Newsletter
- 15th October 2017
GRO latest:
PDF trial will last at least 3 months BREAKING NEWS
When it's worth paying for a paper certificate
Historic maps of England & Wales: project complete
How much did your ancestors earn?
Welsh parish registers which aren't online
Save 25% when you join the Society of Genealogists EXCLUSIVE
British Newspaper Archive offers quarterly option NEW
Were your ancestors in the British Army?
DNA study points the way to a longer life
Free love in 19th century England
Review: The American Candidate
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GRO latest: PDF trial will
last at least 3 months BREAKING
NEWS
When I was using the GRO site on
Wednesday I noticed a warning about scheduled site maintenance on Thursday
morning - and immediately wondered whether they were about to launch the new
PDF trial foreshadowed in my article
last month.
My suspicions were right - the trial
began on Thursday morning and will run for a minimum of 3 months. Why so
long? Because the GRO need to gauge what the demand is likely to be if they
offer PDFs on a permanent basis - and how the provision of information in PDF
form impacts on the sale of conventional paper certificates.
It's important to remember that civil
registration and the General Register Office weren't created for the benefit of
family historians, and even today a sizeable proportion of the GRO's income
from certificate sales comes not from researchers like us, but from executors,
solicitors, and heir-tracing companies.
Note:
for legal purposes, only a certified copy of an entry in the registers will do
- but most family historians are only interested in the data, not the form in
which it comes, or whether it is certified. Indeed, if we are looking for
authenticity we should not be ordering certificates from the GRO at all, but
from the local register offices which hold the original registers (because the
GRO only has copies).
Although you don't have to use the GRO's
own online indexes to place an order, it will be a lot simpler and easier if
you do. The records available in PDF format during this trial are as follows:
Births:
1837-1916
Deaths:
1837-1957
It's possible that in the latter part of
the trial, from 1st January onwards, births from 1917 will also be included -
but that's just speculation on my part.
When it's worth paying for
a paper certificate
To order a PDF you must provide the
index references - which is very easy now that there are online indexes of
births and deaths at the GRO site. But when you order a certificate you're not
obliged to give the index references - and it might surprise you to know that
in some cases it might be in your interests not to provide the index references,
even though it means waiting longer for the certificate to arrive!
After all, there are always going to be
times when you can't be sure which is the right birth or death entry, and
whilst you could just guess, it's expensive when you get it wrong.
Fortunately you can remove much of the risk by omitting the index
references. Instead provide the minimum information required - name, year, and
registration district - and add extra optional information that will probably
only match the event you're looking for. For example, if you were after a birth
certificate you might give the forename of one or both of the
parents - and if you were looking for a death you might specify the
person's occupation (which for a woman might be "widow of John
Smith").
It's not a completely foolproof solution, since the information recorded won't
always be what you expect - but it greatly reduces the chance of paying for an
incorrect certificate.
Tip:
if there are no matching entries in the specified year, or one year on either
side, you'll get your money back.
Historic maps of England
& Wales: project complete
The last place most people would think
to look for historic Ordnance Survey maps of England & Wales is surely the
website of the National Library of Scotland - and yet for the past 3 years
they've been scanning nearly 90,000 map sheets from 1841 to 1952 in order to make them available (free) to users all over the
world.
Although I've written about this
wonderful resource on a number of occasions, it was
only this summer that the project was finally completed. You can view the maps
and print extracts if you follow this link.
Some of the maps are very detailed - 6
inches to the mile, or even 25 inches to the mile. I can make out my house on
the 1881 map of Essex, which is based on surveys carried out in 1875/76 - the
next step is to pinpoint where my ancestors were living - for whilst few of
their homes will have survived it would be good to know where they stood in
relation to the modern towns and villages that have sprung up around them.
How much did your ancestors
earn?
One of the leading experts on wages
earned by English labourers and craftsmen, and the cost of rent and food over
the centuries, is Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of
California, Davis. If you follow this link you'll
find a range of spreadsheets covering some or all of
the period 1150-1914.
Most of my ancestors were poor farm
labourers, but the earliest ancestor I've traced was a carpenter in the mid-16th
century - so it was interesting to see what the average wage would have been
from craftsmen like him, and how little it changed over the succeeding
generations.
Welsh parish registers
which aren't online
Most of the parish registers for Wales
are online at Findmypast, with transcriptions at FamilySearch - but there are
some exceptions, and if you have Welsh ancestry you'll find this page
on the FamilySearch wiki useful, because it lists parishes which aren't included
for one reason or another.
Save 25% when you join the
Society of Genealogists EXCLUSIVE
I recently reported
that the Society of Genealogists have restructured their memberships to better
reflect the reality - that we don't all live within a short distance from their
London headquarters. And whilst the subscriptions have gone up, they've
abolished the joining fee.
