Newsletter – 14th
September 2024
Half-price historic newspapers this weekend ENDS SUNDAY
All About That Place 2024 FREE
New ScotlandsPeople website goes live
LostCousins is completely FREE ENDS 30TH SEPTEMBER
1910 Land Valuation records for Wiltshire go
online NEW
Support a good cause and save ENDS SUNDAY
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 5th September) 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):
To go to the main
LostCousins website click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not
already a member, do join - it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you
whenever there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
Half-price historic newspapers this weekend ENDS SUNDAY
Although
there’s a fabulous collection of historic newspapers in the British
Newspaper Archive (which Findmypast
subscribers with a Pro or Premium subscription can also access), there’s an
even bigger collection that you might not know about.
Newspapers.com, part
of the Ancestry family, has just passed the ONE BILLION PAGE mark, almost exactly
12 times as many pages as there currently are in the British Newspaper Archive.
Of course, those one billion pages are from newspapers round the world, not just
from the British Isles – nevertheless there are millions of pages from major British
newspapers that you won’t find in the BNA collection, such as the Daily
Telegraph (the BNA only goes up to 1911) and the London Evening Standard
(the BNA only has issues up to 1916). Even where there is an overlap the
indexing is bound to be better at one site than the other.
This
weekend you can buy a 6-month Newspaper.com subscription for half-price, which for
those of you in the UK would work out at just £24.99 – only slightly more than
my wife and I paid last month for coffee and cake at the Maze Bar & Grill
in Saffron Walden (in its former life as the Maze Café it was the venue for our
wedding reception). I can’t check what the prices are in other territories, but
half-price is half-price wherever you are in the world!
All About That Place 2024 FREE
Organised
by the the Society of Genealogists, the Society for
One Place Studies, British Association for Local History, and Genealogy Stories
this free annual event includes 140 short (10 minute) talks on a wide range of
topics. For more details including short biographies of the speakers, please follow
this link.
New ScotlandsPeople website goes live
I
mentioned recently that the ScotlandsPeople website would be closed for a few
days for refurbishment, and expressed the hope that this didn’t herald an increase
in charges.
The
good news is that the site is back online, and the even better news is that
there seem to have been no price changes whatsoever. You can still get an image
of an historic birth, marriage, or death register entry for 6 credits (equivalent
to just £1.50, half the cost of a digital image in England & Wales), and
whilst it might feel strange to some of us that census images are also
pay-per-view, you can save money by doing most of your searching at Ancestry or
Findmypast, which both have indexed transcriptions of the censuses from
1841-1901 (but no images). The 1911 and 1921 Scotland censuses are currently
only available through ScotlandsPeople.
Tip:
the LDS transcription of the Scotland 1881 Census is FREE at ScotlandsPeople –
which is great news for LostCousins members with Scottish ancestors, or any
relatives who were living in Scotland in 1881.
The
Van
Gogh exhibition which has just opened at London’s National Gallery, to
glowing reviews, is billed as a once-in-a-century opportunity. As a 20 year-old
impoverished university student I was fortunate to be able to visit the
Salvador Dali exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (also in London) just over 53
years ago, and that too was an unforgettable experience – so, with my birthday
coming up very soon, I persuaded my wife to splash out on a National Galley membership
which will allow us both to attend National Gallery exhibitions free for the next
year. We’ll be visiting at the end of October, so you might well get my
feedback in the first newsletter of November.
LostCousins is completely FREE ENDS
30TH SEPTEMBER
Although
LostCousins is mostly free, just like this newsletter, there’s normally a small
membership fee if you want to be able to initiate contact with someone new (ie someone in the New Contacts section of your My
Cousins page).
However,
I don’t want any family historians to miss out on ‘lost cousins’ just because
they can’t afford £10 for 12 month’s membership, so there have always been several
periods each year when all members can make new contacts without having to pay –
and one of them has just begun! Until midnight on Monday 30th
September you can make as many new contacts as you want with family
historians who are researching your ancestors and have entered at least one of the
relatives on your My Ancestors page. Of course, the more relatives you’ve
entered – especially from the 1881 Censuses – the more connections you’ll make,
so now’s a good time to fill in the gaps.
