Newsletter – 17th October 2025
Whole-genome sequencing for genealogists BREAKING NEWS
Consumption and phthisis: TB or not TB?
Gardeners Corner: Colourful Shrubs
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Whole-genome sequencing for genealogists BREAKING NEWS
This week MyHeritage announced that from January 2026 they will sequence the user’s whole genome (3.2 billion base pairs) rather than just the 700,000 base pairs that existing tests look at. And, importantly, with no increase in price!
This sounds like good news, but details are thin on the ground. Whole-genome sequencing has been around for many years but the technology is inherently flaky – which is why, when testing for medical purposes, each part of the genome is read at least 30 times.
I had my whole genome sequenced 7 years ago when there was a special offer – it cost me 169 Euros, which was about £140 at the time. However, whilst the genome was read 30 times on average, there were a few sections which were only read 4 times – increasing the number of errors. Even so, the amount of data generated was so large that they would only supply the full data on a hard drive (which I would have had to pay extra for).
MyHeritage haven’t revealed how many passes they’ll be using, but their researchers published a paper in 2020 which looked at the feasibility of using a single pass for genealogical purposes. This found that when it came to cousin-matching the accuracy would be comparable with existing methods – which is reassuring, though if what MyHeritage will be offering from January is a single pass test, it is hard to see how it is going to improve on what is currently available.
Even if the test were 100% accurate, which it certainly won’t be, it isn’t necessarily going to enable us to knock down ‘brick walls’ which are too far back for existing technology. Whilst existing (chip-based) tests only look at a small sample, the bases have been chosen in such a way that they provide the maximum amount of information: in other words, they’re punching above their weight.
Whilst I look forward to finding out more about MyHeritage’s plans, my guess is that if you want answers in the next 10 years, you’ll still do best to test with Ancestry.
Consumption and phthisis: TB or not TB?
You don’t need to have seen as many death certificates as I have to be familiar with the terms phthisis and consumption – and both describe the disease we now know as tuberculosis.
The disease has been around for a long time – at least 10,000 years. The ancient Greeks knew it as phthisis, which means ‘wasting away’, whilst our 19th century ancestors would have known it as ‘consumption’.
The word ‘tuberculosis’ derives from the German term ‘Tuberkulose’, used by Johann Lukas Schönlein in his medical notes in 1829, and first mentioned in his publications in 1832. However it didn’t come into general use in England until the late 19th century; physicians tended to use the word ‘phthisis’ whereas those less-educated referred to ‘consumption’.
Whatever it was called at the time, tuberculosis is likely to have killed a significant proportion of your ancestors, but you’re unlikely to know which of them succumbed unless they died after the commencement of civil registration – because causes of death are not routinely mentioned in parish registers (the rare exceptions tend to relate to plague or accidents, though I’ve also spotted men who were shot by troops after taking part in an uprising).
My great-great-great grandfather Edward Smith died of ‘phthisis’ in 1851 – he was 51 years old, and left behind a widow and 7 children. My great-great grandfather William James Harrison died of ‘phthisis pulmonalis’ in 1886 – he was only 44 and left behind a widow and 4 children (three others had died in childhood). His widow Louisa (née Noakes) also succumbed to ‘pulmonary tuberculosis exhaustion’, but at least by then the children were grown-up.
The disease continued to be a scourge in the first half of the 20th century. In 1927 my uncle Horace, my father’s only sibling caught TB, and articles in the Messenger (the magazine of Seven Kings Baptist Church) chart his progress:
November 1928: "Horace Calver who had passed his examinations and been allotted a place in the Borough Road College, was unable to take it owing to illness and has now had to go away for some months for treatment."
July 1929: "Horace Calver...still undergoing treatment. "
March 1930: "Horace Calver and Dorothy Harper who have been away under treatment for so long…"
May 1930: "Horace Calver is now home again... though he has been ill for so long his happy spirit is undimmed and he is very cheerful company."
August 1930: "It has been a joy to see Horace Calver so much stronger and better and able to be wheeled in his chair for quite long excursions. And though the bath chair is necessary in order to avoid over-fatigue, he is well able to stand and to walk short distances."
January 1931"…Mr Horace Calver who also is making such excellent progress."
In those days there were no antibiotics, and no cures for TB, only pneumothorax treatment – which involved artificially collapsing a lung by pumping nitrogen into the cavity around it (in theory this gave the lung a chance to recover).
