Newsletter – 1st September 2025
Half-price Findmypast offer extended! SAVE £100
What makes Findmypast different – and why does it matter?
Mother and baby home archives to be digitised
Shakespeare family will found in The National Archives
Grants for heritage organisations
Save on the best DNA tests US & Australia only
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 29th 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!
Half-price Findmypast offer extended! SAVE £100
I’m delighted to report that, as I hoped, Findmypast have agreed to extend their half-price 12 month subscription offer – not just by a few days but until Monday 15th September!
In fact, it has been so successful that they’re no longer limiting it to readers of this newsletter: however, I hope you’ll use the links I provide as this will enable LostCousins to benefit from your purchase – the links in Friday’s newsletter will continue to work, but I’ve provided a copy below for convenience.
One or two members have asked if I could explain in more detail how to take advantage of the offer, so I’ve put together some screenshots so that you’ll know what to expect. For example, when you click any of my links you’ll see something like this (the currency and price will vary depending which link you’ve clicked):
Click the View options button, which will allow you to choose the length of your subscription. Bear in mind that the half-price offer applies only to 12 month subscriptions.
Longer subscriptions are always cheaper, but it’s especially true during this offer – were you to choose a quarterly subscription you would have paid more after 4 months than the entire cost of a 12 month subscription!
Make sure that the 12 month subscription is selected, then click Subscribe.
Ignore the two boxes on the right – focus on the large box on the left. Choose Log in if you have registered with Findmypast at some point in the past, or Sign up if you haven’t (or if you no longer use the email address you registered wth previously).
Fill out the details: if you’ve registered previously you’ll only need to enter your email address and password. Don’t worry if you can’t remember your password as there’s a Forgotten password? link you can click – this will send you an email reset instructions.
Please bear in mind that you’ll only be supporting LostCousins with your purchase if you use the relevant link from the list below:
Findmypast.co.uk –
SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH
‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com.au – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.ie – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
If the link seems not to work it strongly suggests that you have software that is blocking it. In this case, please load up the newsletter in the Chrome browser (if you need to install Chrome – it’s free – the default settings are fine).
Indeed, using Chrome is the best way to maximise your chances of supporting LostCousins – please do NOT use Firefox, Brave, or any other browser that promises ‘privacy’, because that means they won’t tell Findmypast that you clicked the LostCousins link.
What makes Findmypast different – and why does it matter?
One of the biggest mistakes that any family historian can make is to assume that all of the major genealogy websites have the same records, and that the same search techniques work equally well at every site.
Even highly-experienced researchers – as most LostCousins members are – often fail to appreciate that they can get better results by adapting their search technique. For example, when you’re filling out a Search form, do you enter as much information as possible, or as little as necessary? The first technique can work well at FamilySearch and Ancestry, where it often produces lots of results (though most of them won’t be relevant) – but at Findmypast you’ll generally get much better results if you enter less information (it also saves time!).
One of the things I like most about Findmypast is the way that they handle forename variants. You don’t need to tick the ‘include name variants’ box to allow for middle names and initials: for example, a search for ‘Marie’ will find ‘Marie-Claire’, ‘Marie Ann’ and ‘Marie J’. Similarly, a search for ‘Mary’ will find ‘Mary Ann’ (though not ‘Maryann’ or ‘Marianne’). When you do tick the ‘include name variants’ box you’ll get every result that might feasibly fit, including records where only initials are shown, or where the order of the forenames is reversed.
I also like being able to re-order the Search results by clicking the heading at the top of any column. I find this particularly useful when I’m looking for baptisms as I can sort them by date, by location, or by the forename of the father or mother.
But it’s not just about how you fill out the Search form and sort the results – there’s also the question of what records you’re searching, and how the records are organised. Ancestry typically organise records according to their source – so if parish registers for a single county are split between two or more record offices you might have to carry out multiple searches to find the records you’re looking for (assuming you realise what has happened).
