Newsletter – 5th
October 2020
Were the Neanderthals wiped out by a coronavirus?
EXCLUSIVE
Ancestry offer free access to Australian and NZ
records ENDS TODAY
Census confusion following Scotland's decision to
postpone
Abolition of marriage registers delayed
Understanding the GRO birth and death indexes
Handwriting in German genealogical records
Forum discussion: surname spellings
Birth certificates for adopted children
Review: Heroes & Villains of the British
Empire
The LostCousins
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Were the Neanderthals wiped out by a coronavirus?
EXCLUSIVE
It's generally thought that Neanderthals, a close
relative of homo sapiens died out around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago – but nobody knows precisely
why, and some argue that interbreeding with modern humans resulted in them being
assimilated into a larger population. Modern humans of European origin have a
small amount of Neanderthal DNA, and it's possible
this broadly reflects the relative sizes of the populations.
One of the many hypotheses is that Neanderthals
were less resistant to diseases, and this idea has been given new life by
recently published research which indicates that people with certain
Neanderthal gene variants are more vulnerable to COVID-19 (see this article
for more details). Whilst Neanderthal DNA can only explain a small fraction of
the differences in outcomes for modern humans, it seems perfectly possible that
it was their susceptibility to certain coronaviruses that led to the demise of the
Neanderthals.
Ancestry offer free access to Australian and NZ records ENDS TODAY
Apologies
for the late notice (partly caused by my laptop going into 'sleep' mode overnight despite being powered from
the mains), but better late than never…..
this weekend Ancestry.com.au
has been offering free access to Australian and New Zealand records – the offer
ends at 11.59pm AEDT on Monday 5th October, so follow this link
without delay!
Census confusion following Scotland's decision to
postpone
In
July the Scottish government decided to postpone the
census planned for 21st March 2021 until 20th March 2022. But if you were to
read this page
on the official Scotland's Census website you’d get the impression that the
census had been planned for 2022 all along! If you compare what's currently
written there with this snapshot
of the page from earlier in the year you'll see that someone has used
search-and-replace to change the year: clearly it doesn’t make any sense to say
that "The programme closed in March 2014 following a recommendation to
hold a census in 2022" since the original plan was to hold the census in
2021, 10 years after the 2011 Census.
Abolition of marriage registers delayed
The
Government originally planned to bring into force the changes in marriage procedure
enacted by the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Act
2019 before the end of last year, but even though we are now approaching the
end of 2020 they still haven’t happened.
And
that's a good thing for genealogists, because one of the changes is to abolish
marriage registers as we know them – in future the happy couple will sign a
form, not a register, and the information on the form will be used to create an
entry on an electronic register.
One
saving grace is that churches will still be able to keep a record of marriages,
though it won't have the same legal status - only registrars will be able to
issue marriage certificates (the effects of all the changes are summarised here).
One of the drivers behind the new legislation was the decision to provide for
the names of mothers to be included on marriage certificates – now you can see
why I wasn't prepared to lend my support to that petition!
Note:
these changes affect England & Wales: Scotland and Northern Ireland already
have a similar system in place.
Understanding how the GRO's indexes were
compiled
Until
November 2016 there was only one set of GRO indexes for England & Wales,
the quarterly indexes that were compiled soon after the end of each quarter. Many
family historians, myself included, had the privilege of handling the original
handwritten index volumes at the Family Record Centre, or at one of the previous
locations where they could be inspected by members of the public, such as
Somerset House or St Catherine's House. Some of the handwritten volumes were replaced
with typeset printed copies when they deteriorated; later indexes were typewritten.
The
information recorded in the indexes varied over time - for example, the age at
death wasn't shown in the Death indexes until after 1865, and the mother's
maiden name wasn't recorded in the birth indexes until the third quarter of 1911.
Middle names were often abbreviated to initials. It's fair to say that the paucity
of information in the early indexes often made it particularly difficult to identify
the correct entries, leading to frustration for researchers and disappointment
when the certificate turned out to be for the wrong person.
