Newsletter - 4th November 2019
How
I got started in family history
In search of Henry Morton Stanley
How to join the LostCousins Forum
Double baptisms, birth registrations, and marriages
Pauper Lives in Georgian London and Manchester
'Somerton Man' could be identified at last
When
Y-DNA tests are worth considering
How Ancestry calculate ethnicity estimates
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
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click here;
to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this
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How I got started
in family history
We all have our own reasons
for researching our family tree - in my case it was to discover whether a
family story was true, and having discovered how rewarding an activity it was,
I just kept going.
However I'd had that question nagging in the back of my mind
for many years - it was only when the 1901 Census launched in January 2002 that
I tried to make a start. The only problem was, millions of other had the same
idea, causing the website to crash completely - and it wasn’t until September
2002 that the census site was working.
Over on the LostCousins Forum
there are dozens of similar stories posted by members - recounting how you got
started is a great way to introduce yourself to the other forum users, all of whom
are fellow LostCousins members. You can read their stories if you follow this link
- you don’t need to be a member of the forum to see what others have posted,
but if you've been invited to join (check your My Summary page), why wouldn’t
you?
On Wednesday last week Woman's
Hour featured an interview with Nicola Dunn, a family therapist who works
with people who undergo genetic testing for medical conditions. During her work
she has come across quite a few cases where the supposed father of a child
can't be the biological father - and it was interesting to hear her talk about
the issues.
You can hear the programme on
BBC Sounds if you follow this link. The segment starts
after 30 minutes and 37 seconds, but at the start of the programme there's another
gem - an interview with the wonderful Maddy Prior about the 50th anniversary of
the folk-rock group Steeleye Span (who were great favourites of mine in the
1970s).
Note: if anyone reading this
knows Maddy Prior please tell her that I stopped going to Steeleye Span
concerts a few years ago because the music is so loud that I can’t hear the vocals.
Not everyone knows the words of all the songs, and, even if I did, I'd still like
to hear Maddy's voice!
This poignant story of adoption
in successive generations doesn’t involve a LostCousins member - the lady at the
centre of this is Norma Symonds, the Mayor of Bishops Stortford (the town
closest to where LostCousins is based).
I've never met her, but I
think she was very brave to allow the local newspaper to publish her story -
you'll find it here.
My next article involves
another Norma, one who - because of a policy that we now find difficult to
comprehend - is thousands of miles away.
Home
Children - a success story
The scandal of the hundreds
of thousands of British Home Children who were exported to the colonies and
dominions of the Empire, sometimes against the wishes of their parents, and
often after being told that their parents were dead or didn’t want them back,
continues to shock.
"Our
family lives in New Brunswick, Canada, where my English grandparents were both
sent under the child emigration program in the early 1900's. We have known
next-to-nothing about our English roots because British Home Children rarely
spoke about the families they had been forced to leave behind when they came to
Canada as indentured servants.
"It
meant so much to my grandfather, Albert Davies, that his twin brother Edward emigrated
with him, even though they were separated after their arrival. Though the farms
where they worked were not far apart, the boys were not allowed to visit, but
they made up for it later: as adults, they were always together, hunting and
fishing and pretending to be each other to trick unsuspecting grandchildren.
"After
my grandfather passed away at nearly 101 years of age, I decided the time had
come to look into our family history. Fortunately, with the advent of the
internet, historical records were more accessible and
I was thrilled to start building a family tree on Ancestry. My next step was to
request my grandparents' personal records from the Middlemore Children's Emigration
Home in Birmingham, England (copies could be ordered from the Library and
Archives of Canada).
"The
story I was able to compile from all these documents has been fascinating. Albert
and Edward were
born in 1901 in Birmingham to an unwed servant girl named Jane. She was the
eldest of 9 children and had been in service since her teenage years.
"After
the boys were born they went to stay with Jane's
widowed mother and her youngest sister, Helen (you can see the four of them in
the photo), while Jane worked to support them.