I'm delighted to say that I've been able
to persuade the SoG to offer a 25% discount on the first year subscription for LostCousins members who join the SoG
before the end of November using the offer code LC25
The discount applies to both Full
Membership (which offers free access to the Library) and Associate Membership.
You can find out more about the benefits here.
There
are many family history societies around the world, but there is only one
Society of Genealogists!
British Newspaper Archive
offers 3 month option NEW
The world's largest collection of
historic British newspapers just got cheaper for those who aren't prepared to
spend out on a 12 month subscription. Rather than pay
£12.95 a month you can now opt for a quarterly subscription costing £25.90 - so,
in effect, the third month of the quarter is free.
Of course, if you have a Findmypast
Britain or World subscription you'll already have access to the hundreds of
millions of articles in the archive - but you won't be able to use the Advanced
Search features that the dedicated BNA website offers.
Over 22 million pages (with more than
200 million articles) have already been added to the collection, and the number
goes up by an average of 100,000 pages (around a million articles) a week. So
being able to search only pages added
between specific dates is incredibly advantageous, especially if you're looking
for ancestors with a common surname, or one that happens to coincide with a
place name.
Note:
if you have as Findmypast subscription you could search free at the BNA site,
then do a follow-up search at Findmypast. But it's not an ideal solution - and
that's why some researchers have subscriptions to both sites.
You can support LostCousins when you subscribe
to the British Newspaper Archive using this link.
Were your ancestors in the
British Army?
There's a new free website where you can search over
11 million British Army records, and whilst most of those records are hosted at
other sites, including the National Archives and Findmypast, finding army
records can be pretty challenging, so having a new way
of searching is always useful.
Tip:
if you find the Medal Index Card for your ancestor don't spend £3.50
downloading the black & white image from the TNA website, because if you
have an Ancestry subscription you can download a colour version (and whilst the
reverse of the card is usually blank, Ancestry have digitised them anyway -
because occasionally there's some useful information that has been recorded).
You can search the medal cards at Ancestry here.
But it's not just about records at the British Army Ancestors site -
you'll also find photographs, and you can upload the photos that you have of
your own ancestors.
UPDATE: the British Army
Ancestors site was hacked on the evening of Monday 16th October, but the malware has been
removed and the site security upgraded. You don't need to register, but if you do it
is good practice not to use a password that you also use at other sites.
Last week The Genealogist
launched indexes of men who were serving in the British Army in 1851, 1861 and
1871 - based on War Office Paylists held in the
National Archives. Although these are census years most of these men won't be
found in the censuses - even if they were no further away than Ireland. You'll
find these records under Muster Books and Pay Lists, but if you don't have a
subscription to The Genealogist another option is Findmypast, where they also have an
equivalent index for 1841.
Finally, Ancestry
have an index to soldiers who were discharged from the army after 1920, but
born before 1901. There are over 300,000 soldiers in the index, which you can
search here.
This index is also at the British Army Ancestors site, and because of
differences in transcriptions it's worth checking both sites. If you find an
ancestor in this index you can order a copy of their service record from the
MoD, although at £30 a time it would have to be an important part of your
research.
Ancestry
DNA
There's currently an offer in the UK
which offers a 20% discount to those who have previously bought a test - ideal
if you want to compare your matches with those of a cousin, or if you want to
add to your matches by asking a sibling to test.
Tip:
it's worth checking the link below to see whether you can get the same offer -
you never know!
This brings the cost down from £79 to
£63 (plus shipping) for those in the UK; in the US the cost is currently down
from $99 to $79. Unfortunately I can't tell you what
the prices are in other territories because I'm automatically diverted to the
UK site, but I've provided links so that you can check yourself.
If you do decide to place an order
please use one of the links below:
Living
DNA
Living DNA have further reduced their
prices, though only for a limited period. UK customers can now buy a test for
just £99 (previously £120, then £109), whilst US customers will pay just $99
(previously $159). In Canada and Australia the current
price is $169 in local currency (down from $199), and in the European Union the
cost is €129 (down from €159).
Living DNA probably isn't the first
company you think of when you consider taking a DNA test - nor should it be,
because the primary purpose of autosomal DNA testing is to find genetic cousins
who can help you to knock down your 'brick walls', something that companies
like Ancestry and Family Tree DNS do very well.
Ironically the biggest companies tend to
market their tests based on their ability to analyse the ethnicity of an individual
- even though they don't do it very well - and even worse, they're typically
identifying where your ancestors may have been a couple of thousand years ago,
well outside the scope of genealogy (since records don't go back that far).