It’s these original quarterly indexes which have
been transcribed by FreeBMD, Ancestry, Findmypast and
other sites, and the images you see are typically scans of microfilmed pages. Transcription
errors can be identified and rectified by referring to those images.
In
November 2016 the GRO launched indexes of historic
births and deaths which had been newly compiled from the registers they hold.
Because they were compiled 'from scratch' it meant that errors and omissions in
the original quarterly indexes were unlikely to be repeated, but inevitably new
errors and omissions were introduced instead.
But
the biggest benefit is the inclusion of information that was omitted when the
original indexes were compiled - every forename is transcribed in full, and in
the birth indexes the mother's maiden name is shown from 1837 onwards (provided
she was married to the father of the child). In the death indexes the age at death
is shown from 1837 onwards - another significant improvement.
Things to bear in
mind when using the new indexes:
- The various fuzzy-matching search
options don't work very well - don't expect to be
able to find mistranscribed entries.
- The GRO search only returns a
maximum of 250 results, but you won’t be warned
if there are more results that aren't shown.
- The age at death of children
under one year old may be shown incorrectly - there is nothing to indicate
when the age is in days, weeks, or months rather than years.
- Births identified as illegitimate
are treated differently - nothing is shown in the mother's maiden name
field.
- In the early years of civil registration
(prior to 1850) it isn't always obvious from a birth register entry whether
the parents of the child were married, so in some cases illegitimate
births will appear in the index as if they were legitimate, and in others legitimate
births will appear in the index as if they were illegitimate.
- Occasionally the name of the registration
district will differ between the new indexes and the old; usually it’s simply
a different way of saying the same thing, but where boundaries have
changed it may be a different district altogether.
- Don’t make the
mistake of looking at an entry in the original indexes and trying to
predict how it might have been mistranscribed -
it won’t be the same handwriting as in the register.
But
despite the flaws in the new indexes they've proved amazingly useful, allowing researcher
to reduce or even eliminate the possibility of ordering the wrong certificate -
and sometimes providing so much information that it isn’t necessary to order
the certificate at all!
Things
to bear in mind when reporting 'errors' in the new indexes:
- Unless you purchase a certificate
or PDF from the GRO you cannot see the register entry – so you cannot be
sure that the discrepancy you've noticed is a transcription error (the
register entry might be wrong).
- The fact that an entry differs
from the corresponding entry in the quarterly indexes doesn’t
necessarily mean that it’s wrong.
- The original quarterly indexes
were also produced by the GRO, not by FreeBMD, Ancestry
or whoever – they have merely transcribed the data in the indexes so that
is searchable.
- If the mother's maiden name isn’t
right it's not necessarily an error in the birth indexes – the register
entry could be wrong; check the index entries for siblings as if another
birth has been registered with the same 'wrong' maiden name it probably isn’t
a transcription error.
Why it's
better to search the birth indexes at Findmypast
Although
the birth indexes at Findmypast are based on the original indexes, in many cases
they've added the mother's maiden name, even before
1911 - presumably taking this additional information from the new indexes.
If
you've used the GRO indexes you'll know that the search is limited and inflexible
- for example you can only look for males or females, not both, and you can
only search a maximum period of 5 years. Findmypast doesn’t have these limitations,
so it's particularly useful if you're looking for several children born to the
same parents, perhaps over a period of 20 years or more (since one search at Findmypast
could do the job of 8 or more searches at the GRO site).
Another
advantage of searching at Findmypast is being able to search by county,
something you can’t do at the GRO site. You can even
choose multiple counties (particularly handy if your ancestors lived near the
county border), or multiple registration districts - something else that you can’t do at the GRO site.
Follow
this link
if you want to experiment - you'll be amazed how much you can find out with a
free search!
Handwriting in German genealogical records
One
of the first things I discovered when I started researching my family tree was
that I had German ancestry on my mother's side – but it was only very recently
that I was able to pinpoint where in Germany any of them had come from. There
are many German records online, but if you thought deciphering English wills
was difficult, try reading German handwriting!
