Newsletter – 7th
October 2021
New Morton Farrier novel coming soon EXCLUSIVE
Mother-and-baby homes
in Northern Ireland
Finding adoption
records and making contact with relatives
Surnames missing from
the census
Save 25% on the best DNA tests (UK
only) ENDS TUESDAY
Free genealogy podcasts
by experts
Society of Genealogists move into
temporary accommodation
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 29th September) click here; to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between
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2009, so you don't need to keep copies):
To go to the main
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whenever there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
New Morton Farrier novel coming soon EXCLUSIVE
Like many of you I've
been following the career of Morton Farrier, forensic genealogist, ever since
the first book in the series was published 8 years ago. Back in December 2013 I
wrote in my review:
"Once I started
reading Hiding the Past I had great difficulty putting
it down - not only did I want to know what happened next, I actually cared. I
certainly hope that author Nathan Dylan Goodwin is already writing the next
Morton Farrier story because I can't wait!"
It has been like that
ever since – perhaps because what Morton and I have such a lot in common that I
can imagine myself as part of the story. And in the next book in the series, the
line between fact and fiction becomes even more blurry because there's a
Detective Constable Calver in the story!
I'm planning to
review The Foundlings once the release date is known, but I wanted to be
the first to reveal the title of the new novel, as well as the cover artwork. When
I first saw it my eyes were drawn to the gorgeous
sports car parked outside the electricity showroom (those were the days!) but after
reading the book I know why two of the objects in the otherwise monochrome picture
are tinted red – they play a key role in the story. Whilst it can be read as a
stand-alone novel I thoroughly recommend reading the
books in the series in sequence – you can see them all if you click the appropriate
link below:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
If you followed the Adoption
Matters series of articles which ran in this newsletter not so long ago you'll know that the circumstances of adoption vary –
and you'll have heard every side of the story, from birth mothers, birth
fathers, adoptees, and adoptive parents. You'll even have read the tale of the
LostCousins member who was a foundling – I wonder what will go through her head
as she reads the book?
Over the past few years I've been intermittently assisting a LostCousins
member who was an adoptee and, though not a foundling, discovered through DNA
testing that her mother had not only concealed her own true identity, but given
a false name for the father of the child. It's a tangled story, and as in Nathan
Dylan Goodwin's new book, the mother turned out to have given birth to more
than one illegitimate child with the assistance (at least at the conception
stage) of different fathers.
Section 3A of the
Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 (as amended by the Children Act 1975) describes
the procedure for the registration of births of abandoned children. You can
find a PDF copy of the Act here, but I've reproduced the key section below:
I also discovered that
the National Archives has registers of foundling births for the years 1952,
1956, 1976 and 1986 – and that they've been open for public viewing since 25th
November 2019. I wonder why those years were chosen, and whether anyone reading
this has inspected the registers?
Foundlings have been
with us since time immemorial – many of you will know the story of Moses in the
bulrushes. Though not all were as fortunate as Moses, as the next article
reminds us…..
Thomas Coram spent 17
years campaigning for the Foundling Hospital to be built, and eventually after
Coram gained the support of 21 prominent women King George II signed the
charter. In 1741 the hospital opened in temporary premises and accepted the
first 30 children, but according to an article in the August 2021 issue of Third
Age Matters, the U3A magazine, only 6 of those 30 children survived long
enough to be apprenticed – a shocking statistic that I couldn’t confirm on the Foundling
Hospital's own website.
The use of the word
'foundling' in the title is somewhat confusing – it usually means a child
abandoned by its mother and left for others to find, whereas in practice mothers
applied to the hospital and, if accepted, gave up their child – though no doubt
some of the children of mothers whose application was rejected did end up as
foundlings (or worse). There were success stories too: a few years ago
LostCousins member Sue told me a wonderful story from her own family history, which
you can read here, and if you'd like to know more there's a website where you can hear
stories from foundlings who passed through the hospital between 1912 and 1954
(when the remaining children were returned to their birth mothers or placed
with foster families).
