Newsletter
- 26th December 2015
Find
cousins and win prizes in your Christmas Competition ENDS 5TH JANUARY
GRO
meetings are just the first step
Historic
births, marriages, and deaths - the way forward?
Scotlandspeople:
Findmypast group give up contract
2.8
million 1939 Register entries revealed
Track
down evacuees using LostCousins
Save 50%
on your first 1939 household ENDS 5TH JANUARY
Get a
1 month Platinum subscription for £1 at Genes Reunited ENDS FRIDAY
Try
the British Newspaper Archive for £1 ENDS 4TH
JANUARY
Tithe
records and maps - now complete at The Genealogist
Man or
beast? Unusual cemetery inscriptions
Christmas
card addressed simply to 'England' reaches the right person
Shocking
images on Victorian Christmas cards
Britain's
oldest Christmas tree
Is
this the first postcard to Santa?
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 19th December)
click here, for an index to articles from 2009-10
click here, for a list of articles from 2011
click here and for a list of articles from
2012-14 click here. Or do what I do, and use the customised
Google search below (it only searches these newsletters, so you won't get
spurious results):
Whenever possible
links are included to the websites or articles mentioned in the newsletter
(they are highlighted in blue or purple and underlined, so you can't miss
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LostCousins site an exception (or else use a different browser, such as
Chrome).
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!
Find cousins and
win prizes in your Christmas Competition ENDS 5TH JANUARY
There are some excellent prizes in this
year's competition, and the great thing about it is that to win, you only have
to do what comes naturally - search for your 'lost cousins'. (For those of you
who've yet to begin searching for cousins, this is a very good time to put your
excuses on one side and make a start, even if you can only spare 5 or 10
minutes.)
Every direct ancestor or blood relative
you enter on your My Ancestors page
before midnight (London time) on Twelfth Night (Tuesday 5th January) represents
an entry in the competition.
Tip:
a 'direct ancestor' is someone from whom you are descended, such as a
great-great grandparent - most people just call them ancestors; a 'blood
relative' is a cousin, ie someone who shares your
ancestry.
Shortly after midnight I'll start
picking relatives at random from all those entered during the period of the
competition, and the lucky members who entered those relatives will be able to
choose a prize from the list below (the first person out of the hat gets to
choose first, the second person has next choice, and so on).
This year's wonderful prizes
include.....
THREE 12
month World subscriptions to Findmypast, each one supplemented with 300 credits
to enable you to access the new 1939 Register (generously donated by Findmypast, Britain's leading family history
company)
With a World
subscription you can access any of Findmypast's historic records and newspaper
articles, as well as their modern (2012-14) UK Electoral Register - and you can
do this at any of the Findmypast's four sites around the globe.
ONE Printed
Family Tree to the value of £45, showing up to 500 of your relatives (kindly donated
by Genealogy Printers,
Britain's leading tree printing company)
If the winner
has wall space for an even larger family tree it will be possible to upgrade by
paying the difference. Genealogy Printers can accept files from just about any
family tree program - if your program isn't on the list just ask.
ONE copy of
Family Historian v6 (kindly donated by Simon Orde,
the designer and lead programmer of Family
Historian)
If the winner
lives outside the UK the prize will be a downloaded copy; winners in the UK can
choose between a downloaded copy and a boxed copy (they function identically).
Check out Family Historian now with a free 30-day trial - just follow this link.
TEN 12 month
subscriptions to LostCousins
If you
already have a subscription I'll extend it by 12 months
Even if you don't win one of these prizes
there's a far greater reward at stake, and at it's one that everyone can win -
you could find a 'lost cousin'. Every single relative you enter is a potential
link to another researcher who shares your ancestry - and whenever you click
the Search button the LostCousins
computer will compare every single entry you've made against the millions of
entries made by other members!
Tip:
unlike some websites, which update their databases at intervals, the
LostCousins database is updated instantly - there is no waiting, whether you're
entering a new relative or updating an existing entry.
This
year your chances are better than ever before - for example, when you enter a household
from the 1881 England & Wales census there's 1
chance in 18 of an immediate match!
GRO meetings are just the
first step
In the past week representatives of the
General Register Office - including Andrew Dent who, as Deputy Registrar
General, runs the organisation - met with representatives of family history
societies, professional genealogists, probate researchers and other
organisations (such as UKBMD and LostCousins).