"When
their grandmother grew too old and feeble to care for the twins anymore, Jane
was advised to place them at Middlemore Home until other arrangements could be
made. She knew there was a chance they could be sent to Canada, but was led to
believe she could get them back.
"In
the event 11 year-old Albert and Edward were shipped across the Atlantic with a
group of other Middlemore children, never to see their family or their homeland
again. Their mother got married soon after and tried to get them back, but her desperate
pleas were refused. She wrote to her sons for the rest of her life (and her
grandchildren remember getting Christmas gifts from England), but she never saw
them again.
"We
have no idea who the father of the twins was, but my strategy has been to trace
the other Davies siblings and try to make contact with
living relatives back in England. That has worked out well, since some of them had
already been building Ancestry trees that included the same people
I was discovering to be my relatives. One cousin was kind enough to visit the
home where Albert and Edward had lived with their grandmother and aunt, whom
they always referred to fondly as 'Aunt Nell'. This is the same house that is
in the background of an old photo of the twins at the age of 6, or thereabouts.
"One day,
while scrolling through Ancestry records, I came across this wedding photo, and
was struck by a sense of familiarity as I gazed at the young bride.
"On
a hunch, I sent a message to the tree owner, Kate, and asked about the people
in the photo. I was told that the bride was her aunt, who had passed away
recently. When I asked if she had any Davies relatives, Kate confirmed that the
lady in the photo was the daughter of Helen - 'Aunt Nell'!
"Then
came the astounding news that there was another daughter still alive and
well, and Kate offered to put us in touch. Now I receive emails written by the
96 year-old 1st cousin of Albert and Edward! She is,
to the best of my knowledge, the last surviving member of that generation of
the Davies family. It has been so rewarding to have her share stories and
photos of our English relatives, and in turn she has been grateful to learn
about the branch of their family that no one realized was missing.
"We
still have not identified my great-grandfather, but I'm hopeful that DNA testing
will turn up a helpful match some day."
Norma's grandfather seems to
have been one of the more fortunate Home Children, but he still found himself
thousands of miles from his relatives, including the mother he was never to see
again.
Let's hope that DNA testing
does solve the mystery of who Norma's great-grandfather was - there should be sufficient information in the trees of her genetic cousins, but
the challenge is to make sense of so much information. However, if there's one
thing I've learned from this story, it's that Norma has the tenacity and
determination to succeed - so I'm sure she’ll soon acquire the necessary skills!
Note: I recently watched
the Long Lost Family Special about identical twins who were adopted separately -
if you missed it you'll find it here, on the
ITV Hub.
In search of Henry Morton Stanley
Last month I challenged
readers who belong to the LostCousins Forum to find the birth registration and/or
the 1841 Census entry for the famous journalist Henry Morton Stanley, best
known for discovering Dr Livingstone.
It turns out that finding
Stanley is even more difficult than finding Livingstone - after more than a
fortnight we still haven't solved either of the mysteries (although Gill kindly
sent me the photo on the right, of Henry Morton Stanley's memorial in the churchyard
at Pirbright, in Surrey).
But even in his own lifetime
there were all sorts of stories going around about his origins, so we can't
rule out the possibility that he embellished the story slightly.
This extract from the Denbigh
parish registers shows the baptism of John Rowlands - later known as Henry
Morton Stanley:
Image © Welsh Archive Services
/ Gwasanaethau Archifau
Cymru; used by permission of Findmypast
It looks to me as if the word
'Bastard' was added later, and I also wouldn't rule out the possibility that
the mother's surname was a later addition. I wonder if the Bishop's Transcripts
have survived?
But please don't write to me,
instead post any observations that you may have on the forum - you'll find the
discussion here.
How to join the
LostCousins Forum
If you’re entitled to join
the forum there will be a link and a code on your My Summary page - just
log-in at LostCousins and look for My Summary in the menu.
If you haven’t qualified yet
you'll need to add more entries to your My Ancestors page, but it's hardly
a daunting task - provided you focus on the 1881 Census it shouldn’t take more
than an hour, even if your My Ancestors page is currently blank.