Note: in April I mentioned
that the Foundling Hospital was looking for volunteers to transcribe 112,000
pages from their archive which cover the period 1739 to 1910 – you can find out
more here.
Mother-and-baby homes in Northern Ireland
This
week a panel of experts recommended that there should be a public inquiry into institutions
for unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland, and that there should be immediate
restitution payments for survivors. Many readers will know that there was previously
a similar inquiry into homes in the Republic of Ireland.
Over
10,500 mothers are believed to have passed through the homes in Northern
Ireland, more than 3,000 of whom were subjected to workhouse-like conditions in
the Magdalene Laundries in Belfast, Londonderry, and Newry. You can find it
more by following the links in this BBC News report.
Finding adoption records and making contact with
relatives
Most
of us have adoptees in our tree, whether we know it or not, but until 1927 adoptions
were not legally regulated in England & Wales (in Scotland and Northern
Ireland it was a few years later). When you’re unable to find birth records for
a child it's always worth considering the possibility that they were adopted –
and bear in mind that in those days adoptions often took place within the wider
family (indeed this sometimes happened after 1927 – just ask Morton Farrier).
The
Who Do You Think You Are? magazine website has a useful guide to
finding adoption records – you'll find it here.
The General Register Office operates the Adoption
Contact Register, which is not a tracing service – in fact it works rather
like LostCousins in that both parties need to be on the register for a connection
to be made (and they're similarly confidential services). The Adoption Search
Reunion website is another key source of information.
Tip: although we
might think of DNA as being for modern-day adoptees (as in 'The Foundlings'),
it can also be used by family historians to trace the birth families of
ancestors who were adopted.
Free
genealogy podcasts by experts
The
Association of Genealogists & Researchers in Archives (AGRA) was founded in
1968 to maintain and promote high professional standards in the field of
genealogy and historical research – members not only hold a relevant qualification,
they have several years of experience in carrying out
paid research. So it's worth listening to what they have
to say, especially when it's free!
In
2020/21 AGRA ran a series of monthly podcasts, and they're running a second
series in 2021/22. A podcast is like a tape recording – you can stop it and
start it whenever you like – and whilst they're only 30-45 minutes long,
they're packed with useful information from a team of experts. You'll find links
to all the podcasts here –
and if you've ever considered hiring a professional researcher last month's
podcast is essential listening!
Tracing ancestors with common surnames like Smith and Jones
is always difficult because it's difficult to be sure that you've found the
right entry. I recently had an email from Anne Harvey, author of several novels that I've reviewed
and recommended (but also known to many as a prolific contributor to family
history magazines) – she had an example of how important it is to search in the
right way when looking for the baptism of an ancestor with a common surname.
She knew that her ancestor Elizabeth Jones was born
around 1839, and according to her marriage certificate Elizabeth's father was
Henry Jones, a coachman. She'd tracked down a family on the 1841 Census who were
living near Chester, and knew that Findmypast had the Cheshire parish registers,
but had she done what an inexperienced (or lazy) researcher might do and used Search
all records she'd have had nearly five thousand records to look through,
even if she restricted the search to a 5-mile radius of Chester and 2 years
either side of 1839. Filtering the results by limiting them to Birth,
Marriage, Death and Parish reduces the number to 1248, but it’s only when
you filter further to just Parish baptisms that it becomes a more
manageable 98. At that point she would have been able to refine the search
further by adding the names of the parents – but how much easier it would have
been to go straight to Findmypast's Cheshire baptisms in the first place,
and that was the point she wanted me to bring home to readers of this newsletter!
If you’re not sure what records Findmypast have which are
specific to a particular county, choose All record sets from the Search
menu and type the name of the county in the search box, eg
Note: the number
of records in each record set is shown – this is a good guide to how
comprehensive the coverage is.
If you search Cheshire Baptisms for baptisms of Elizabeth
to Henry and Martha Jones there are just two results in the right timeframe, both
in Chester, but annoyingly both show the father's occupation as coachman!
