Newsletter – 5th
September 2022
Save 20% on Pro subscriptions at Findmypast.co.uk
ENDS SUNDAY
Parish registers online at Findmypast
Possibly the most confusing census schedule I’ve
ever seen
British Newspaper Archive offer starts today
ENDS SUNDAY
Guest article: DNA Test Messes Up My Family
Lateral thinking locates unknown grave of WW1 soldier
Ancestry.com subscription offer FLASH SALE - ENDS WEDNESDAY
What would you take to The Repair
Shop?
A boost for the older generation
The LostCousins
newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue
(dated 25th August) 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):
To go to the main
LostCousins website click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not
already a member, do join - it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you
whenever there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
Save 20% on Pro subscriptions at Findmypast.co.uk ENDS SUNDAY
Last
month there was an opportunity to save 20% on subscriptions to Findmypast’s
Australian site, this week it’s the turn of their UK site. Of course, you don’t
have to subscribe to the site closest to where you live – you may prefer
the site that’s closest to where your ancestors lived – and for those of
you outside the UK the recent fall in the value of the British pound will work
in your favour.
I
understand that this offer is open to new subscribers, former subscribers, and
even current subscribers who want to upgrade to a better subscription.
Pro
subscriptions not only provide virtually unlimited access to ALL of the billions
of historical records at Findmypast (other than the 1921 Census), they include hundreds
of millions of articles in the British Newspaper Archive, as well as modern UK
electoral registers from 2002 onwards.
It’s
worth reminding you that Findmypast are almost unique in offering a Loyalty
Discount to subscribers who purchase 12 month subscriptions, and this currently
provides a useful 15% discount on automatic renewals. This means that if you do
decide to take up the offer, you’re unlikely to be faced with a big increase in
a year’s time. (There’s no absolute guarantee, because with inflation at the
current rate it would be foolish to predict what will happen to prices, but you
can always cancel the renewal.)
The
offer also applies to 3 month Pro subscriptions but, of course, the discount
only applies to the first 3 months – so it might be worth cracking open the
piggy bank and locking in the savings for a full year.
This
offer isn’t exclusive to LostCousins members (those were the days!), but you will
only be supporting LostCousins when you use the link below:
FINDMYPAST.CO.UK
– SAVE 20% ON 3 & 12 MONTH SUBSCRIPTIONS ENDS SUNDAY
Tip:
if you’re asked about cookies please accept them as otherwise your purchase won’t
be recorded as coming from LostCousins. You can always change the settings later,
if you really want to.
Parish registers online at Findmypast
Experienced family historians are highly dependent on parish
registers, so I thought it would be useful to list the counties for which
Findmypast have images, which include:
Cheshire, Devon, Hertfordshire,
most of Kent,
Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Rutland,
Shropshire,
Staffordshire,
Surrey,
Warwickshire, much of Yorkshire,
and most of Wales
They also have tens of millions of indexed records from other
counties, many of them the result of Findmypast's connections with family
history societies, but remember that even the most reliable transcriptions can
miss out key information.
Possibly the most confusing census schedule I’ve ever
seen
I’m
grateful to Roy for drawing my attention to the household schedule below – it’s
a reminder of how important it is to view primary records, when they are
available, rather than relying on transcripts, or secondary records.
©
Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London,
England and with the permission of Findmypast
Remember
that prior to 1911 the census records we see are not primary records – the information
in the enumerators’ summary books has been copied from the household schedules,
and may well have been altered in the process. Sadly the schedules for the
1841-1901 censuses were destroyed – only a few hundred from the 1841 Census
have survived.
British Newspaper Archive offer starts today ENDS SUNDAY
The
British Newspaper Archive is a sister site to Findmypast, and if you have a Pro
or Ultimate subscription to Findmypast you’ll already have access to the
newspapers and magazines in the archive. There are already more than 56 million
pages, with an estimated half a billion articles, and literally billions of mentions
of names.
The
primary focus is on local and provincial newspapers, so your ancestors don’t
need to have been famous – or infamous – to qualify for a mention. Local
newspapers specialise in ‘human interest’ stories, covering accidents, school
sports days, examination results, amateur dramatics, and a wide range of sporting
events – indeed, the more local people they could mention, the more copies of
the newspaper they were likely to sell!
However
if you don’t already have access, it’s worth considering the advantages of
subscribing to the British Newspaper Archive. Frequent users of historic
newspapers will appreciate the more flexible searching options – for example
you can restrict your searches to pages added to the archive after a certain
date, so that you don't keep ploughing through the same list of results. This
allows you to focus on what's new, which is important because the archive is
growing rapidly – by my calculation over 10 million pages have been added in
the past year alone!
