Newsletter - 10th October 2018
Back to basics - a week at the Record Office
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When to order local BMD certificates
Miscarriages are more common than we think
When did our ancestors stop marrying their cousins?
How your ancestors could speak from the grave
The 10th President's grandsons are alive!
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Back to basics
- a week at the Record Office
There's so much information
online these days that it's understandable that newer researchers might never
have visited a county record office - and even I find myself putting off my
visits in the hope that the parish registers I'm interested in will
miraculously appear online.
But this week my wife is in
Cyprus visiting her father's 1st cousin, so it's an ideal opportunity to spend
time at the Bury St Edmunds branch of the Suffolk Record Office - and since at
least a quarter of my ancestors hail from that county
there are lots of loose ends to tie up. I can't call them 'brick walls' because
until I've done the basic research - examining the parish registers for which
there are no online transcriptions - the barriers are primarily of my own
making.
When I first visited the
Suffolk Record Office 16 years ago there was little to guide me, but this time
there are clues from online trees, and these are proving particularly useful on
the lines which I've recently 'cracked' using DNA - though inevitably some of
the clues are actually 'red herrings'. Even when I find a register entry to
back-up the tree it doesn’t mean that it's the correct entry - often there are
several baptisms that fit, so it’s necessary to look for corroborating
evidence. This is particularly important when the baptism you've found took
place in a different parish from the one in which he married and baptised his
own children.
What counts as corroborating
evidence? For a start, you have to make sure that the
person you've identified as your ancestor didn't die as a child - infant
mortality was very high, and in some of the poorest families was over 50% - but
the next step is to build up a picture of the family by looking for siblings.
This is something you'll want to do if it's the right entry, so the sooner you
do it the better - it's much easier to establish that an ancestor born in one
parish is the same person who married in another if you can find evidence that
other members of the family did the same.
When you’re looking for
baptisms it often helps to start by searching for marriages. Why? Because in
some parishes and some counties marriages have been transcribed from an earlier
date than baptisms - this is a particularly useful tip if you're researching in
a county like Suffolk which has good coverage in Boyd's
Marriage Indexes (which are online at Findmypast). Even though families weren't as mobile as
we are in the 21st century, there can be 50 parishes within a 10-mile radius, so
if you know where people with the right surname married that's a useful clue to
where their children were likely to have been baptised.
Tip: Boyd's Marriage Indexes cover the period
1538-1840 and include more than 2.5 million marriages from 4300 parishes across
England; however, the collection is particularly strong in Yorkshire,
Cambridgeshire, and East Anglia.
Many marriages took place
between people from different parishes, and from 1754 onwards the register
entry should indicate where the bride and groom were living (and occasionally
earlier entries will also provide clues). Banns registers and marriage licences
are another source of clues.
There are lots of other tips
that I could give you..... but you'll have to wait for
my Masterclass!
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from the day you buy your Findmypast subscription -
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in which case I'll extend it by 12 months. The offer includes a joint
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is the time to open a LostCousins account for them, and link it to yours (by entering their membership
number on your My Details page). Note
that you can have two accounts at the same email address just so long as the
passwords are different - indeed it’s usually the best option.
When to
order local BMD certificates
Now that it's possible to
purchase PDF copies of historic birth and death register entries for England
& Wales from the General Register Office, and an increasing number of
church marriage registers can be viewed online, it's tempting to ignore the
possibility of ordering certificates from a local register office. But are
there circumstances in which this more expensive and (generally) less
convenient option can be worth the money?
The first thing to bear in
mind is that all of the historic entries in the GRO's
registers are copies, not originals. So you won't see
the signatures of your ancestors (unless they happened to be a registrar or
vicar acting in their official capacity), and there's also the possibility that
errors were introduced when the copy entry was created. The names of marriage
witnesses are particularly likely to be wrong, as they only appear as signatures
- and I defy anyone to read my signature, even if it hasn’t been written with a
quill pen (as many 19th century signatures were)!
In some circumstances you
might need to see an original signature in order to confirm the identity of the
individual: for example, there's an interesting discussion on the LostCousins Forum about a man who had two wives, one called
Maria Ann and other Mary Ann, and it’s not clear which of the two was the M A
who registered the births of some of the numerous children (and was,
presumably, their mother). In other cases you might
suspect that the information shown in the GRO register has been copied
incorrectly.
But ordering a certificate
from the local register office doesn’t guarantee that you'll get a facsimile
copy of the register entry (as you usually would when ordering a certificate or
PDF from the GRO). Not all offices have the necessary equipment, and even if
they do, they may not have the time - it's quite a fiddly process - so make
sure you check before you place your order, as once a certificate has
been provided they're unlikely to be able to change anything.