© Copyright image reproduced by courtesy of the Cheshire
Archives and Local Studies Service and used by permission of Findmypast
© Copyright image reproduced by courtesy of the Cheshire
Archives and Local Studies Service and used by permission of Findmypast
Anne tells me that the birth registration for Elizabeth Fitter
Jones shows her father's occupation as publican, not coachman – so perhaps the
rector got confused between the two families? On the other hand
the 1841 Census entry, which I'm pretty sure is for the same family, shows
Henry as a coachman:
© Crown Copyright
Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England. Used
with the permission of Findmypast.
Although family
history is a serious business we all appreciate a bit
of light relief, so I was amused to see that the Jones's neighbours in White
Friars were – drum roll – the Fryers! Indeed, in a map of 1745 the street
name is shown as White Fryers.
Missing surnames in the census
Being
a census enumerator in the 19th century not only involved a lot of leg-work, but also a lot of copying – the enumerator had to
painstakingly transcribe information from the household schedules into the summary
books that are our only source of information up to 1901. Frequently ditto
marks were used to cut down the amount of handwriting (and wrist-ache), but sometimes
enumerators couldn't even manage this, leaving surnames to the reader's imagination,
as in this example from the 1851 Census of Tittleshall,
Norfolk:
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England. Used with the permission of Findmypast.
Although
the enumerator used ditto liberally in the occupation and birthplace columns, the
name column is a different matter – there are no ditto marks (unless you count
the occasional flourish of the pen), and the way the household of Rector Kenelm
Digby is recorded
is potentially confusing since only two of the daughters (and none of the sons)
have the Digby surname shown, and two of the sons have middle names which
clearly originated as surnames.
Many
transcribers were able to 'fill in the gaps' but the Findmypast transcriber(s)
responsible for this part of Norfolk left most of the surnames
blank, which might well prevent some researchers from finding their ancestors'
households. It's hard to work out how many individuals are affected since I haven’t
yet found a way of searching specifically for entries with missing surnames, but
it's very probably in the thousands. (The problem also affects the 1851 Census
at FamilySearch since that site uses the Findmypast transcription.)
Note:
I'm grateful to genealogist, writer, and broadcaster Anthony Adolph for drawing
my attention to these anomalies.
Of
course, when you're searching the census it's always good practice to widen your
search to include other household members if your initial searches are
unsuccessful – it's not only transcribers that make mistakes, enumerators and (as
we've seen from the 1911 schedules) householders could also get things wrong.
Many
readers wrote to tell me how much they appreciated the insights they gained
from enumerators who worked on the 2021 England & Wales census, so you
might like to read this article
by a US counterpart.
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Tip:
making breakthroughs using DNA usually requires the co-operation of some of
your cousins – but they needn't be the cousins that you grew up with (indeed,
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Society
of Genealogists move into temporary accommodation
Many of you will know that the Society of Genealogists
has sold its London premises and is negotiating for a new permanent location in
the London area. In the meantime they have moved into temporary premises in
north London – you can find out more here in a letter
from the new CEO who I interviewed
for this newsletter in August.
I read this week that
Royal Mail are experimenting with drone delivery of post to remote Scottish
islands (see this BBC News article for more information), which reminded me of the attempts
in the 1930s to prove that rockets could be used for mail delivery. The article
on the right, published in The Scotsman on 3rd August 1934 (image
copyright Johnston Press plc, used by permission of Findmypast) reports on the
failure of Herr Gerhard Zucker's attempt to send mail between the uninhabited Scottish
island of Scarp and the Isle of Harris.
As you can see from
the report, Herr Zucker attributed the failure not to the German technology,
nor the Scottish weather, but the quality of the powder used to power the
rocket, which had been produced by an English manufacturer. Donner und Blitzen
(please excuse my French)! Well, Herr Zucker, maybe we did it deliberately, to
sabotage your plans to take over our postal system – perhaps our government saw
you as the Huawei of the 1930s?