Fortunately help is at hand: FamilySearch are running a
series of free webinars using Zoom. To find out more follow this link
to the FamilySearch and click October Month Schedule (or click here
to go straight to the PDF document). The handwriting seminars run from Monday 26th
October through to Friday 30th October, starting at 10am MDT each day (that's
5pm BST if you’re in the UK). But I won't
be waiting until Monday 26th to get started because on Saturday 24th there are
three other seminars that will be of interest to many with German ancestry. I'm particular interested in the one at 12.45pm MDT on Württemberg
Family Books, as that's where one of my ancestors originated.
There
are some names that, when you come across them in the records, you feel you have to research them, if only to confirm that it isn’t a
weird typo. Iddo Smetheaham
Peters is one of those names
Image
© Copyright. Plymouth & West Devon Record Office, used by kind permission
of Findmypast
Iddo said "I do" for the second time at
the age of 29, in the very church where he has been baptised, and where his
parents had married; almost exactly 5 years later he was buried at Ford Park
cemetery in the same parish. He may have travelled the world in the Royal Navy,
but he kept coming back to Plymouth. His first marriage wasn't
in the same church, but it was in Plymouth.
Further
research revealed that 'Iddo' is derived from a
Hebrew word meaning 'mighty'; Smetheaham (or Smetherham) was his mother's maiden name.
Forum discussion: surname spellings
Over
on the LostCousins Forum we've been discussing the
problem of variations in surname spellings. Until the 19th century nobody gave
two hoots about spelling, so variations in the spelling of surnames are not only
common, they’re almost inevitable. Some arose as the
result of clergymen not being familiar with local surnames and misunderstanding
the accent; many are the inevitable result of there being several variations
which most people would pronounce in the same way, for example 'Wallis' and
'Wallace'.
Illiteracy
was a factor, but it isn’t the sole cause of the
confusion: my great-great-great grandfather married twice, in 1817 and 1827,
and signed his name both times – but the spellings were quite different. In
each case the spelling he used matched what the officiating cleric had written
in the register, so did he simply copy that spelling? I may never know.
Then
in 1894 the birth of his great-granddaughter, my grandmother, was registered
under one spelling, but when she married in 1915 he
used a different spelling. All of the members of her
family changed the spelling around the same time, but even today other branches
of the same family use different spellings.
You
don’t need to be a member of the forum to read what others have written – you'll
find the discussion here.
But if you've been invited to join the forum (check your My Summary page
to find out) you should do so, as this will not only allow you to contribute to
discussions started by others, it will enable you to start discussions of your
own.
Note:
please do not write to me about this or other forum topics – if you're a member
of the forum you should post any comments of questions there, and if you're not
you should join (assuming you've been invited). If you haven’t been invited
then my advice is to focus
on qualifying (something that most people reading this could do in an hour or
less). Forum membership is free.
DNA
doesn't
lie; people do
Jermaine
in Australia wrote to tell me about her experiences with DNA (all names have
been changed):
"I have done a DNA test, under pressure
from my daughter. One of my brothers, Bruce, 72 yrs. old, also did his under
pressure from his children, his was a birthday gift.
"Oh dear, what a load of family secrets
came out. Both parents apparently had affairs that resulted in children: I
discovered a half-brother here in Australia, a very unhappy man (my father was
in the Merchant Navy so heaven only knows if any other matches will turn up.). Then
Bruce discovered that his father was an Italian - and to top it off, other
members of the family already knew, and had kept it from him until he
discovered it himself through the DNA test!
"I now understand why my mother said 'mind your own bloody business' and refused to give me
any information at all when I asked questions when I first started to get
interested in family history. Got to have a sense of humour to survive!"
As
family historians we're used to discovering skeletons
in the closet, but when they're so close to home it can be unnerving. But
better, surely, that we find these things out ourselves, rather than our
children or grandchildren unearthing the truth and spreading it all over social
media.
Birth certificates for adopted children
In
this month's Oldie magazine (October 2020, p.16) Germaine Greer repeats
a comment she made at the Hay Festival in 2015, criticising the fact that the birth
certificates for Elton John's adopted children show his husband David Furnish
as the mother.