By contrast, Findmypast bring together all the records they have for a particular county, so you don’t necessarily need to know which record office holds the registers. Sometimes there might be three or four results for the same baptism, all from different sources: this might seem like unnecessary duplication, but it greatly reduces the chance that you’ll miss an entry because it has been wrongly transcribed.
Similarly you can search marriages for a county without having to worry whether they took place before or after 1754, when new registers were introduced. To carry out the same search at Ancestry is much more complicated – especially since marriages between 1754 and 1812 won’t all be in the same record set (and what works for one parish might not work for another parish in the same county).
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Findmypast have a large collection of transcribed parish records thanks to their excellent relationships with family history societies. You don’t need me to tell you that volunteers from family history societies are by far the best transcribers, thanks to their local knowledge and their diligence – this means that even if the parish register images are at Ancestry, you might well find the entry you’re looking for more easily by starting at Findmypast.
Mother and baby home archives to be digitised
Records of institutions for unmarried mothers in Northern Ireland are to be digitised as part of an investigation into allegations of physical and mental abuse and forced adoptions. Given their sensitive nature they won’t be made available online in the foreseeable future – but at least they are being preserved, not destroyed like the adoption charity records I wrote about last month.
You can find out more about the digitisation plans in this BBC article, which was published over the weekend.
Note: this week ITV will be showing two special editions of Long Lost Family focusing on The Mother and Baby Home Scandal in England – they are due to air at 9pm on Wednesday and Thursday. Thanks to Who Do You Think You Are? magazine for the tip.
Shakespeare family will found in The National Archives
Dr Dan Gosling, Principal Legal Records Specialist at The National Archives, recently discovered a 1642 will that sheds light on a dispute regarding the ownership of William Shakespeare’s family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare himself had died in 1616, aged just 52.
The will was made almost exactly 283 years ago by Thomas Nash, who was married to the playwright’s grand-daughter Elizabeth, and lived in New Place, said to be the second-largest house in the town. He left the house to his cousin Edward Nash, although it wasn’t his to bequeath – when William Shakespeare died he left it to his eldest daughter, Susanna, Elizabeth’s mother, who was living in the house with Thomas and Elizabeth.
The matter came to a head in 1647 when Thomas Nash died: Susanna was still alive (she died in 1649) and together with her daughter she obtained a document confirming that they still held Shakespeare’s estates.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the case, what I found fascinating was that original will of Thomas Nash was in The National Archives, but almost certainly hadn’t been seen since it was filed away 150 years ago.
How many of us have taken the time to view the original wills of our ancestors? When it comes to Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) wills most family historians I know rely on the copy PCC wills, as these have been digitised, indexed, and made available online – I doubt that even 1 in 100 of the original wills have ever been viewed by a descendant.
There is an article about the rediscovery of Thomas Nash’s will on the website of The National Archives – you’ll find it here. To find out more about Shakespeare’s children follow this link to the website of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Grants for heritage organisations
Applying for grants is tedious, time-consuming, and often results in failure. But sometimes it’s the only way a project can be funded, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has provided £550,000 for The National Archives (TNA) to distribute across the heritage sector.
You can find out more by following this link to the TNA website – note that there is a free webinar on 17th September which “will take you through each grant scheme in detail, covering everything from eligibility to assessment criteria to budgets – and anything else that might be useful!”
If the AHRC sounds familiar, it’s because they funded The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland – the magisterial work which thousands of readers of this newsletter have been studying since I exclusively revealed at the end of July that the price of the Kindle version had been slashed at Amazon.co.uk from £260 to £0!
Another project funded by the AHRC is the Clergy of the Church of England database, which I’ve mentioned before. Covering the period from 1540-1835 it’s a remarkable project, one that comes in very useful when I’m working through higgledy-piggledy parish registers (as many were before 1754 – and some were afterwards). Knowing when there was a change of incumbent allows me to use handwriting as additional evidence when – as happens all too often – the year is not stated.