By contrast, if you have British
ancestry, Living DNA offers a more detailed analysis of your ethnicity than
anyone else - and because it relates to where your ancestors lived a few
hundred years ago it's likely to be very relevant to your research. If you have
already tested with Ancestry or Family Tree DNA, but would like to know more
about where your ancestors came from so that you can take a more focused
approach to tackling your 'brick walls', the Living DNA test is well worth
considering.
You can support LostCousins by using the
relevant link below:
Family
Tree DNA
Currently you can get an autosomal DNA
test (Family Finder) for just $69 - the usual price is quoted as $89, although
as I recall it was previously $79. Whilst FTDNA provide more tools than
Ancestry they offer fewer matches because they have a much smaller database,
and my feeling is that their matching is less accurate (because Ancestry use a
phasing algorithm to minimise false matches).
Nevertheless, the fact that FTDNA also
offer Y-DNA tests and can use the same samples for both tests is attractive -
just remember that you cannot transfer FTDNA results to Ancestry, though you
can go the other way round. FTDNA also offer tests
worldwide at the same price (except in countries like France where testing is
illegal).
You can support LostCousins by using the
link below:
DNA study points the
way to a longer life
Researchers at Edinburgh University have
analysed the DNA of over 600,000 people in order to
find correlations between gene mutations and longevity - you can read a summary
of the results in this BBC article.
But should information from DNA tests
that family historians take be used to provide these sorts of insights? An
article in last week's New Scientist
questions whether it's right for the companies that provide our tests to sell the
anonymised results to researchers and pharmaceutical companies.
I'd personally be delighted if my genetic
information played even a small part in finding a cure for cancer, and I've
certainly no objection to my own results being used. But it's hard to see how
my DNA could help unless the researchers also knew about my medical
record - and that's something I've never divulged to any DNA testing company,
and probably never would (unless I knew precisely how it was going to be used).
But some family historians may have
handed over medical information: according to the New Scientist article 23andMe sends out questionnaires to some of
their users. I've never recommended the 23andMe test because in the UK it's so much
more expensive than tests from other providers, but over 2 million people
worldwide have tested with them - so I'd be interested to know whether any
readers of this newsletter have completed the 23andMe questionnaires and, if so,
what your thoughts are on this often controversial topic?
Also in the news this week was a DNA
test that will help to identify the women most as risk from breast cancer - you
can read about it here.
In France DNA testing is virtually
illegal - but in 2015 a law was passed in Kuwait which made it compulsory.
However last week Kuwait's Constitutional Court ruled that the law violated the
constitutional guarantee of personal liberty.
There's a lot to be said for using DNA
to identify people - with the exception of identical
twins no two people have the same DNA, and it's something that people can't easily
change or forge. It's reminiscent of the system invented by French
criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who I wrote
about 3 years ago.
Although a lot of the stories that
feature in this newsletter are based on experiences of LostCousins members,
what you read is just the tip of the iceberg - there are many more tales that I
can't publish because of the need to protect the privacy of living people. So when I wrote the following lines in the last issue I was
not writing from my own experience, nor expressing my own opinions, but passing
on some of the accumulated knowledge that I had acquired from members:
"DNA
testing has become popular amongst adoptees (and those conceived as a result of sperm donation) as a way of tracing their
genetic parent(s), but it's not something anyone should embark upon without
serious consideration.
"If
you're an adoptee you might think that the worst possible outcome is that
you're rejected for a second time by your birth parent(s), but the real
tragedy, I suspect, would be to ruin someone's life by turning up out of the
blue."
In England adoption was only legally
regulated from 1927 onwards, so it's inevitable that most of the children who
have been adopted are still alive, and that in many cases their mothers (and
perhaps their fathers) are also still alive. Some of those fathers might never
have known that they had fathered an illegitimate child; some of the mothers
would have been forced by circumstances to give up their child, and would have
eventually begun new lives and new families with new partners.
As family historians we often delight in
tales of adultery and worse, even when our own ancestors were involved - I
certainly don't shy away from the fact that several of my 19th century
ancestors were illegitimate. But I'm always very careful of what I say about
20th century relatives, in case I inadvertently hurt somebody, and I'd like to
think that readers of this newsletter are similarly concerned about the
possible consequences of their actions.
When I wrote the words in italics I
hadn't seen this article
from The Guardian or the many
comments, some of them extremely insightful, that it prompted. But if I had
done, it would have only reinforced the stories I've heard privately from
members who were faced with similar situations - and dealt with them in an extremely
caring and unselfish way.
Free love in 19th century
England
Just one year after Queen Victoria
succeeded to the throne, and well over a century before the Swinging Sixties
got under way, a visionary set up a commune in rural Cambridgeshire where 'free
love' was practised.