The
two boys were born in the US to an unnamed surrogate, and the situation there
might be different, but I thought it would be instructive for readers to take a
look at the paperwork that's issued in respect of adopted children in England.
This PDF
document sets out the procedure, and although it refers to birth certificates,
the examples provided are of a short birth certificate and a certified copy of
an entry from the Adoption Children Register:
: 
Note
that a short Birth Certificate doesn’t give the name
of either parent – indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that the individual was
adopted. The certified copy of the entry from the Adopted Children Register
does give the names of the adoptive parents, but they’re
not described as 'father' or 'mother' – that's left to the imagination.
LostCousins member
Joan in Canada contacted me this week with a wonderful story about how her
friend Judy recovered some very important family photo
albums that had been lost during a house move. Here's
the story in Judy's own words:
"My parents lost
a box of photo albums in a move 23 years ago, and they were recently returned
to us! Apparently, the box never left the moving van. The van went from
dropping off my parents' stuff to another house in Austin and loaded up another
family’s stuff and took it to Ohio. The family was there a few years and then
moved to Utah.
"They did not
open the box until 2015 [and that's when they discovered the photo albums].
They tried several times to find out who the albums belonged to but had no
luck. Recently they wrote to our hometown
newspaper because Mom had put some articles about their florist and nursery
business in the albums.
"Long story
short, a long-time family friend who still lives in Burnet saw the article and
recognized my parents’
photo which was included."
"This is a small
selection of the recovered photos, the oldest dating back to about 1906 shows
my grandmother as an adolescent. The man in uniform is my father just before going
to England in 1943 until D-Day, when he landed on Omaha Beach. I was born 5
weeks before D-Day but did not meet my father until I was 18 months old. The
baby photo with the doll [far left] is me.
The doll was one my dad sent me from Belgium that I still have, 76 years
later! The young blond girl Is my mother
with her doll, circa
1932.
"This is not
anything really connected to the lost photos, but you might find it
interesting. The censors were brutal in
Dad’s letters because the soldiers’ whereabouts were top secret, of
course. But, one day, Mom received a
letter from a wonderful woman in Weston-super-Mare
who told her where Dad was. He and a buddy had been Invited to Christmas dinner
at their home, and the Rendell family sort of adopted Dad. Mrs Rendell would mail
uncensored letters from Dad to Mom, and she continued to write to Mom and to my
grandparents. In fact, Dad was at their house when he got the letter about my
birth!
"My baby book
has a letter from Mrs Rendell to “Dear Baby Judy” in which she tells me of
Dad’s happiness at becoming a father, and she quoted him as saying something
like, 'now that my baby is here and my wife and baby are good, I’m ready to go
fight the Nazis!'. Mrs Rendell knitted
and stuffed a toy penguin and sent it to me. I have another photo with the
penguin, but not with me here. (My husband and I got 'stranded' by Covid-19 and
decided to stay put until we feel safe enough to fly home.
"When I was 12,
I got Mrs Rendell’s address from the letter in my baby book and wrote to her.
We became pen pals, and after college, when I was a young teacher, I went to Weston-super-Mare to visit and fell in love with both Mrs
Rendell and her husband. I continued writing to them and visiting them until
they both passed away. I called them my English godparents
and grieved their loss with many tears."
Thank you Judy, and also Joan for bringing this story to my
attention. I know how devastating it can be to lose an entire collection of
family photographs – my aunt's photo albums were stolen in a burglary, and
never recovered. Thank goodness Judy and her family got back their photo albums
eventually – and what a wonderful story about her English 'godparents'. I
wonder how many other GIs made similar connections?
Note: the title of
this article was inspired by the storyline in the latest Esme Quentin genealogical
mystery from the pen of Wendy Percival – you can read my review here.
Review: Heroes & Villains of the British Empire
Cecil Rhodes, the
mining magnate after whom Rhodesia was named, was born in 1853 in Bishops
Stortford - the nearest town to the village where I live (and LostCousins is
based). The house where Rhodes was born became a museum, and later an arts
centre, known as the Rhodes Centre, was built adjoining the house – it was a
popular concert venue in the 1960s featuring acts like Cream, the Yardbirds, the
Animals, and Gene Vincent. However, Rhodes was a controversial figure even in
his own short lifetime – he was 48 when he died in 1902 – and eventually, in
August this year, the Rhodes Art Complex was rebranded as South Mill Arts (the
change took effect on the 206th anniversary of the day that the British army
burned down the White House)..