An earlier experiment
on the outskirts of London, reported in the Daily Mirror on 7th June
1934 had apparently been successful, though as it was witnessed by only 5
people, all of whom were sworn to secrecy I can’t be sure what 'success'
entailed. According to the website of the Postal Museum a second experiment at
Rottingdean in Sussex on 6th June had carried "upwards of 3000 letters"
into the air, though when they returned to earth shortly afterwards they were
delivered by Post Office in the normal way.
The view of the
General Post Office (GPO) at the time was that the primary objective of Zucker
and his business partner was the creation of philatelic curiosities, and an
eBay listing I found is even harsher in its judgement of Herr Zucker: "Up for auction is a beautiful rocket
mail cover from Germany, addressed to Gerhard Zucker the famous rocket pioneer
and scamster (none of his rockets ever worked!)."
In 1972 hundreds of
envelopes were carried into space by the crew of Apollo 15, most of them without
the knowledge or permission of NASA. There's a Wikipedia article devoted to this incident, which seems to have had far-reaching
repercussions for those involved.
I began this article
with the news that Royal Mail are experimenting with drone delivery, but I also
found out today that in India drones are being used to deliver vaccines to
remote areas. The first trial delivery – on Monday – took 12 minutes for what
would normally have been a 4 hour journey, and
although the drone only carried 10 doses on that occasion it's capable of carrying
900 doses. You can find out more in this BBC article.
When you get to my age
you don't get a lot of birthday cards, but the three I got this year made up in
quality what they lacked in quantity. For example, this card from my younger
brother featured a screenshot from one of the games we worked on together in the
mid-1980s, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer. The graphics and animation
were pretty good for the Commodore 64 (thanks largely to my brother's efforts),
but the gameplay was amazing – and until very recently there was a website for
fans who still play the game. It's not the most famous computer soccer game, nor
the biggest-selling (though it was in the charts for 3 years) however – as this
review explains – it introduced many features that modern
gamers take for granted. So now you know a little of what I got up to before I discovered
the joys of family history….
Although it’s only a
week since I last wrote, the outlook for energy prices has worsened
considerably and it has been predicted that the price cap
will go up by around 30% when it is reviewed again in 6 months' time - though the
percentage increase will almost certainly be greater for consumers like me who
have shopped around in the past, not least because there will be fewer suppliers
competing for our business. In the last issue I mentioned
that the price of heating oil had gone up by 25% since I placed my order just
last month – now it's up by 50%. Let's hope that it’s another mild winter.
Some readers
questioned the thermostat settings mentioned in my last Peter's Tips article:
I said that our thermostat is set to 18C during the day, and 10C at night, but
I should perhaps have explained that in practice the temperature in the house
rarely falls by more than a degree or two during the hours of darkness, so the
night-time thermostat setting is largely irrelevant. I should also have admitted
that we might turn the thermostat up to 19C in the evenings – sometimes it can
feel colder than it really is, especially when you've been used to wandering around
outside in a T-shirt and shorts (which we were about 10 days ago, before the
Indian Summer was transmuted into an English Autumn).
But words failed me when
I watched the news today and heard someone suggest that there was something wrong
with the country if she had to wear a cardigan during the winter - clearly she has led a feather-bedded existence up to now. Anyone
who thinks that turning the thermostat up is a sensible substitute for dressing
appropriately is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Remember, it’s primarily
the increase in demand that has sent prices through the roof, so anyone who
uses more than they need is making things worse for everyone else, especially
the poorest in society.
It's less than 48
hours now before I get my booster jab – though I still don't know whether I'll
be offered a flu jab at the same time. Hopefully by now more of you will have
either had your booster, or have an appointment to get
it (I appreciate that if you're not in the UK things are going to be different).
By the way, there are still some people out there, including a few misguided
doctors, advocating ivermectin – but this BBC article explains why the
so-called research into the benefits of the drug shouldn’t be trusted.
Enough doom and gloom
– how about some music to cheer us all up? This version of Dolly Parton's Jolene by the talented Lil Nas X is wonderful!
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 back soon with more news from the world of genealogy but please
don't forget that your own cousins are relying on you to complete your My
Ancestors page – don’t let them down!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2021 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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