Note: I have heard it said that some local registrars will
provide an uncertificated photocopy of a register entry, but I have never been
able to confirm that this has actually happened.
When you order a certificate
from a local register office it’s not quite as simple - for a start you have to figure out where the event occurred, and where the
registers are currently held (changes in boundaries and the consolidation of
services are added complications). It's not just a question of looking up the
entry in the GRO indexes, because the volume and page number identify the
location in the GRO's registers, not the local registers. Fortunately
some areas have local indexes which are available online, and where they are,
these may contain additional information - or be searchable in ways that the
GRO indexes aren't. The UKBMD
website has links to most or all of the local indexes (note that they're not
shown in strict alphabetical order - areas which use the UKBMD software are
listed first).
Note: a reminder that ALL certificates are copies -
there is no such thing as an original certificate, since a certificate is a
certified copy. The closest you can get to an 'original' is a certificate
issued at the time an event occurred - but this won't show the signatures of
the parties, only that of the registrar.
Miscarriages
are more common than we think
There's nothing worse for an
expectant mother than to miscarry, but research
suggests that most miscarriages occur very early in a pregnancy, before the
mother is even aware that she is pregnant. Geneticist William Rice, at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, has calculated that even in her 20s a
woman is just as likely to miscarry as to give birth, and for older women the
statistics just get worse.
I was reminded of this
research when reading the poignant story of a BBC journalist whose daughter was
still-born - you can read it here.
You may also recall that three years ago previous research suggested that
female embyros were more likely to die, contradicting
the long-held belief that males are more vulnerable (it was reported in this article
in The Guardian).
When did our
ancestors stop marrying their cousins?
Analysis of millions of
profiles on a genealogy site has allowed researchers to produce a family tree
with 13 million individuals, certainly far larger than mine, and perhaps the
largest tree ever put together. By analysing this tree
the team apparently concluded that marriages between cousins continued to be
common into the second half of the 19th century, despite increased mobility.
There are cousin marriages in
my tree, certainly, but they're the exception - so I wonder whether the data is
biased towards the US? Unfortunately I don’t have access to the paper, only the
abstract, but
the lead researcher is now working just a few miles down the road (at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) so I'll see if I can find
out more.
Why do we do what do - is it
just a hobby, or is there a greater purpose? Just this morning I received an
email from a distant cousin (we found each other through DNA) in which she
wrote:
" I am trying to document the lives
of both of my parents and their heritage - telling the stories of their
ancestors, the people who made them the wonderful people they were."
It's a marvellous way of
expressing how I feel about my own research - do you feel the same, I wonder?
How your
ancestors could speak from the grave
Baidu, the Chinese equivalent
of Google, is working on technology that would enable a computer to mimic the
voice of a human after hearing just a few samples of that person speaking. So if you've got a tape-recording of a parent or grandparent
that's gathering dust in the attic, perhaps it'll soon be time to dust it off?
Just imagine your ancestors
telling their stories in their own voices - and you could literally put words
into their mouths by adding a soundtrack to home movies! Baidu are not the only
people in this field - the Canadian firm Lyrebird is working along similar
lines, and if you go to their website you
can turn your own voice into a digital version. I could recognise my tones in
the Lyrebird digital equivalent, though I think they've got some way to go
before I can send my computer to do a presentation to a family history society!
At the mediaeval church of St
Mary, in Clophill, Bedfordshire a path has been laid using headstones that had been
moved from their original site half a century ago. Some see it disrespectful,
but what do you think? There's more in this BBC News article.
Peter Jackson, the film
director best known for the Lord of the
Rings trilogy has shown just what can be done with old film footage in They Shall Not Grow Old, a collaboration
with the Imperial War Museum and others that uses original footage of the Great
War from the museum's archive, but updates it with colour, sound, and even 3D!
You can see the trailer if you follow this link.
Note: a few months before my father died I was able to
film him with a 3D video camera at a family Christmas party that we organised
for him in his care home. It's not the last memory of my father, but it's
probably the last time I saw him really happy -
surrounded, as he was, by the people who mattered to him, and who cared about
him.
The 10th President's
grandsons are alive!
You might have read about this
elsewhere, as the article has been sitting on my desk for ages - but this is
surely some kind
of record.....
John Tyler, born in 1790, became
the 10th President of the United States in 1841 on the death of the 9th President,
William Henry Harrison. His 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853,
and two of his sons, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. (born in 1924), and Harrison
Ruffin Tyler (born in 1928) are still alive - they were interviewed by CBS News
last year (see this article).
The story of how the Golden
State Killer was caught has gone round the world many times, but since these
things tend to get distorted in the retelling I think you'll be as interested
as I was to hear CeCe Moore describe how she got
involved in tracking down criminals using the DNA they left behind - you'll
find the ABC News clip here.
