Newsletter
- 8 August 2013
125
million newspaper articles go online
Save
10% on findmypast.co.uk subscriptions EXCLUSIVE
Clandestine
marriages revealed at Ancestry
Prince
George's birth certificate surprise
Did your ancestors
have more sons than daughters?
Japanese
quake boosts the number of female births
Britain
on Film reveals gender imbalance
Derek -
the British Genghis Khan
Wool you
find ancestors in the Sheep Returns?
Canada
1921 Census goes online
Society of
Genealogists has 12 million names online
1790
Survey of the High Roads from London
Is
there a difference between Ancestry and Starbucks?
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 30 July
2013) 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 2012-13 click here.
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125 million newspaper
articles go online
Findmypast.co.uk has just added more
than 125 million overseas newspaper articles covering the period 1834-2012. Almost
120 million of the articles are from US newspapers, with a further 4 million
from Canadian newspapers in Alberta, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan -
but there are also articles from several other countries. For a full breakdown see the
news release here.
This massive collection is included in
the World Subscription, but I'm glad to say that the price hasn't increased.
Also available at findmypast.co.uk is their British Newspaper collection, with
over 6 million pages from over 200 local and regional newspapers from 1710-1965
(the British collection is included in the Britain Full and World
subscriptions).
Save 10% on findmypast.co.uk
subscriptions EXCLUSIVE
Until the end of August you can save 10%
on any new subscription to findmypast.co.uk when you click here
and use the code LCW10
But that's not all - you can also get a
free LostCousins subscription (worth up to £12.50) AND a much-coveted invitation
to join the new LostCousins forum (priceless - only 1% of members have been
invited, so it really IS a privilege).
To make sure you qualify for the bonuses
follow these simple steps (and read the small print at the bottom, in case it
applies to you):
(1) Click here
to go the findmypast website (it will open in a new tab or browser window),
then either register or log-in. If you are already logged-in when you arrive at
the website (perhaps because you've been checking out the latest data releases
before subscribing) log-out, then start again by clicking the link at the
beginning of this paragraph.
If you aren't taken to the Subscribe page automatically, click Subscribe in the top right hand corner.
Note: if the Promotional Code box isn't
shown it's because you haven't logged in yet (there are two screens that look
very similar).
(2) Enter the exclusive offer code LCW10 in the Promotional Code box, and
click Apply to display the discounted offer prices:
(3) Choose the subscription that's best
for you, bearing in mind that 12 month subscriptions offer by far the best
value (because the second 6 months is virtually half price).
The World subscription includes Ireland, Australia & New
Zealand, and the USA plus a few records from other
countries (click on the country name to see precisely which records are
included).
If you're only interested in British
records (England, Scotland, and Wales) the Full subscription is by far the best
choice - the Foundation subscription only offers basic records and is for
absolute beginners (don't even consider it!). The wealth of additional datasets
you get with a Full subscription are well worth the small additional cost,
especially when you consider that a subscription to just one of them - the British
Newspaper collection - would cost £79.95 if purchased separately.
(4) Before entering your credit card
details make sure that the price shown is
the discounted price!
If at any stage during the process you
are logged out (this often happens to me while I'm looking for my credit card),
or if your credit card isn't accepted for any reason, please start again at
step (1) to ensure that you qualify for your free LostCousins subscription.
(5) When you receive your email receipt
from findmypast forward a copy to me so that I can verify your entitlement (you
won't find my email address on the website, but it is in the email I sent
telling you about this newsletter). Your free LostCousins subscription will run
for 6 or 12 months and can include your spouse or partner as well - just make
sure that the two accounts are linked together before you
write to me (all you need to do is enter the other person's membership number
on your My Details page). If you already have a LostCousins
subscription I'll extend it.
Small print: these offers cannot be
combined with any other offers or discounts or backdated; if you are a current
findmypast subscriber you will receive a 10% Loyalty Discount when your
subscription is renewed automatically, so you won't qualify for either offer.