Tip:
ALL of your living cousins are descended from collateral
lines, the lines that branches off from your direct
lines so the best way to find them is to enter the relatives from the branches.
Start with your ancestor’s siblings then continue with their cousins. A good
approach is to start with everyone you know about in 1841 – whether
or not you can find them on that census – then track each branch and
twig through the censuses until you get to 1881.
Members
who support LostCousins by purchasing a subscription do so not because they have to, but because they want to support the site, and
ensure that I continue to provide the independent and unbiased advice that they
find so helpful. When the subscription rate was set at £10 in 2005 it was the
equivalent of 32 First Class stamps – from next month you’ll only be able to
buy 6 stamps for £10, but the LostCousins subscription has NEVER increased (and
hopefully, with your help it never will).
1910 Land Valuation records for Wiltshire go online NEW
The
Genealogist specialise in records that most other sites eschew, such as tithe
records and tithe maps, and the 1910 Land Valuation, commonly known as the
Lloyd George Domesday. The 1910 Land Valuation is an enormous project, one that
will take years to complete: The Genealogist began with London and the Home
Counties, and Wiltshire – the latest county to be added – is probably the
furthest from London to date.
Wiltshire
is home to Stonehenge – one of the world’s most famous pre-historic sites, and
one that regularly appears in the news – most recently because geologists have
determined that the ‘altar stone’, weighing over 6 tons, originated in
north-east Scotland, more than 400 miles away. You can read more about the
various theories here,
and there’s another interesting article here.
I
generally use The Genealogist for non-conformist records and hard-to find
census records, but I really need to spend more time learning how to use their Map
Explorer which now includes all of the censuses up to
1911, as well as tithe records and the 1910 Valuation. If you’re tempted to try
out The Genealogist, the subscription offer in the last newsletter is still
available – see that article,
or click this link
to go straight to the offer page on their site.
Support a good cause and save ENDS
SUNDAY
I’ve
mentioned in the past some of the interesting items I’ve bought online from
Oxfam, including the 18th century gardening book I gave my wife for
her birthday this year, and the bundle of historic papers bought for my
birthday last year, which included a document with the signature of Prince
Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband as well as a letter signed by Princess Mary,
the last-surviving child of King George III.
There
are many thousands of cheaper second-hand items for sale, including books and
clothing but I’m often put off by the standard delivery charge of £3.95 which,
in some cases is nearly as much as the cost of the item. But this weekend they
are waiving their standard delivery charge (though not the courier charge for valuable
items), so if you’re in the UK, why not take a look at what
they have to offer?
Over
the next few weeks I’ll be putting together the list of prizes for this year’s
competition, but this is a good time to remind you that you don’t have to wait
for the announcement, you can enter now simply by adding relatives to your My
Ancestors page (indeed, every direct ancestor or blood relative you’ve
added to your My Ancestors page since the last competition ended on 31st
January will count as an entry for this year’s competition). It’s best not to
leave it to the last minute as some of the prizes will be awarded during the
period of the competition!
Thanks
to all of those who wrote in with kind comments about the Simon Dee case study –
I’m currently working my way through the 2006 biography by Richard Wiseman,
trying to distinguish fact from fiction. I suspect I’ll have an update in a few
weeks’ time.
One
of my favourite toys as a boy was a Mamod steam
engine, so I was sorry to hear that
the company closed down last month after 88 years – though on the other hand, I
was a bit surprised to find they were still going in an age when there are so
many competing attractions for youngsters. But where do toys end and hobbies
begin? Last month my brother and his wife were flying miniature rockets for Great
Britain in the European Championship for Space Models in Serbia – and they came
back with two silver medals.
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 2024 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?
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