My father couldn’t remember how long Horace was away from home: it was only after Dad died that I found the articles quoted above. From the dates of the magazines I calculated that he must have been at Harold Court Sanitorium for around 18 months, an awful long time for someone who was still a teenager.
(Ironically, until 1918 Harold Court had been an annex to Essex County Lunatic Asylum, where his mother – my grandmother – had spent 8 months recovering from post-natal depression after giving birth to Horace, her first child, in August 1910.)
Harold could have been the first on either side of my family to go on to higher education, but my father didn’t even get a chance to take the entrance exams, because he too caught TB and, like his brother before him, was sent to Harold Court Sanitorium, returning home after 10 months. This put an end to his formal education (though he had more years at school than my mother, who left when she reached 14 in March 1940, to avoid being evacuated).
Although Horace was recovering in 1931, his TB flared up again, and in 1936 he died aged 25 at Orsett Lodge, in south Essex (the tuberculosis ward was opened in 1924 – you can see a photo here).
Horace didn’t marry during his short life, but he was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who developed his own films. I don’t have many photos of my father’s family, but many of those I do have were taken by Horace, the uncle I never met; however exposure to chemical fumes in a confined space can’t have helped his lungs to recover.
Tuberculosis is just one of many diseases that our ancestors had to avoid – or survive. When I was growing up some of my contemporaries suffered from polio, mumps, German measles (as we called it), and whooping cough. I myself contracted scarlet fever, measles, and chickenpox.
All of these diseases can now be avoided provided that children are vaccinated but, sadly, scare stories in the press and on the Internet, some of them promoted by people who ought to know better, are threatening the lives and well-being of modern children in the UK and elsewhere.
Why was it that my father survived TB but his elder brother didn’t? Did playing the bugle in the Boys’ Brigade strengthen Dad’s lungs, whilst inhaling chemicals damaged Uncle Horace’s chances of overcoming the wasting disease?
The Wellcome Library has digitised the annual reports by Medical Officers for Health of the London boroughs, and from the 1928 report I could see that whilst the total number of cases of tuberculosis notified (153) was significantly lower than the figures for scarlet fever (502) and diphtheria (260), amongst children over 15 and adults it was by far the most common of all the notifiable diseases.
TB in its various forms was also the biggest killer – only pneumonia came close:
72 deaths out of 153 cases – that’s close to 50%. My grandparents must have been terrified when one son, then the other, caught this devastating disease.
Re-reading the excerpts from the church magazine I had noticed for the first time the name of Dorothy Harper, who was hospitalised at the same time as Horace. I wondered whether she had been one of the lucky ones?
As it wasn’t a name I recognised I checked the 1921 Census, to see if there was a Dorothy Harper living near the church.
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
I found this family living in Cambridge Road, Seven Kings – which almost backs onto the site of Seven Kings Baptist Church (the church itself was replaced by a housing development some years ago, though the members continue to worship at the nearby United Reform Church).
Both are close to Seven Kings railway station, which connects to London’s Liverpool Street terminus, where Ernest William Harper worked as a clerk. The young girl shown as Dorothy Francis May Harper was, in fact, Dorothy Frances May Harper, as you can see from her birth registration:
Although this Digital View image is so badly misaligned that the day of birth is missing I’ve included it because of the insight it provides into the working of the civil registration system in England.
The entries in the GRO’s birth register are copies, on loose-leaf sheets, of the births recorded in the local register. Each page of births submitted to the Registrar General was signed by the registrar for the sub-district, to confirm that it was a true copy of those entries in the register.
So, what happened to Dorothy Frances May Harper? The good news is that in 1937 she married Reginald Richards, and in the 1939 Register they can be seen living in Eccleston Crescent, Goodmayes – just round the corner from where I would be living 20 years later:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
Sadly there’s no possibility that we met, because Dorothy didn’t live happily ever after – on 22nd March 1942 Dorothy died from Infective Endocarditis and Mitral Stenosis, both of which could have been (and probably were) caused by her tuberculosis:
I’d never heard of Dorothy Frances May Harper before I began writing this newsletter, but it’s possible that I now know more about her than any person alive – she doesn’t appear in any Ancestry trees, and few people looking at her death registration would realise that she had contracted tuberculosis in her late teens.
Isn’t it amazing what we can discover using the records and techniques that we use for our own family history? In the next article you’ll have a chance to demonstrate your own sleuthing skills!