Founded by William Hodson, a farmer,
former sailor, and Methodist lay minister, the Manea Fen
community abolished money and laboured on the land together. Hodson had fallen out
with his church when he married his dead wife's sister - a practice that was
illegal between 1834 and 1907 - and it seems it was the attitude to marital
relations that undermined the success of his Utopian project, according to this
Cambridge News article
which reports that the site of the community is currently being investigated by
archaeologists from the University of Cambridge.
The project apparently failed around the
time of the 1841 Census, when a key investor died, but Hodson himself stayed on
until 1846, when he migrated to the recently-founded city of Janesville in Wisconsin.
You can read a lot more about the Manea Fen project here
- I wonder whether anyone reading this newsletter has an ancestor who was
involved?
In the last
issue I deliberately didn't draw a parallel between the real life stories I
was writing about and the plot of The
Suffragette's Secret, the latest Morton Farrier story from the pen of
Nathan Dylan Goodwin (you can read my review here).
But I was quite surprised that none of you wrote in to point out the
similarities…..
Note:
driving past Audley End this weekend I was dismayed to see a 'For Sale' sign
for 'an historic estate of 715 acres'. It's not the main Audley End Estate
that's for sale, but the adjoining Shortgrove Estate
- Shortgrove Hall no longer stands but part of the
Capability Brown designed grounds remain. If you've got £7.5 million to spare I
suggest you follow this link
to find out more.
Review: The American Candidate
It has taken
me a while to get around to reading The
American Candidate, the third novel in MJ Lee's series about Jayne
Sinclair, policewoman turned genealogist - but only because I wanted to do the
book justice. For me reading genealogical mysteries is a welcome pleasure -
provided I can relax, and not worry that I've got a pile of unanswered emails
from LostCousins members (or a newsletter to write) - and I wanted to savour
every moment.
At a time when it seems impossible to turn
on the news without hearing some new pronouncement from the current incumbent -
or his opponents - a story that revolves around a potential candidate for the
2020 US Presidential Election couldn't be more topical. And considering that the
title of the book pays homage to a classic movie that was released in the year
that JFK was elected I was also intrigued to discover whether there were any
similarities in the storyline.
You might expect that, given the nature
of her assignment, our heroine would be clocking up air miles, but the most exotic
form of transport she employs is a Southern Railways train to Battersea
(predictably delayed by a points failure at Clapham Junction). Instead the
focus is on the storyline, which takes us back to the Second World War, and
reveals some uncomfortable truths about the way in which Hitler used captured British
soldiers to support the German war effort.
It's full of surprises - just when I
thought I'd got it all worked out another twist in the tale set my head spinning
all over again. I can't tell you much more without spoiling your enjoyment, but
I will reveal that our intrepid heroine survives, against all the odds, so
there's every prospect that we'll encounter her between the covers of another
MJ Lee mystery next year.
The
American Candidate is available
either as a Kindle book or as a paperback. You don't need to have read the
previous books in the series, but they're both cracking good stories which are
rooted in historical fact, so it's well worth catching up on them at some point.
You can use the following links to support LostCousins (even if you end up
buying something completely different):
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Did you watch the second series of How to Stay Young with Angela Rippon and
Dr Chris van Tulleken? One of the tips was to burn up
more calories by standing at a desk instead of sitting down - what a great idea!
Coincidentally I'd already bought myself a laptop
stand that I could put on the breakfast bar in the kitchen so that I can
use my computer while standing up, and whilst this was primarily intended to
help my back, I was delighted to learn that I could lose weight at the same
time. A win-win opportunity!
Or so I thought - until I read some research published recently
by the Institute of Work and Health in Canada, which revealed that workers
whose jobs required them to stand up most of the time were twice as likely to develop
heart disease as workers in sedentary occupations. This conclusion remained
even after other lifestyle factors were taken into consideration. Perhaps it's
just as well that I don't stand up to use the computer all the time!
Last week I received two brochures from
a company called Premier Radiators - one came with the post, the other fell out
of Saga magazine. There are a number of companies that target older people in an attempt
to persuade them to buy expensive electric heaters that look good but can't
possibly meet the expectations of the customer when it comes to energy efficiency
and running cost. My advice is to keep your money in your bank account and send
the salesman packing with a flea in his ear.
Tip:
there is really only one way to save money on electric
heating, and that's to use heat pump technology (as deployed in air
conditioners).
As I was finalising this newsletter I spotted
a 'good news' story
on the BBC website (there aren't many of those nowadays, sad to say): a family
who had been stranded in the Scottish Highlands after their canoe was washed
away by a swollen river were rescued by a steam train.
That alone would make for an interesting
story to tell the grandchildren, but this wasn't any steam train - it was the Hogwart's Express!
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......
I'll be writing to you again
before the end of the month - but until then, keep on searching for those 'lost
cousins'!
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?