The aim of the meetings was to explain
how the change in legislation promoted by Baroness Scott had opened
up opportunities for the GRO to offer new services that were not possible under
the previous legislation - which, in essence, had changed little since civil
registration was introduced in England & Wales nearly 180 years ago.
Unfortunately the changes to the law
probably aren't sufficient to enable the GRO to bring in a commercial organisation
such as Ancestry, Findmypast, or The Genealogist to provide online access to
historic registers - which means that any proposals that the GRO might forward
must be funded from the ever-shrinking public purse.
But it's not just about how the project
is financed - there are several other constraints. Whilst the GRO is not
allowed to make a profit from the sale of certificates, they're also expected
to present a balanced budget, ie they can't budget
for a loss. Maintaining this fine balance must be a challenge at the best of
times, but it will seem almost impossible if the range of services and prices
are changing.
The GRO must also balance the needs of
different types of users: whilst the vast majority of copy certificates are
bought by family historians who pay the standard £9.25 price, urgent orders
from probate researchers (heir hunters), professional genealogists, solicitors,
and people who need their birth certificate urgently in order to apply for a
passport can provide up to 40% of the income (because the price of £23.40 is
two-and-a-half times higher). Reading Nathan Dylan Goodwin's latest novel, The
America Ground, I couldn't help wincing every time Morton Farrier, the
forensic genealogist hero of the story, used the priority service - but when
you've got an urgent assignment and you need the information in order to
determine what to do next, the premium price is likely to be worth paying.
Furthermore, in balancing the needs of
different types of user, the GRO must ensure that there isn't any element of
cross-subsidy - in other words, they can't use their near-monopoly to favour one
group of users over another.
A further complicating factor is that
the legislation passed earlier this year relates ONLY to the General Register
Office - it does not change anything so far as local register offices are
concerned. Nevertheless the impact on local register offices must be considered
in any proposals that the GRO puts forward, otherwise it might become unviable
for them to provide copy certificates.
It was against this complex background
that the three meetings were held - at the GRO in Southport on the afternoon of
Friday 18th December, and at the Home Office on the morning and afternoon of
Monday 21st December. The afternoon meetings were primarily for family history
societies, though I know that Ian Hartas of UKBMD
attended the Southport meeting, whilst Baroness Scott - who is responsible for
the liberalisation of civil registration law - was at the London meeting.
I was at the Monday morning meeting,
which was also attended by probate researchers, professional genealogists, and
representatives from Ancestry. Although the ground covered at the three
meetings was similar, the meeting I attended was particularly interesting
because of the mix of attendees - probate researchers are primarily interested
in the turn-around time, whilst family historians like you and I are more
sensitive to cost (on the way to the meeting I calculated that to get all of
the historic certificates for the relatives on my family tree would cost over
£50,000 at current prices).
In the next article I'll set out some of
my thoughts about how family historians might benefit from the change in
legislation.
Historic births, marriages,
and deaths - the way forward?
Many of you will recall that in the
summer of 2008 the GRO announced that the DoVE (Digitisation
of Vital Events) and MAGPIE (MultiAccess to GRO
Public Index of Events) projects were being put on hold, as the contract with
Siemens, the contractor entrusted with the work, had not been renewed.
Subsequently, in September 2012, I published
in this newsletter key details that I had obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, including an estimate that to complete the project would cost
a further £25-30 million, on top of the £8.33 million that had already been
paid to Siemens.
The good news was that even though the
project was abandoned, the money spent had not been wasted - births from
1837-1934 and deaths from 1837-1957 had been digitised before the contract
ended, and those digital copies were being used to produce copy certificates. Previously
the certificates were all created from microfilm - the new system is much more
efficient.
At Monday's meeting I was also able to
confirm that most of the information in the digitised registers had been transcribed.
This was done with a view to creating new indexes - and offers all sorts of
opportunities, as we'll see in a moment.
Whilst the Scotlandspeople model -
online digitised images from historical registers available instantly - is
clearly attractive, given the many constraints it seems most unlikely that the
GRO will be able to put such a system in place in the foreseeable future. That
was the bad news.
The good news is that the GRO are keen
to provide what their customers want - and this is why the meetings were arranged.
No doubt there will be more discussions
in the coming months, but I would personally like to see the data that has been
captured from the already-digitised registers made available to search,
since this would make it much easier for family historians to identify the
entries they're looking for. After all, one of the problems with the current
cost of certificates is the likelihood that when it arrives it turns out not to
be the right one!