Findmypast has a copy of The Clergy List for 1896, which provides details of each member of the Anglican clergy in England, Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1896 complete with dates of the appointment to their parish. In 1917 The Clergy List was absorbed into Crockford’s Clerical Directory and if you follow this link you’ll find the 1868, 1874, 1885, 1898, 1908 and 1932 editions at Ancestry.
However the biggest collection is at The Genealogist, which has hundreds of thousands of records from over 20 directories, including 5 editions of Crockford’s Clerical Directory, 5 editions of The Clergy List, and several other publications one of which covers Wesleyan Methodists. It was thanks to The Genealogist that I was able to piece together the career of the somewhat disreputable Rev Hyma Henry Redgrave for last year’s articles about the famous Redgrave family. You can see a list of their impressive collection of occupational records if you follow this link.
I’m sure we’ve all come across incomplete marriage entries in registers – where the details have been prefilled, but for one reason or another the marriage didn’t take place. I’ve also seen an example where two couples signed each other’s register entry, another sign that register entries were completed in advance.
It’s less common to come across a record of a baptism which didn’t take place, so I was grateful to Mick for sending in this 1883 example from the register of St Thomas Charterhouse, in Goswell Road, London:
© The London Archives. All Rights Reserved. Image used by kind permission of Ancestry
Note that the name of the person who performed the ceremony for James Walter, son of John and Louisa Walter, has been struck through. There was a very good reason why baby James could not be baptised on Sunday 10th June – sadly he had passed away a week earlier, aged just 9 days:
How closely do you look at baptism entries? For example, do you routinely check which day of the week it was in order to assess whether it was likely to have been a public or private baptism?
This baptism (in the same parish, the previous month) is helpfully annotated as private, but most aren’t:
© The London Archives. All Rights Reserved. Image used by kind permission of Ancestry
Some children were baptised privately for the convenience of their well-to-do parents, who may have held a celebratory gathering for close friends and relatives. More usually private baptisms took place because it was feared that the child might not live. In this case the father of the child was a soldier, and may have been due to return to his regiment before the following Sunday.
Prior to the introduction of pre-printed baptism registers in 1812 some vicars would state that a child had been ‘publickly baptized’, but this was far from universal.
Save on the best DNA tests US & Australia only
Until Saturday 6th September you can make big savings on Ancestry DNA at Ancestry.com.au – just follow the link below:
Save now! AncestryDNA® is $90*. Terms Apply.
Until Wednesday 3rd September you can save up to 50% on Ancestry.com memberships, and up to 60% on Ancestry DNA (US only) when you follow the appropriate link below:
Get up to 50% off 6-month Memberships. Don't miss out!
AncestryDNA® is 60% off. Don't miss out! Sale end 9/3. Terms Apply.
Note: these offers end at 8am Mountain Time on Wednesday, so unless you’re an early riser I suggest you don’t leave it till the last day!
The mystery of a 70-year-old letter found under a tree in Wolverhampton by a gardener seems to have been solved, after relatives of the man it was addressed to came forward. You can read the whole story in this BBC article.
I made a few discoveries when I was digging in our garden this year, though not nearly as interesting as that letter: I uncovered several intact glass bottles which are certainly older than I am, and could well be over a century old.
Some had no markings but most had names embossed in the glass. The style of the bottles was unfamiliar, but they were names that I knew: Veno’s Lightning Cough Cure, Sloan’s Liniment ‘Kills Pain’, and that old favourite HP Sauce. Incidentally, Sloan’s Liniment was originally developed for horses, but was later marketed as ‘good for man and beast’.
Cleaning the outside of these tiny bottles was easy, but they have such narrow necks that removing the soil (and I do mean soil) from the inside is extremely tricky, even using pipe cleaners. If anyone has found the solution (and it may well be a solution) please let me know - but do bear in mind that they're too small to swirl the contents around. Though maybe if I could borrow my wife's ultrasonic jewellery cleaner....
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 2025 Peter Calver
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