And there's a bonus - in the
process of earning a place on the forum you're likely to find a 'lost cousin',
so your time will be doubly well-spent.
Tip: at the forum there
are areas for each of the counties of England, Scotland, and Wales - there you'll find
links to resources that are too localised to be mentioned in this newsletter.
Double
baptisms, birth registrations, and marriages
It's not unusual to find two
entries in the baptism register for a child of the same name and the same
parents - often this is happens when a child dies, and
the parents re-use the name for the next child.
But this isn't the only circumstance
in which there will be two entries, because baptism has two key functions, naming
the child and receiving them into the church. If a child has been privately baptised
(as two of the children were in the extract above) you might find that there are
two entries in the register, one for the baptism, and one for the reception
into the church. However this varies between parishes
and over time - some vicars would annotate the original entry, others might not
record the private baptism.
The Church of England
discourages private baptisms, as you will see at the start of this extract
from the Book of Common Prayer. At the end of the extract there is a special
form of wording to be used when it isn’t clear whether a child brought to the
church for baptism has already been baptised - this avoids the possibility of baptising
the child a second time. Double baptisms are not permitted.
Double birth registrations
are rarer, and when they do occur they're easily
missed: see the next article for an example.
Double marriages are unusual,
but far from unheard of - in most cases I've seen the groom was in the army and
required permission to marry. If permission wasn't forthcoming
he would marry secretly, then marry 'officially' when permission was eventually
given. (See my 2010 article
for more information.)
Note: if you have Catholic
ancestors you might well find that their marriage was recorded in two churches,
one Catholic, and one Church of England.
Last month I wrote about the
teenage girl who was described on the 1911 Census as "Single - on the look out" - you can see the census entry again here.
It didn’t take her very long
to find a man - but she didn't marry him, and by the end of 1914 she was the
unmarried mother of a little girl:
As you can see from the GRO
index, the birth was registered twice, first as legitimate (bottom entry) and
then as illegitimate. Intrigued? Now take a look at
the birth register entries:
As you can see, the birth was
originally registered in January 1915 as if Joan was the child of Eva's
parents, Francis Burren and Ann (née Wickens); then
in March the birth is re-registered, showing Eva as the mother.
It's not unusual for the
illegitimate child of an eldest daughter to be registered as the child of the
grandparents (see this article
from a year ago), and Ann was certainly still young enough to bear children,
though her last child was born in 1905. You might think it would be difficult
for the daughter to conceal her pregnancy and the mother to invent one, but since
they were a farming family they probably wouldn’t have had much contact with
the outside world - and they may well have come up with the plan soon after Eva
knew she was pregnant.
No, the big difference in
this case is that the perjury was subsequently admitted and corrected, which is
something I haven’t seen before. Have you?
Pauper Lives
in Georgian London and Manchester
Eight years ago I wrote about a
fascinating project which focused on the lives of the poor in London; I
recently noticed that the website
has been expanded to include Manchester.
The project is directed by Dr
Romola Davenport of Cambridge University and
Professor Jeremy Boulton of Newcastle University, and is well worth a look -
even if your pauper ancestors didn’t live in those two cities.
Over the weekend I was
reading about another of their projects: it focuses on baptisms, with a particular focus on the age at which children were baptised.
I found it fascinating - look out for an article in the next newsletter.
The October issue of The
Local Historian, the journal of the British Association for Local History
has an article which, while focusing on the identification of field names,
provides some useful pointers that will help in the interpretation of medieval
documents.
I'm a member of the BALH, so
my copy arrived in the post, but the good news is that this particular article
is available online for anyone to read - you'll find a PDF copy here.
It's also worth looking at
the website
of the Institute for Name Studies, which includes an index to the meanings of
14,000 English place names.
Gill wrote to me recently
with an example of how finding an unexpected name in a will had helped her to identify
a previously unknown branch of her tree:
"As
you said in one of your newsletters, wills can be a great source of information
- but they can also be a source of disappointment. This week I received some of
the wills I ordered from the Probate Service, and trawled through them, trying
not to expect too much. In fact, most of them were fairly
straightforward and there were few surprises.