Some of you will recall how, nearly 10 years ago, I discovered an early Victorian sampler for sale at our local auction house: stitched in 1838 it gave the birthdates of William Godwin and his wife, as well as the birthdates of their 10 children, born between 1793 and 1813.
I decided to purchase the sampler and track down William and Mary’s descendants, following which I had the pleasure of handing it over to one of them on the Findmypast stand at Who Do You Think You Are? Live, at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. That’s me below, in the Rupert Bear scarf:
Victorian samplers often come up for sale on eBay, though it’s rare for them to include information as detailed as this. Nevertheless, I suspect that a lot of family historians would want to own a sampler stitched by one of their relatives – if only they knew that it was up for sale.
It doesn’t help that the auction descriptions can be incomplete or misleading. This listing for an 1849 sampler originally showed the name of the school as ‘Brentwood British School’ in the heading, though it was correctly shown as ‘Brentford British School’ in the text – the seller corrected the error in the headline after I sent them a message.
And can you spot the mistakes in this description of a sampler stitched in 1857? If you can, don’t tell me – I already know the answer – post it in the LostCousins Forum.
Did you know that you can use your investigative skills to reunite samplers and other objects with living relatives who have a keen interest in family history? LostCousins has a Historical Research feature, which allows you to enter on your My Ancestors page people who are unrelated to you, but are connected to research that you are carrying out – whether it’s for a book, an article, a local history society, or simply to reconnect an heirloom with the family it used to belong to.
The great thing about using LostCousins to make connections, rather than posting something on Facebook, is that it isn’t dependent on someone else spotting the post. You are the one in control: when you click the Search button you’ll be matched automatically with other members who have made the same entries, and can initiate the contact process.
Tip: remember to click the Search button from time to time, even if you haven’t added anyone new – at any one time there are typically over 1000 matches with cousins waiting to be discovered!
Did you watch the BBC documentary from 1958 which I recommended in the last issue? If, like me, you’re old enough to remember the 1950s it will have brought back plenty of memories.
Another documentary in the same series is The Big Gamble, first shown in 1957, which looks at seaside holidays and, especially, the unpredictability of English weather.
I can certainly remember shivering on Southend beach in the late 50s and early 60s – and it was on one those occasions that I first came to appreciate coffee, though I was so cold that anything warm coming out of a Thermos flask would have provided momentary relief!
You’ll find The Big Gamble here, in the BBC Archive on YouTube.
Gardeners Corner: Colourful Shrubs
A reminder from my wife that roses are not the only shrubs….
Sometimes we can overlook the most reliable plants in favour of fads and fashions: for example, many shrubs offer a lot of colour, structure and scent for a modest outlay and effort. Mindful that autumn and early spring are the best times to plant shrubs, here are a few reliable old favourites to consider. All are unfussy, winter hardy, and drought tolerant once established, making them good choices for high performance and low maintenance.
In spring, cherry and
magnolia trees promise warmer days ahead, but they bring little to the summer
garden. While many magnolias can dominate the garden, star magnolias
(“stellata”) are smaller and shrubbier, producing white or blush-pink
ribbon-like flowers followed by apple-green leaves. Grow in a sheltered spot
and mulch with ericaceous compost in autumn. Similarly, there are several
slow-growing dwarf cherry trees (“prunus”) suited to a smaller space or a
container, or weeping cherries such as Cheal’s (pink) or a Hillings weeping
(white) – clearly not a shrub, but stunning in spring and autumn given a
circular space to occupy.
By June, mock orange (Philadelphus) begins its month-long display of tangerine-scented white flowers. Preferring sun or light shade, “Belle Etoile” is upright with attractive yellow stamens on blush-centred white blooms. “Snowbelle” is more compact, with dark green foliage and pure white blooms. Check the mature size of a variety before purchasing, because they can vary enormously. These are beautiful shrubs for a white garden or bordering a seating area.
Weigela is a
much-overlooked shrub with pink, purple, orange or yellow tubular blooms in
June-July. Some grow tall, including the scented yellow “Middendorffiana” and
the variegated “Nana” with dainty pink flowers. Many are large and need at
least 4 hours of sunlight; “Florida” varieties are more compact with bright
blooms and greater shade tolerance. Weigela foliage colours vary from creamy
green through to red-tipped chocolate, providing interest outside their
flowering season.