Rhodes
inevitably gets a couple of mentions in Stephen Basdeo's
new book, Heroes & Villains of the
British Empire: Their Lives & Legends. It might seem a strange book to publish at a time when the British
Empire and imperialism in general are being criticised right, left and centre –
well, left and centre at least – but, as the son of a Guyanese immigrant and
his English wife, the author has a wider perspective than most. And tempting
though it must have been to pick a handful of 'heroes and villains' and devote
a chapter to each, he instead picks broad themes.
For me, and those of previous generations, the
British Empire was brought to life through books, such as the works of H Rider
Haggard, the ever-popular Robinson Crusoe, and magazines for boys – the empire-builders of the future. The Boys Own Magazine, Chums, and Union Jack were respectable
titles, but they were aped by 'penny dreadfuls' such as The
Young Briton, Sons of Britannia, and the Boys of England. Others saw it as their duty to spread Christianity to the heathen
hordes.
Stephen Basdeo turns to
literature again in his concluding chapter, describing how 20th century writers
like C S Forester (the Hornblower series) perpetuated the glorious myths of the
British Empire even as others like Lytton Strachey (in Eminent Victorians) and E M Forster
(in A Passage to India) were exposing its flaws. But he also tells us that the saintly Mahatma
Gandhi was guilty of racism in his early years, and that in 2018 this resulted
in the removal of a statue of Gandhi from the University of Ghana. On the final
page he reminds us that the 18th century writer Henry Fielding (writing about Ancient
Greece and Rome) warns us, in Basdeo's words, to take
"all the stories about the goodness, bravery, generosity and altruism of historical
military men with more than a pinch of salt and a healthy does
of downright cynicism".
It's a thought-provoking book, one that will help all of us better understand
the world in which our ancestors lived and died. I read the paperback, which
has a cover price of £15.99 in the UK (but is currently available at Amazon for
about 30% less); there is also a Kindle version for around a fiver. Please use
the links below if you want to support LostCousins – thanks!
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Now
that I'm 70 I don’t feel any different. Well, actually
that's not quite true – I have a lovely warm feeling as a result of the kind
words and good wishes of the members who took the time to offer their congratulations
and say nice things about the work that I do. And some of you weren't just
generous in the things that you said, you also bought me a drink for my birthday
using the PayPal widget in the last
newsletter. (Everyone should have received a personal reply by now – it’s the least I could do.)
Big
birthdays don’t come round very often, so as a birthday present to myself I
splashed out on a dozen large Kilner jars – just in time for the last of the damsons and
the first of the sloes. They weren't
cheap but I'll use them time and time again, which is more than I can say for a
lot of the rubbish that's sold these days.
In
recent weeks I've been heartened by the emails I've received from senior
LostCousins members who are still actively researching their late 80s and 90s,
but this Guardian article
about care home residents who are taking part in a global cycling competition
was also reassuring (and just the thing for a pandemic, too).
Well,
it's that time of year again…… these days everyone knows about Black Friday - which
this year is likely to provide an even bigger bonanza than usual for online
retailers – but Amazon Prime Day (in just over a week's time) is a better-kept
secret. Only Prime members can participate, but since you can take a 30-day free
trial it's potentially open to (almost) everyone who hasn’t
previously had a free trial. If you want to sign up for a free trial please use the relevant link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
But
beware - I originally signed up for a 30-day free trial several years ago, but I've continued to subscribe ever since (the same thing
happened with Ancestry). Mind you Prime saves me a fortune in delivery charges,
and also gives me free access to some excellent TV
programmes. I know that Amazon isn’t everyone's
favourite company, however for me they have been marvellous.
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 2020 Peter Calver
Please do NOT copy or republish any part of this newsletter
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link to a specific article right-click on the article name in the contents list
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