"However,
one of them proved to be a gem. It was the will of my great-great-great aunt
Margaret Hughes, who died in 1894 aged 86. She lived in Sketty,
now a suburb of Swansea, and had had more than her fair share of tragedy in her
life. She’d had two husbands, both of whom died within five years of marriage.
She had had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, one at 10 years old, and
the third, William Terry Hughes died in 1873 aged just 33. She and her son
William had run a successful ironmongery business in Oxford Street in Swansea.
- they were a well-known family. An account of William’s funeral was written up
in the Western Mail and it described him as 'highly esteemed'.
"I
was curious to know how she’d dispersed her estate – she left just under
£3,000, and her executor was my great grandfather John Williams (her nephew).
The will entrusted my great grandfather to liquidate her assets and distribute
the cash among her nephews and nieces – helpfully all 19 of them were named in
the will, along with their mothers’ names. Each was to receive £100 (a
substantial sum in those days).
"I
picked up two previously unknown ‘cousins’ as a result. I also knew from a
letter in my possession that John Williams had taken his time about
distributing the legacies and his cousins in the USA had got annoyed with him
and had complained about the delay.
"But
it was her final bequest of £100 that intrigued me. It simply stated that £100
was to go to 'Jessie Edwards of Waunarlwydd'. I did
not recognise this woman’s name at all, but Waunarlwydd
was a village on the outskirts of Swansea, so perhaps it was an old neighbour
or a friend. So I turned to the censuses and records
online.
"Luckily
the name Jessie was relatively unusual and so I very quickly found her in the
1891 census, living in Waunarlwydd, a married woman
aged 29, the wife of William J Edwards, a miner. Further, the 1901 census entry
for William and Jessie included one Annie Atkins, described as mother-in-law, a
widow. So this was Jessie’s mother, and this in turn
helped me find Jessie’s baptismal entry in the parish records for St Mary’s
Swansea.
"The
baptism register identified Jessie as 'illegitimate', with no father’s name
indicated. But it was the entry in the marriage indexes which answered the
conundrum.
"Searching
the indexes using her husband’s name, William J Edwards, I found a likely
entry, a marriage to a Jessie Hughes - in other words, the same surname as my
ancestor Margaret. The marriage record in the parish records confirmed my
suspicions. The entry named her as Jessie Hughes, and her father as William
Hughes, deceased, an ironmonger. So Margaret had left
her granddaughter a bequest without identifying her relationship.
"Why
her son William and Annie had not married is anyone’s guess. - we my never know. But now I have a previously unknown branch
to investigate!"
If you've ordered wills since
the July price cut and are still waiting to receive them, check out the discussion
on the LostCousins Forum.
'Somerton Man'
could be identified at last
In June last year I wrote
about the mystery of 'Somerton Man', whose body was discovered on an Australian
beach in 1948, but whose identity had remained a mystery for 70 years. At that
time DNA seemed to offer the best hope of identifying him, but permission to
exhume the body had twice been refused.
Now the Attorney General for
South Australia has given permission, on the condition that taxpayers don't
have to pay the cost, estimated at $20,000. You can read the updated story here,
on the ABC News website.
When Y-DNA tests
are worth considering
When I first started writing
about DNA testing, back in 2006, Y-DNA tests were by far the most common - and
the most useful.
Because Y-DNA is passed on by
males to their sons, it tends to follow the surname - the main exceptions being
where there was illegitimacy (when the child typically takes the mother's
surname) or adoption. Where one of these has occurred, a Y-DNA test can provide
clues to the likely surname of the biological father.
These days Family Tree DNA
are the only major provider of Y-DNA tests, and I would caution readers against
purchasing Y-DNA tests from any other company (at best they will only be of
value as paternity tests and, even then, only if the putative father also tests
- they won’t help you research your ancestors).