There is also the possibility that partial
transcriptions of historic birth and death register entries could be made
available at a significantly lower cost than certificates - these could be
based on the information that was captured when the registers were digitised.
Whilst in many ways a transcription is a poor substitute, we have to remember
that the registers held by the GRO are themselves only copies of the registers
held by the local registrars (in other words, they also transcriptions).
I could envisage a situation in which
family historians purchase transcriptions from the GRO, but follow-up by
ordering copy certificates from the local register office.
Of course, what I'm talking about is
really nothing new - most of you will know about the UKBMD site and the
projects to put local indexes online in order to make it easier to order
certificates locally. However coverage is quite patchy - for example, none of the
projects cover the areas where my ancestors lived - and whilst some of the
local indexes have been enhanced by the inclusion of information not given in
the GRO indexes for the same period (such as the mother's maiden name prior to
1911), this isn't always the case.
I was impressed by what I heard on
Monday, both from the GRO and from the customers who attended. The GRO were
very open about the constraints they face, but also receptive to suggestions put
forward by customers. Provided the dialogue with stakeholders continues - and I
think it will - we can be confident that we'll get the best system possible in the circumstances.
Scotlandspeople:
Findmypast group give up contract
In 2002 the Scotlandspeople site was
launched, powered by a then little-known IT company called Scotland Online,
which was part of the DC Thomson publishing empire. Five years later Scotland
Online took over Findmypast which, because Scotland Online had secured the
contract to publish the 1911 Census, helped to cement Findmypast's reputation
as one of the leading providers of online family history data in the UK.
The DC Thomson group continued to manage
the Scotlandspeople site even though the nature of their business was changing
from IT services to online publishing, but I've heard that when the contract
came up for renewal earlier this year they chose not to pitch. As a result the
contract was awarded to the IT company CACI
(no, I haven't heard of them either).
I wonder whether, now that there is no
longer a conflict of interest, we might finally see images from the Scotland
censuses on sites like Findmypast and Ancestry?
2.8 million NEW 1939
Register entries revealed
Just as my last newsletter was being
sent out I noticed that nearly 3 million additional entries from the 1939
Register had appeared on the Findmypast website - most of you will, I hope,
have seen the update I added within hours of the newsletter being published.
At the time I couldn't be certain
whether these new entries were the result of Findmypast successfully matching
closed entries against the death indexes, but 2 days later Findmypast confirmed
this on their blog - you can read it here.
For my family and myself
it was a great Christmas present, because one of those 2.8 million people was
my mother who, as a 13 year-old schoolgirl, had been evacuated from Ilford in
Essex to Ipswich in Suffolk:
© Crown Copyright Image
reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
I now know that she and another girl
were living with Mr & Mrs Orlando Horrex, a
couple in their 30s. They had no children of their own, which is a great shame
- because they clearly had excellent genes. Who could have predicted in September
1939 that they, born in 1904 and 1907 respectively, would both outlive their 13
year-old evacuees?
Track down evacuees
using LostCousins
The evacuation of millions of British
schoolchildren during World War 2 will have had a lasting effect, not only on
their lives, but also on the lives of the families with whom they were
billeted. Having found my mother on the 1939 Register I wondered how feasible
it would be to track down members of the family she lived with - and realised
that one way of doing this would be to use the My Ancestors page....
Whilst you can't enter people from the
1939 Register on your My Ancestors
page (at least, not at the moment), many of them will also have been recorded
on the 1911 Census. I've therefore created a new category in the Relationship or category dropdown menu -
WW2 evacuation - so that I and other members can search for relatives of the
people who looked after the evacuees in our families during the war.
Here's the first ever entry using this
new category:
I'll let you know if I get a match! In
the meantime, why not see who you can find?
Save 50% on your first
1939 household ENDS 5TH
JANUARY
Until midnight on 5th January you can
save 50% on your first purchase of 60 credits (sufficient to view a single
household) when you use one of the links below:
By using one of those links you'll also
be supporting LostCousins - whether you buy 60, 300, or 900 credits.
If, like me, you want to track down your
wider family then the cheapest option is to buy 900 credits (sufficient for 15
households).
Get a 1 month Platinum subscription for £1 at Genes
Reunited ENDS FRIDAY
All of the main websites in the
Findmypast group are using special offers to promote Family History Week,
recognising that this is a time when people are most likely to start
researching their family tree for the first time. However, you don't have to be
a beginner to take advantage of the offers - anyone can get a 1 month Platinum
subscription at Genes Reunited by following this link and entering the discount code: GRSYFT15
Warning:
don't take advantage of this offer if you have currently have
a Standard subscription - you'll lose your existing subscription (and any
preferential rate). By default subscriptions renew automatically at the full
rate - if you don't want to renew at the end of the month simply change the
setting on the 'Subscription Details'.