For family historians
DNA is a less newsworthy - but equally useful - tool, especially when we're
trying to solve mysteries of adoption or illegitimacy (the two often go hand in
hand, of course). LostCousins member Ilona wrote in
last week with a wonderful story from her own tree, and she's kindly allowed me
to reproduce it here:
Quite a few years ago, 2007 in fact, my mother and I were discussing some family history research I had been carrying out on behalf of my maternal grandmother. "You know, I’ve never had a proper copy of my birth certificate, only an extract of birth", she said. My reply was to log on to the magic of the internet and order her a certificate from the GRO then and there using the number on her ‘extract of birth’, dated 1948. As Mum was born in the UK in 1937 and we live in Australia it was a six week wait for the certificate to arrive. When it landed in my letterbox I drove straight to her house (45 minutes away) so that she could open it. Excitedly I handed it to her, she ripped the envelope open and started reading, "Oh", she said, then again a longer, drawn out "Ohhh…"
"Mum? What is it?" She
handed it to me and I saw that there was no father named and at the end was an
addition - Adopted. We looked at each other while we digested this new fact and
then she said, "Oh well, it doesn’t really matter now but I’d like to know
the story". My mother was reluctant to bring it up with her mother as she didn’t
want to upset her - after all, my Gram had managed to keep her secret for 70 years!
(Clarification: my grandmother is her biological mother, she was officially
adopted by her step-father).
My grandmother passed away the
following year without revealing any information and left no clues behind; we
were hoping to find a letter explaining everything or other documents
but this story has a different plot. So I started researching.....
My mother was born in March 1937
in Hammersmith; the first thing to look for was my grandmother’s marriage
record. Visited the State Library of Victoria and searched the microfiche
starting with 1935 (my grandmother would have been 17 in 1935). Found the
marriage record in September 1939, the day after WW2 was declared! My
grandmother and her beau had rushed off to the Hammersmith Register Office to
ensure my mother would be looked after should something happen to them during
the war (my grandmother was in the army reserve and was called up to serve
under Montgomery but that’s a separate story). I do recall her telling the
story of pulling a couple of passers by in to the
Register Office as witnesses and that she was wearing a mustard-coloured suit.
There are no photographs. So my grandmother didn’t actually
marry until my mother was two and a half years old, hmmm....
She had often talked about living
with her aunt and uncle and how much they enjoyed looking after my mother while
she was at work. Being a single, working mother in the late 1930s was certainly
unusual. We did wonder what her husband was doing at this time
but we now know he wasn’t around yet. Also she had
told us about “rushing out to buy a wedding ring” which now made sense – she
bought her own wedding ring to hide the fact that she was pregnant and
unmarried. Unusually for the time my mother was not put up for adoption; my
Step-Grandfather officially adopted her in 1948 when her birth certificate was
needed for school enrolment.
Next I
started quizzing any older relatives to see if they knew anything but they
didn’t know any more than I had discovered. Dead end…or so I thought.
Cut to 2016 and the DNA testing
fad was really taking off. I decided to test on a whim as my father was a
European displaced person and my mother an English immigrant. When my mother
and her half-sister heard what I was doing they wanted to test as well.
A couple of months later the
results came in and confirmed that my mother and my aunt definitely
did not share the same father. But what did this mean? This meant that
anyone who matched my mother and me but not my aunt could possibly be related
to my paternal grandfather. OK, what next?
I started to compile a
spreadsheet of how much DNA the common matches shared with my mother and with
me. One day midway through 2017 a new match sharing 332 centimorgans, ST,
popped up – Ancestry predicted a 2nd cousin to my mother. Wow, that’s pretty close, I thought. ST had created a public family
tree. Another close match (268 centimorgans), LRA had also published a family
tree and from those trees I could see which ancestors they had in common. As
this point I started a family tree for my mother’s paternal side with
information gleaned from ST and LRA and a couple of more distantly related
matches, MB and AJF. By painstakingly researching their common ancestors I was
able to work out how these four people were related to each other within the
family tree. From this I was able to identify my mother’s paternal grandparents
Arthur Henry Zealey and Alice Hannah Skinner (which
was amazing to be able to get that far). This meant that ST was her 1st Cousin
Once Removed (1C1R) and LRA a First Cousin Twice Removed (1C2R) – ST is the
uncle of LRA. The DNA amounts they share support the result of my research.
Arthur & Hannah had four sons
and eight daughters - four candidates for my mother’s father: Arthur, Albert, James and Walter. So glad it
wasn’t the other way around!
I plucked up the courage to
contact ST and introduce myself. Our correspondence established that his uncle
DZ, was a potential half-brother to my mother, and the last living descendant
of one of the four sons, Arthur. Broaching the subject of a DNA test was a
delicate operation but eventually his uncle decided he would do it in early
2018. Six weeks later the results arrived – he and my mother were first cousins
as they share 958 centimorgans. So Arthur turned out
to be my mother’s uncle.
