Newsletter – 1st November 2025
What are your thoughts about the new FreeBMD?
Findmypast focus on ‘Pals’ battalions FREE ACCESS WEEKEND
Message in a bottle turns up after more than a century
Genealogy book bargains – if you’re quick
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 27th October 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):
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When it comes to your own family tree you are the expert – there’s nobody else who is researching all of your ancestral lines. After all, the only people with exactly the same ancestors are your brothers and sisters, and since you’re the one in the family who has taken on the task of family historian, they’re going to be relying on you.
It’s a big responsibility that you’ve taken on – though you probably didn’t see it that way when you started. Now everyone is relying on you, and yet there isn’t enough time to do everything. You probably began by researching your 4 grandparents, then your 8 great-grandparents – and you may not have fully appreciated at the time how soon the doubling of the number of ancestral lines with each generation would turn your casual hobby into a full-time job.
What’s that? You can’t spend every waking minute working on your family tree? Join the club – none of us can devote as much time to genealogy as we would wish, so we have to compromise, putting some of our ‘brick walls’ on the back-burner in the hope that something will turn up whilst we’re working on other lines. Now and again something does turn up, but mostly it doesn’t, and our backlog gets bigger and bigger.
Fortunately there is a solution – once we realise that we don’t have to do everything ourselves. Whilst there are no other researchers who share ALL of our ancestors, there are hundreds or thousands who share SOME of our ancestors. Of course, the vast majority of them won’t be be nearly as experienced as you, nor as careful to get things right, but some of them will be – and they’re the ones who are most likely to belong to LostCousins.
When I ask members to complete their My Ancestors page it’s because it’s in their best interests – your best interests. The longer you delay the more time you’ll waste, whether duplicating research one of your cousins has already done, or banging your head against a ‘brick wall’ that has already been knocked down.
The fact that some of my cousins know more about some of my ancestral lines than I do isn’t because they’re smarter than me (though they may well be), or because they’ve been researching longer than me (though some certainly have), it’s because they’ve chosen to focus on some of the lines that I’ve been forced to put on the back-burner due to lack of time.
If I’m not too proud to accept help and from advice my distant cousins, nor should you be – grasp the opportunity!
What are your thoughts about the new FreeBMD?
In the last issue I gave my thoughts about the revamped FreeBMD website, and now I’d like to know what you think. But please don’t write to me, post your comments and suggestions here on the LostCousins Forum.
Findmypast focus on ‘Pals’ battalions FREE ACCESS WEEKEND
Next weekend, from 7th-9th November, millions of military records at Findmypast will be free – to help families remember the loved ones who served and, all too often, gave their lives during the Great War.
This year there is a special focus on the ‘Pals’ battalions, which enabled friends, work colleagues, and neighbours to enlist together. If members of your family served in one of those battalions you can contribute information here right now (and you should be able to use the same link to access the free records when the offer begins).
ScotlandsPeople is the only online source of the free LDS transcription of the 1881 Scotland census – which we’ve been using at LostCousins for over 20 years to connect family historians who are researching the same Scottish lines.
However, a LostCousins member recently pointed out that searching for certain surnames doesn’t seem to work as you would expect. For example, if you search for ‘John McPherson’ you get just 6 results from the LDS transcription, but over 800 results when you search ScotlandsPeople’s own version of the census.
It turns out that even if you use the ‘phonetic matching’, ‘fuzzy matching’, or ‘wildcard’ options the search of the LDS census for ‘McPherson’ doesn’t pick up entries where the surname has been recorded as ‘Mc Pherson’. I imagine the same problem occurs with other ‘Mac’ names, so if you can’t find one of your Scottish relatives try changing the format.
Tip: if you have an Ancestry subscription you can use their transcription of the 1881 Scotland census. Both Findmypast and Ancestry have transcribed the Scotland censuses from 1841-1901, so you can research your Scottish branches in detail without spending credits at ScotlandsPeople.
Although ScotlandsPeople has digital images of historic BMD registers, more recent entries are only available in the form of a certificate. A member wrote to me this week complaining that she was charged £4.10 in postage for her certificate, on top of the £12 charge for the certificate itself – and commented that it arrived on the 14th working day after the order was placed, towards the end of the 5 to 15 working day estimate on the website.
The GRO currently charges of £12.50 for England & Wales certificates, with despatch by 2nd Class post on the 4th working day after ordering provided the index references have been supplied. It’s a long while since I’ve ordered a paper certificate, so I’d be interested to know whether the GRO are meeting that target.
Message in a bottle turns up after more than a century
It’s not unusual for bottles containing messages to show up, but for a bottle from the Great War to have survived all this time definitely is out of the ordinary. See this Australian news article for more details.
I was also taken by this BBC article about two pen-pals who met for the first time after 43 years!
Genealogy book bargains – if you’re quick
This year I’ve highlighted on several occasions how Amazon.co.uk have been discounting Kindle versions of the popular Tracing Your Ancestors….. series to just 99p.
I was amazed to discover today that there are currently 34 of the 84 titles which are discounted to 99p, many more than ever before (usually it’s about 5 at a time – the most I’ve ever seen before was 14). I’m not going to attempt to list them here – it’s tempting fate, and would delay the publication of this newsletter, but you can see the current list yourself by clicking this link.
If you use my link LostCousins will receive 3p in commission for each book you buy – not a fortune, but every little helps.
Until 21st November Ancestry.co.uk are offering DNA tests for £39 plus shipping (the full price is £79 plus shipping, although I don’t suppose many people pay full price for anything these days!).
There’s also a sale at Ancestry.ca with $50 off the standard test.
The Ancestry test remains the one that I recommend – partly because their database is far larger than any of their competitors, which means you’ll get far more useful matches with genetic cousins, but mainly because of the clever way that they integrate their vast collection of family trees in order to save you time and effort.
Save up to 50% on AncestryDNA®. Terms Apply.
Save up to $65* on Ancestry®! Terms Apply.
If there are offers in other territories I’ll add them as I get the information.
Some of you may recall that in mid-September the LostCousins website was unavailable for several hours (up to 24 hours for some members) as a result of a DNS configuration error by someone at our hosting company.
Normally this wouldn’t be something to be proud of, but it turns out the recent enormous outages that hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) and then Microsoft Azure were also caused by DNS configuration errors. It just goes to show that anyone can make mistakes, no matter how big they are.
I wasn’t inconvenienced by the AWS problem, though I know a lot of people were, but when Microsoft Azure was hit we lost access to our Netatmo central heating thermostat, and my wife and I felt distinctly chilly for a couple of hours until it came back online!
Finally, if you’ve read about the plans to run double-decker trains through the Channel Tunnel you might be interested in this short film from 1949 about the very first double-decker trains in Britain. I can see why it didn’t catch on…..
Monday 3rd November: as of this afternoon there are still 26 Tracing Your Ancestors... titles on sale at 99p. Apologies to those of you outside the UK who cannot take advantage of the offers - even if they were on offer in other territories I wouldn't know, as I can't see the prices for Kindle books outside the UK.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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