Try the British
Newspaper Archive for £1 ENDS
4TH JANUARY
Subscribers to Findmypast can get access
to British newspapers as part of a Britain or World subscription, but many find
that the advanced search features at the British Newspaper Archive justify a
separate subscription.
Now's your chance to find out whether
you would also benefit - you can get a 1 month subscription for just £1 when
you follow this link and enter the
discount code: HAPPYNY2016
Tithe records and maps -
now complete at The Genealogist
On Christmas Eve The Genealogist announced that they had completed their
collection of searchable Tithe Maps and Schedules for England and Wales with
the release of more maps covering 40 counties.
I was able to find my great-great-great
grandmother in one of the earlier batches of Tithe Schedules, but I can now see
on the Tithe Map precisely where she was living in 1838.
Note:
you'll need a Diamond subscription to access tithe records.
Man or beast? Unusual
cemetery inscriptions
Searching Findmypast's collection of Dorset
Memorial Inscriptions I got these rather unusual results:
The transcriptions revealed little more
- other than the denomination "C of E". But surely these were pets,
and not people? Ancestry has online registers for many Dorset parishes, but
unfortunately there are no burial registers in the collection for St James,
East Chelborough, a church
so hard to find that in Dorset:
The Complete Guide the author erroneously described it as a parish
without a church.
Perhaps there's a LostCousins member in
the area who can confirm that Fly, Tango, and Twinkle were indeed much-loved
pets, and not the short-lived offspring of a Bohemian mother? Should you have
trouble locating the church this page
from the Dorset Historic Churches Trust website might be of assistance!
Christmas card addressed
simply to 'England' reaches the right person
There's an amazing story
on the BBC website - about a Christmas card sent from Germany which arrived at
the right house, even though the address of the recipient was missing.
A Royal Mail spokesman said: "Royal
Mail's team of 'address detectives' are renowned for their ability to ensure
poorly addressed items of mail reach their intended recipients however, even by
their standards, this is pretty impressive."
Perhaps we should hire them to search
for missing ancestors?
Shocking images on
Victorian Christmas cards
It was the Victorians who invented
Christmas cards - but it seems that they weren't all as 'traditional' as we
might think - just look at the examples in this BBC article!
Britain's oldest
Christmas tree
Each year my wife and I buy a traditional
Christmas tree from our next door neighbour's farm - they're such beautifully-grown
trees that people come from many miles away to buy them (and if you've got
stout boots you can choose one that's still growing in the field).
Artificial Christmas trees are a
relatively recent invention - or so I thought, until my wife pointed out this article
on the Mirror website about an artificial tree that was bought from Woolworth's
in 1920, and is still in use!
Is this the first
postcard to Santa?
These days Royal Mail has a whole
department dealing with letters addressed to Santa Claus, but I suspect they
weren't as imaginative in 1899. So I was fascinated when LostCousins member
Michael sent me a scan of this postcard from his collection:
Following on from previous articles
about letters to Santa found in chimneys, LostCousins member Julien sent me
this charming letter, which was written by her mother around the end of the
Great War:
I wonder whether little Joyce got her
Christmas tree with a fairy dressed in pink? If only children were as easily
pleased these days!
It's perhaps a little too late to tell
you this, but I'm going to anyway - it's still Christmas Day in our house.
Google have an online Santa Tracker
which allows you to follow Santa Claus on his journey round the world - but it
doesn't come top of searches, even at Google. No, the top result is the NORAD
Santa Tracker, which was inspired by a misdialled telephone number 60 years ago
- you can read all about it here.
The best advice I can give to any family
historian is to take every opportunity to connect with their living relatives,
especially the ones who also have an interest in family history.
LostCousins are all keen family
historians, so I shouldn't really need to persuade you to complete your My Ancestors page, but I recognise sometimes
we need a bit of push to overcome the inertia - and hopefully the prizes in my
Christmas Competition will give you the added incentive you need.
It was particularly heart-warming to see
members connecting with new cousins on Christmas Day, but I can assure you that
any day when you find a new cousin will seem like Christmas!
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives without
asking for permission in advance - though why not invite them to join
LostCousins instead, since standard membership, which includes this newsletter,
is FREE?