That left Albert, James and
Walter as a potential biological father.
Fate more research led me to a
living descendant of Albert, JZ, his grandson. I wrote and introduced myself to
JZ and explained the reasons for my search. He responded quickly but said he
wasn’t sure he could help as his grandfather left the family when his father
(now deceased) was a child. I then told JZ there was one way he could help and
that was by taking an Ancestry DNA test. He agreed without hesitation. About
seven weeks later the results popped up on Ancestry – JZ and my mother share
1,078 centimorgans – more than enough to be her half-nephew. So
I’m quite confident that Albert Edward Zealey was my
mother’s biological father.
A combination of research, DNA testing and luck has led to this amazing result. Along the way many people have helped with tips and information. Huge thank you especially to you, Peter Calver, for sharing your knowledge and experience with your members; over the years I have gleaned many useful tips and research methods from you.
Thank you, Ilona, for sharing
that wonderful story (and - interestingly - the techniques you used were not so
very different from those employed by CeCe Moore to identify
the Golden State Killer).
Note: centiMorgans, usually
abbreviated as cM, are a way of measuring the
importance of shared DNA segments; although they're not actually a measure of physical
length it doesn't do any harm to think of them that way (unless the person
you're talking to has inherited the pedantry gene). There's a chart in my
Masterclass which shows how much DNA is typically shared between relatives, depending
on how close the relationship is - you'll find it here.
As far as I know there are
currently no special offers running (if that changes I'll update this article),
but if you do decide to order a DNA test (or two) you can still support LostCousins by using the relevant link below (please don't
use earlier links as there have been changes - wheels within wheels and all
that):
Ancestry.co.uk
(UK)
Ancestry.com
(US)
Ancestry.ca
(Canada)
Ancestry.com.au
(Australia and New Zealand)
23andMe.com (US)
FamilyTreeDNA (Worldwide)
LivingDNA
(UK)
Note: I've personally tested with Family Tree DNA,
Ancestry DNA, and 23andMe, and I've also had an ethnicity analysis performed by
Living DNA. But if you’re testing for the first time and have ancestors from
the British Isles (as all readers of this newsletter do), I strongly recommend
Ancestry, since they have the biggest database - by far - and you can get
access to it ONLY by taking their test (ie they do not
accept transfers from other providers). As of today I
have 15803 matches at Ancestry, whereas at the last count I had just 2118 at
FTDNA, 979 at 23andMe, and 3193 (including some of my Ancestry matches) at
another site which I'll be reviewing in a future article.
Staying mentally active -
researching your family tree, for example - is a great way to delay the onset
of dementia, but what can we do for those who have already succumbed? The BBC
has a Reminiscence Archive with around a thousand photos, videos, and sound-clips
designed to trigger memories. You might be surprised by what they remember,
given a chance! You'll find the archive here.
According to the calendar I'm
a year older than I was when you last heard from me, though as Richard Branson
- who is a couple of months older than me - is talking about going into space I
don’t consider myself old. My wife and I discussed going out for a meal to
celebrate (?) my birthday, but in the end we decided on
the ultimate treat - a quiet dinner at home with something extravagant that we
couldn't normally bring ourselves to buy. I chose fillet steak.
I was resigned to paying
through the nose, but when I accompanied my wife to Sainsbury's to collect something
she'd ordered from Argos (not my birthday present), I idly glanced at the reductions shelves - only to realise that they had fillet
steak at a quarter of its original price! So we ate
like kings for under £4; and, to accompany our steaks we uncorked a superb bottle
of 2005 Thomas Hyland Shiraz which would cost an arm and a leg today, but only
cost a couple of fingers when I bought it a decade ago.
I don't usually have a
birthday cake (can't afford all those candles!), but my next piece of good fortune
was to spot a delicious chocolate cake in Tesco that was reduced from £12 to £3
- it lasted us for a week. I wish all birthdays were like this one!
Finally, I have
to report that somebody complained about the 'marketing' in my last
newsletter. Well, here are some salient facts:
(1) I only recommend products and services I've bought myself
(which means you can trust what I say)
(2) It's the commission from links that keeps this newsletter
FREE and INDEPENDENT
(3) I don’t charge a penny for the one-to-one help & advice
I provide (but if you ignore it, please don’t ask again - there are 65,000 researchers
who receive this newsletter, so I have to budget my time
very carefully)
So I hope that in the circumstances you can put up with
the 'marketing' - to say nothing of the occasional grammatical or typographical
mishap!
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 in touch
again soon - in the meantime keep searching for those 'lost cousins'.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2018
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?