This
offer isn’t exclusive to LostCousins members, but you will only be supporting
LostCousins when you use the link below:
BRITISH
NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE – SAVE 20% ENDS SUNDAY
Please
bear in mind that the reduction only applies to the initial payment (and
shorter subscriptions are, in any case, much more expensive per month), so my
advice is to get the longest subscription you can afford.
Guest
article: DNA Test Messes Up My Family
What’s worse – finding out that you’re
researching the wrong ancestral line, or never finding out about it? I’d say
the latter, but that’s just my personal opinion. This article from a
LostCousins member describes his own bitter-sweet experience:
“It was rather
traumatic finding out that the man who brought me up wasn’t genetically my father,
particularly at my then age of 73!
“My mother, it turns
out, must have had a one-night fling on or around VJ Day – I was born 9 months
later, in May 1946. But the man who brought me up must never have realised I
didn't belong to him. He died in 1992 and looking back, I can see nothing, no word
nor deed, that suggested he was aware. He was in the RAF during the war and would
have come home shortly after I was conceived.
“Having lost half of
my family tree, I now have another, new, half but it is not easy trying to
relate to them, knowing nothing about the places they call home or the folks
they grew up with. I’m a European, they are North Americans. This all came
about as a result of taking the Ancestry DNA test.
“I had made contact with
my half-sister via Ancestry. She told me all about her father – my father – how
he had escaped from continental Europe as the Nazis advanced, and become a
merchant sailor. After the war he stayed on the other side of the Atlantic,
married her mother and produced 3 children.
“I’d lost one father,
but gained a new one. But there was to be another twist in the tale….
“Some time later my
half-sister persuaded her brother to test, and there was a further revelation! It
turned out that they were not brother and sister, but half-siblings and hadn't
known.
“Her brother is no
match to me, but he does match other cousins of theirs – what this means is
that the merchant sailor was neither her father nor mine, and an unnamed North
American, probably a soldier, was the father of both of us.
“We’re now faced with
the challenge of identifying this unknown soldier!”
Lateral thinking locates unknown grave of WW1 soldier
Solving
family history mysteries almost always requires logical thought, but now and again
it requires a little bit of inspiration. The inspiration might come from
inside, or it might come from someone else, someone with whom we’ve talked
through the problem.
This
BBC article
describes how one man found the site of his great-grandfather’s grave as a
result of talking to a member of staff at the London Metropolitan Archives – it’s
well worth a read.
During
September readers in the UK can purchase the Kindle versions of two of Nathan
Dylan Goodwin’s genealogical mystery novels for the bargain price of 99p by
following the links below!
Hiding the Past is the first book in
the Forensic Genealogist series, and if you read my review
from 2013 you’ll see that I enjoyed it to much that I was already looking
forward to the publication of the next book in the series.
The Sterling Affair is the 8th
novel in the series, published in 2020 – it’s another of my favourites, and you’ll
find my review here.
Please
note that the fact that these books aren’t discounted in other territories isn’t
the fault of the author – apparently Amazon organise the timing and location of
offers like this.
Tip:
you don’t need to own a Kindle or other Amazon device to read a Kindle book – I haven’t
used a Kindle in many years, because I find it more convenient to use my
smartphone. You can find out about the free Kindle reader apps here.
Ancestry.com subscription offer FLASH SALE
- ENDS WEDNESDAY
You
can save 50% on 6 month subscriptions to Ancestry.com (but not other Ancestry
sites) when you follow the link below:
Ancestry.com
– SAVE 50% (ends 11.59pm EST on Wednesday)
This
offer is open to new and lapsed subscribers, but not current subscribers (ie it
cannot be used for renewals). If you live outside the US check the exchange
rate and also take into account local taxes.
What would you take to The Repair Shop?
One
of my favourite TV programmes is The Repair Shop, in which family
heirlooms that are past their best are repaired and restored by a team of
experts.
I’ve often wondered
what I would take to The Repair Shop if I had the opportunity – would it
be the chipped pottery vase that I
moulded by hand at the age of 12? Proud as I was of my achievement, nobody else
in my family was impressed by what I’d done, so perhaps I should choose
something else.
A few years ago my
sister returned to me the battered wooden money box that I’d used as a child – I didn’t realise
that it had survived.
Notice
how wide the slot had to be, to take old pennies and maybe the occasional half-crown.