Tip: although some
autosomal DNA tests also examine parts of the Y-chromosome the information they provide isn't compatible with
standalone Y-DNA tests. Y-DNA tests are based on STRs (short tandem repeats), repeating
segments of DNA, whereas autosomal DNA tests look at SNPs (single-nucleotide
polymorphisms), individual letters of DNA that vary between individuals.
Y-DNA tests are relatively
expensive because they are 'old technology'. Nevertheless, prices have dropped
considerably over the years, and whereas the entry-level test looked at just 12
markers on the Y-chromosome when I first tested, 37 markers is now the minimum.
Advantages of Y-DNA tests
- They look at just one ancestral line, the direct male line, so you
can focus on that part of your tree when trying to find a connection with
a close match
- Because surnames pass down the male line in most societies Y-DNA tests
can provide clues to the surname of an unknown father
- They're perfect for One-Name Studies, where the aim is to finds
links between people who share the same surname
- Y-DNA changes slowly, so there's no real time limit on how far
back it can reach
Disadvantages of Y-DNA
tests
- Only males carry Y-DNA
- Because they're focused on a single line
they can’t tell you anything about other parts of your tree
- You won’t get many matches, partly because fewer people have
tested (probably less than a million), but mainly because you'll only match
with cousins with the same surname, or who would have the same surname but
for an illegitimacy or adoption (either in their tree or yours)
- Even if you get a close match the common ancestor could be so far
back that it predates the introduction of parish registers in 1538 - and
you won’t usually know if that is the case or not
In the 7 years since I tested I haven't learned anything about my Calver ancestors
that I didn’t already know - though it has at least confirmed that there are no
illegitimacies or adoptions in that line.
However, I have been
able to help some of my cousins in the US: one had an ancestor who was adopted
in the 19th century, and he was able to identify the likely father as a result
of matching with me. The others bear the surname Culver, which is much more
common than Calver in the US, though less common in England - I was able to
explain that their ancestors probably changed the spelling after they arrived
in the US (the two surnames have different etymological origins).
But ultimately, whether you
can benefit from Y-DNA depends on whether there is a suitable donor in your
tree. Most of the illegitimate ancestors in my tree were female, so Y-DNA
cannot identify their father, but my great-great-great grandfather, Joseph
Harrison, was said to be the son of another Joseph Harrison when he was
baptised, aged nearly 5, in 1820 - and I'd like to find out whether that was
really true.
The only way I would be able
to confirm my Harrison ancestry using Y-DNA would be to find a male cousin who
bears the surname Harrison - but whilst my great-great-great grandfather had
three sons, I've only been able to trace one of them, my great-great
grandfather, and his only son died aged 10.
Which of your 'brick walls'
can be solved using Y-DNA? Now is the time to check, because there's a big
saving to be made.....
It's still over 7 weeks to
Christmas and more than 3 weeks to Black Friday (which is on 29th November this
year), but some of the top providers of DNA tests are getting in early, with
big discounts on offer.
Family Tree DNA are offering
up to 40% off their tests until 28th November, but the one to focus on is their
Y-DNA test, since they're the only major company offering these tests - see the
article above for more information. At $99 (excluding shipping), down from $169,
the price is the lowest it has ever been, so now's the time to figure out whether
and how you can make use of Y-DNA.
Please use this link
when you purchase a test from Family Tree DNA so that LostCousins can benefit.
Family Tree DNA will ship to just about any country in the world.
Ancestry have also announced
offers - but remember that you must buy from your local Ancestry site. All
prices below exclude shipping and are in the currency of the relevant website.
Ancestry.co.uk
(UK only) - reduced from £79 to £59 until 24th November
Ancestry.com.au
(Australia & New Zealand) - reduced from $129 to $109 until 25th November
Ancestry.ca
(Canada only) - reduced to $79 until 7th November
Ancestry.com
(US only) - reduced from $99 to $59 until 27th November
Please use the appropriate
link so that your purchase can support LostCousins - thanks! Note that you may
need to log-out from Ancestry before clicking the link.