Spiraea Japonica shrubs develop fiery leaf colours after their long-flowering fluffy pincushions of white, pink and purple blooms in nearly summer. These are mounded, wiry shrubs attracting pollinating insects. “Firelight” is a stunning example. The spring- flowering spirea have cascades of pure white flowers on dark foliage – varieties like “Arguta” (Bridal Wreath) and “Snowmound” can grow to 6ft unchecked; “Vanhoutte” is more compact at 4ft.
The tree hollyhock (hibiscus syriacus) blooms profusely from mid-August through September. This is not the shiny leaved, flamboyantly blooming hibiscus grown in tropical climates, but a very hardy shrub with varieties in shades of maroon, lilac, pink and white. Choose from rose-like double-flowering varieties, or single blooms which are trumpet-shaped and often have a contrasting central blotch and long pollen-filled stamens adored by bees.
Two slight drawbacks – the shrub won’t show any foliage until around May, and seedlings can quickly pop up if the seed pods aren’t removed soon after flowering (pot them up if you want more of the same). There are several luminous blue varieties, and the pale blue and white chiffon double-flowering varieties have a particularly ethereal quality.
Lastly, hardy fuchsias can fill shady areas with colour from August until October; they will survive a normal winter when left in the ground and start coming into leaf in late spring. Magellan varieties are particularly hardy, shade-loving and tall-growing with slender “lady’s earrings”- my favourites include the white Hawkshead and the pink-lilac Whitenight’s Pearl. Other hardy cultivars are bushier with fatter bi-coloured blooms; try Delta’s Sarah (purple/ white), Shrimp Cocktail (streaky pink), Garden News (two tone pink) or Dollar Princess (deep purple/ crimson). These can tolerate more sun, although afternoon shade is preferable. Fuchsias work well in containers – use a shrub compost; while they prefer damp soil, I’ve noticed that some put on a spurt of growth as the soil dries out!
Keep new shrubs well-watered for 2-3 seasons so that they can develop deep roots to help them survive dry summers. All the above shrubs are deciduous; prune them soon after flowering but wait until dormancy to transplant or perform more radical reshaping. All shrubs benefit from annual feeding and mulching to keep them healthy and resilient.
You’ll find the links below useful if you live in the UK, but wherever you live you might find inspiration - happy planting!
Sian
Gardening Express – 2 litre pots of hardy fuchsias for only £3.99 each
Crocus – some beautiful hibiscus varieties, 25% off Spring bulbs AND 20-50% discount on many other plants!
Amazon – these fleece bags are handy to pop over my tender citrus trees on chilly autumn nights before they need moving into the greenhouse for the winter. They are tightly woven and last from year to year – I haven’t needed to wash mine yet but, if I did, they can go in the washing machine.
If your pruning equipment needs refreshing, there’s a high-quality, affordable alternative to a certain Japanese brand. Perfect for a gardener’s Christmas wish list! You’ll find the whole range here.
I mentioned a while back that I pay Vodafone an extra monthly sum for the security of a mobile backup when the fibre broadband connection fails. Unfortunately, as I discovered this week, if Vodafone’s own infrastructure fails, neither work.
This BBC article is typical of the uninformed coverage of the incident – I’ll quote the opening sentences, then explain how misleading they are, and why:
Vodafone says it has resolved an outage on Monday across its network that left thousands of people across the UK without internet access.
More than 130,000 reports were flagged to web outage monitor Downdetector on Monday afternoon, as customers complained their Vodafone broadband or mobile data had stopped working.
I’m sure you’ll have spotted the mismatch between the ‘thousands of people’ in the first sentence and ‘130,000 reports’ in the second. But did you realise that to report the outage those 130,000 people (of whom I was one) would have needed an Internet connection via a different network? Which means they are just the tip of the iceberg.
I suspect that in reality most, if not all, of Vodafone’s 18 million UK customers were affected – Vodafone’s own website was down which is probably about as bad as things could get!
I’m going to suggest to Vodafone that instead of relying on their own mobile service for a backup, they have an arrangement with another provider. On this occasion I was lucky – I was at home when it happened, and I could use my phone (which has a GiffGaff SIM) to provide an Internet connection for my computer. But I couldn’t think of an easy way to hook my phone up to our WiFi network, so all our other devices (including the central heating thermostat) went offline for over 2 hours.
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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