences between the two registers – about 9% of baptism entries differed in some detail, mostly in the father’s occupation, but in 1% the surname had changed.
Is it always the case that the earliest document is correct? That’s certainly not been the case in my own researches, and there is an example in the article where an omission in the original register has been made good in the copy.
Errors in parish registers aren’t new to me, but something I did learn from the article was that it was the responsibility of the churchwardens to prepare and submit the Bishop’s Transcripts, and they had to certify them as ‘true copies’, which clearly they may not have been. Intriguingly, Dr Ashurst found that on at least 5 occasions the individuals certifying the BTs as ‘true copies’ were unable to sign their own name!
Note: if you want to see the original 1741-96 register for Worsbrough, and explore the confusion that the 1752 calendar change caused for the vicar, you’ll find it here at Findmypast.
Magna Carta ‘copy’ turns out to be original
In the days before photocopiers, mimeograph machines, carbon paper, and even copy books, scribes were employed to make manuscript copies of official documents. The scribes were highly-skilled copyists who took pride in their work (unlike the clerics and churchwardens in the previous article).
Although we might think of King John signing a single copy of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, there were at least 13 copies of the document circulated in that year, none of which were signed – instead the Great Seal of England would have been affixed by officials. Only four of the copies issued in 1215 have survived, all of them in England – and, if you’re planning to attend the Secrets and Lies conference at Peterborough in September, three of them will be within fairly easy reach (two are in the British Library, and one in Lincoln Castle).
King John died in 1216, but the Magna Carta was reissued several times up to 1300 – in total there may have been as many as 200 ‘originals’, although only 24 are known to have survived until the present day.
In 1945 Air Vice Marshal Forster Herbert Martin "Sammy" Maynard sold the copy he owned at auction – it was bought by a dealer for £42, but re-sold the following year for the equivalent of £7 to Harvard Law School, the current owners. It had been described in the auction particulars as a copy made in 1327, and one can only assume that the dealer who bought it believed it to be original, but was unable to prove it.
However two academics, Prof David Carpenter of King's College London and Prof Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia, have come up with convincing evidence that it dates from 1300, which was the last time that the document was reissued. You can read more about the discovery in this BBC article.
As we’re looking at originals and copies in this newsletter I thought it would be a good time to remind you that there’s no such thing as an ‘original’ certificate – since a certificate is, by definition, a certified copy.
The certificates that family historians encounter are mostly birth, marriage, and death certificates – and perhaps the occasional baptism certificate. The closest to ‘original’ that you can get is a certificate issued on the day the event was registered – this is more likely than a later copy to show the correct names for people whose identity is revealed only by their signature, such as marriage witnesses.
However a manuscript copy is only as good as the person who made it, so if you can get a facsimile of the original register entry, that’s even better. The digital images of historic birth and death entries that you can download from the General Register Office have been scanned from microfilm copies of the registers – however, the GRO registers are created from manuscript copies of the original register entries, so they’re potentially liable to copying errors. A certificate ordered from the GRO might be a lot more expensive, but at best it’s a facsimile of their register entry – and at worst a handwritten or typewritten copy.
For example, here’s the death certificate I obtained in 2004 for my great-great-great-great grandmother Elizabeth Driesen (who sadly died a painful death just a few months before the 1851 Census):
As you can see, her surname was been recorded as Druxen, which is also how it appears in the quarterly index and in the GRO’s new online index. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth getting a copy of the register entry:
The GRO birth registers are compendiums of entries copied onto loose pre-printed sheets at local register offices, checked by the Superintendent Registrar for the relevant district, then sent to the GRO to be bound into quarterly volumes. This error has clearly arisen during the copying process, though looking at the handwriting it’s easier to get a sense of how the original entry might have been misread.
When it comes to marriage certificates there’s the possibility of getting a facsimile from the local register office (if they offer this service), or – if the marriage took place in church – downloading a digital image (assuming the marriages for that church are online). In either case we’re likely to see the original signatures of the bride and groom – something you won’t get when you order a certificate from the GRO.
You won’t even see the signatures of the bride and groom on the certificate issued to them on the day by the registrar who conducted the marriage – something that I thought quite strange when my wife and I got married. Still, I wasn’t going to spoil the day by arguing with the registrar, who had otherwise been very patient and very flexible.
Berkshire parish registers coming to Ancestry
My Berkshire ancestors are relatively new: my great-great-great grandmother Sarah Vize was born in Rotherhithe, Surrey – just east of London on the south side of the River Thames – and her father Stephen Vize died in 1844, leaving no evidence of his origins other than the DNA that he had passed on to his children.
Sarah’s husband had come from Devon, where his ancestors had been mariners, but fortunately I didn’t spend too long researching this angle. FamilySearch had a baptism record for a Stephen Vize who was baptised in Lambourn, Berkshire and as the surname is quite a rare one it seemed possible that it was the right entry, even though Lambourn is 70 miles to the west of London. Fortunately, as so often happens, I was able to prove the connection to the Berkshire Vize family using DNA – so now I was researching in a new county, one whose parish registers are not yet online.
I heard a rumour that the Berkshire parish registers were coming to Ancestry, but there was no hint of this on the website of the Royal Berkshire Archives, so I did what I usually do in these circumstances – I phoned up the record office and asked if there were any plans to put the registers online.
The good news is that Ancestry are in the process of making the registers available online, and although the record office couldn’t give me a date, I got the impression that we might see them before the end of this year.
In the meantime I’ll continue to work with Findmypast’s extensive collection of 1.8 million transcribed Berkshire records – you’ll find them here.
Queen Victoria’s Household Staff
There’s a fabulous 1848 photograph of Queen Victoria’s grooms on the website of the Royal Collection Trust – you’ll find it here. It heads a short article about life at Buckingham Palace and some of the staff who worked there: I found it fascinating.
Woman missing since 1962 found alive and well
A woman who left her home in Wisconsin in July 1962, aged 20, has been found alive and well – thanks to clues in an Ancestry account owned by her sister.
It’s good news of a sort – but as the lady concerned didn’t want to be found, I don’t suppose she’s too happy about it. You can read a little more about it in this BBC News article.
Ancestors from Essex or Notts?
A reminder that there are free online presentations coming up next month from the family history societies which represent these two counties – see your My Events for more details and to book your place, or register your interest in viewing the recording.
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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