The lid is missing, and so is the key, but I’m sure that between them the experts
could put that right. Scratched on the side is the word FIREWORKS, so I must
have used it to save up for Bonfire Night (November 5th) at some
point.
But it’s not really a
family heirloom, at least not yet. So how about this battered and broken
magnifying glass, which my father told me that he inherited from his own father?
The
rim is slightly deformed, there are some minor scratches to the lens, the handle
is completely missing, and there’s barely a trace of the silver plate that would
once have sparkled. It’s just the sort of challenge that the experts would
relish!
I
don’t know whether it’s something that my grandfather had with him in the
trenches during the Great War, or if he used it for his work - but maybe the
experts could find some way of dating it.
But
that’s enough about my treasures. What I really want to know is, what would YOU
take along to The Repair Shop, if you had the chance? Please don’t email
me, instead post your answer – ideally with a small photo – in the discussion
that you’ll find here
on the LostCousins Forum.
Note:
you’ll be able to see what others have posted even if you’re not yet a member
of the forum. But if you have British ancestry you might already have been
invited to join – log in to your LostCousins account and go to your My Summary
page. Near the top of the page you’ll see your ‘match potential’ – if it is 1
or more you can join the forum right away, and even if it is lower you can
boost it by adding relatives to your My Ancestors page (it’ll go up most quickly
when you enter relatives from the 1881 Census).
This
weekend my wife and I were catching up on Gardeners World, having missed
a couple of episodes, and were pleasantly surprised to see Steve Fletcher, the
expert horologist from The Repair Shop, showing viewers around his garden.
There were also a few interesting ideas in some of the ‘viewers gardens’
segments – I wonder whether the gardens of any LostCousins members have been featured?
I bet there are quite a few of you who open up your gardens to raise money for
charity.
My
wife is still working on her next gardening article, but in the meantime she suggested
I share with you some bargains she recently spotted. Crocus are selling nerines
and amarines in 2 litre pots for half the normal price – and you can support
LostCousins if you follow this link
(even if you end up buying something else from the same site).
A boost for the older generation
Ten
days ago my wife and I were invited to book our autumn COVID booster
vaccinations, and we both chose 8th October, the earliest date
available – we’re hoping that supplies of Moderna’s new bivalent vaccine will last
until then, but we’ll have to accept whatever is on offer. This BBC article sets out the details.
I
don’t know what the vaccination plans are in other countries, but I’d certainly
urge readers living in the UK to have the booster – despite the common perception
that the Omicron variant is little worse than a cold, I have friends and
relatives who know that this is far from the truth.
I’ve
just discovered that our electricity is going up by 265% from 1st October
(from 14.48p per kilowatt hour to 52.90p). For the past 12 months we’ve benefited
from a fixed rate, so we’ve been luckier than some, but things are going to get
worse before they get better – because there’s bound to be a further large
increase in January.
This
OFGEM press
release includes a chart which shows how the price cap lags behind market
prices – you’ll see that the October price cap is based on market prices half
the current level, which is why all the forecasters expect a further big increase.
Government intervention may soften the blow slightly but the best thing we can
all do is cut our usage, because it’s the gap between supply and demand that is
driving up prices.
This
weekend I went round the house unplugging or switching off every electrical
device that doesn’t need to be on standby. Tumble-dryers are big users of
electricity, so last month we bought a Which? Magazine recommended heat
pump tumble-dryer, which will reduce power consumption by over 60%. This article
indicates the average heat pump dryer will cost 67p per load, and the average
condenser dryer £1.67p per load, based on the October price cap. My rough calculations
suggest that these figures are likely to rise to around £1.11 and £2.75 respectively
in January, and even if prices subsequently fall to move reasonable levels we’ll
still save thousands of pounds over the life of the dryer.
One
way to save money that doesn’t require any upfront investment is to use your
kettle more efficiently, by only boiling the amount of water you actually need.
For example, our electric kettle holds 2 litres of water, but our teapot and
cafetiere only hold 1 litre each, whilst even the large mugs that we use every
day only hold 300ml. One simple way to ensure that you don’t boil more water
than you need is to fill your mugs or cups with water and tip it into the
kettle.
I’d
like to think that during the winter neighbours will gather together rather
than heat each of their homes individually throughout the day, but perhaps that’s
too much to hope for – what do you reckon?
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 fascinating world of
family history. In the meantime please remember that LostCousins isn’t just a
newsletter, you belong to a website that connects family historians who are
researching the same ancestral lines, no matter where in the world they live. All
that you need to do is complete your My Ancestors page!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2022 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?
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