How
Ancestry calculate ethnicity estimates
When Ancestry first offered
DNA tests in 2012 the ethnicity estimates provided were based on just 22
regions - now they're based on over 1000 regions, and you'll find a list of them
here.
There are now over 40,000
people in Ancestry's reference panel, more than 10 times as many as there were just
a couple of years ago; this enables them to create new regions and provide more
accurate estimates. But calculating your ethnicity estimates - or mine - isn’t easy,
and this White
Paper explains how Ancestry go about it.
You may not understand it
all, but it will at least give you a sense of how carefully they go about the
process of compiling ethnicity estimates - and also why
they change when the reference panel is updated.
There's always
one.....
In the early days pioneering DNA
test providers came up with all sorts of dubious reasons for unsuspecting members
of the public to spend money on DNA tests - remember 'The Seven Daughters of Eve'?
I thought that we'd put all
that behind us, but no - now there's a company that claims to be able to tell
you which foods are good for you. But before you splash out, take a look at the
responses
from Twitter users.....
A magazine subscription is "the
gift that keeps on giving", and one of the biggest magazine publishers has
launched their pre-Christmas sale. Follow this link
and use the code XMAS19 to save on dozens of popular titles including Who
Do You Think You Are?
Note: if you're not in the
UK you may find that the code only works for digital subscriptions.
Make sure you know how to
log-in to your LostCousins account because in a couple of weeks' time I'm going
to be giving away a genealogical mystery - not a short story, not a novella,
but a complete novel which has collected dozens of 4 and 5 star reviews since
it went on sale at Amazon a few years ago. It's completely free, but to get it
before it goes on general release you'll need to log-in to your LostCousins
account.
Not sure how to log-in? No
problem - the email that told you about this newsletter includes the email
address that's in my records - which won’t necessarily be the one you normally
use, or even the one where the email ended up. That email address is your user
name, and you can use it to request a reminder of your password when you click
the Password
reminder link.
(You won’t need a LostCousins
subscription to benefit from this offer, but I'd like to take this opportunity
to thank those of you who are generously supporting the LostCousins project - without
you the independence of LostCousins would be in danger.)
Interest rates keep going
down for savers, and whilst there are lots of firms (usually with posh names)
offering unfeasibly high returns I'm not reckless enough to speculate. Something
that seems too good to be true usually is.
Some years ago I came across
someone who was promoting investments in hotels and holiday resorts on the
Caribbean island of St Lucia, and I was rather surprised to hear how optimistic
he was, since I'd just got back from a holiday on the island (courtesy of Tesco
Clubcard) and seen that building sites had been abandoned. Maybe it worked out
all right in the end, but there was no way I would have invested in that
project.
By contrast I've had money
invested with the peer-to-peer lenders Zopa and Ratesetter since they were first recommended to me by two canny
LostCousins members in 2012 and 2014 respectively. The returns aren't spectacular
- typically 3% to 5% - but it's a lot better than you can get from most savings
accounts, and if you join when there's a special offer you can get a bonus. For
example, at the moment there's a bonus of £100 when you invest a minimum of
£1000 with Ratesetter and keep it invested for at
least a year - just follow this link.
Note: I am not a financial
adviser - what's suitable for one person might not be suitable for another.
Make sure you read the small print!
Thanks to everyone who has
sent in recipes following my comments in the last newsletter - not enough for a
book yet, so keep them coming! This BBC article about a young
woman living frugally might be interesting to some of you - though you might
find, as I did, that her concept of frugal and yours are some distance apart. For
example, this week I created three meals (each for two people) from a chicken
that cost just £1.25 from the reductions shelves in my
local supermarket. There were even a few scraps left over for our cat....
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......
That's all for
now, but I'll be back in touch soon with news of your free genealogy mystery.
In the meantime, if you ever feel that you need cheering up (and I suspect a
lot of us do right now), this clip of Dick van Dyke
singing 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'
in a restaurant should help!
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2019
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?