However if you upgrade your findmypast subscription before the renewal date you
should qualify for a free LostCousins subscription (provided you follow the
instructions above). Free LostCousins subscriptions are funded by the
commission we receive from findmypast, and that's why it's important you follow
the instructions to the letter - if you have any questions ask me before you
complete your purchase, because it will be too late afterwards!
Clandestine marriages
revealed at Ancestry
Until 25th March 1754, when Lord
Hardwicke's Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 came into force, virtually any marriage carried out by an ordained Anglican
clergyman was valid, even though the requirements of canon law might not have
been met.
For example, whilst canon law required
that marriages took place in a parish where at least one of the parties was
resident, this requirement was widely flouted. In her brilliant book Marriage
Law for Genealogists Professor Rebecca Probert
reports a survey of marriages in Northamptonshire between 1700-1751 which
showed that at least 27% were conducted in parishes in which neither the bride
nor the groom was resident. All of those irregular marriages are regarded as
'clandestine' even though in practice the parties might not have been hiding
their marriage from anyone.
During the first half of the 18th
century large numbers of clandestine marriages took place in the area
surrounding the Fleet prison (known as the 'Rules of the Fleet') where those
imprisoned for debt were allowed to live and ply their trade. Clergymen in this
position had little to lose, and a lot to gain by carrying out marriages and it
has been calculated that by 1740 over 6,600 marriages were being carried out
each year, more than half of all the marriages in London at that time.
However, not all of those marrying in
the Fleet were Londoners - some couples would travel 100 miles or more to get
married there.
Records of many of the Fleet marriages
have survived, written down in hundreds of notebooks and registers, and nearly
900,000 entries became available online at Ancestry
earlier this week. I was interested to note that on 7th August 1725 a certain
Peter Calver of the 2nd Regiment of Guards married
Rebecca Cole in a ceremony carried out by John Flood.
To search the records at Ancestry click here.
Prince George's birth
certificate surprise
In the early days of civil registration it was the
responsibility of the registrar to secure the registration of births - the
parents could only be prosecuted if they refused the answer the registrar's
questions - and in many parts of the country the registrar went to people's
homes rather than sitting in an office waiting for them to show up. These days
you'll probably need an appointment to register a birth or death.
So when Westminster City Council
registrar Alison Cathcart travelled to Kensington Palace in order that Prince
William could sign the birth register it was a return to the way things worked
in 1837, when Queen Victoria, William's great-great-great-great grandmother
ascended to the throne.
It was no surprise that the registrar
was prepared to travel to register this particular birth, but it was a bit of a
surprise for me to see how much birth certificates have changed since my own
birth was registered in 1950.
From 1969 onwards the place of birth of
the father and mother were shown, and since 1986 occupational details have been
included for the mother as well as the father.
However, one thing hasn't changed -
marriage certificates still only give the name and occupation of the fathers,
not the mothers. Whether or not this is discriminatory I'll leave it to you to
decide (Scottish marriage certificates have always shown the names of both
parents), but there are certainly some people who think it is, and there is an
online petition to change things.
Regular readers of this newsletter will
know that I'm not a believer in online petitions, so I'm not going to promote
this one, but I do think that in view of the more complex family structures we
see in the 21st century more information ought to be included on certificates
generally, especially if we're no longer going to have censuses.
Of course, the downside of putting more
information on censuses is that the privacy concerns are more likely to lead to
restrictions on the availability of copy certificates, just as they have
already caused the GRO to stop supplying electronic copies of their birth,
marriage, and death certificates.
What information would you like to see
on the birth, marriage, and death certificates of the future? And did you know
that from 1938 onwards registrars asked supplemental questions which don't
appear on the form, such as the age of the mother, the parents' date of
marriage, and the number of previous children. From 1960 onwards the age of the
father was also noted.
(This information
comes from People
Count, an excellent 1987 book which I recommended recently - Amazon
have used copies available from just 1p plus postage!)
Unfortunately for us, that information
was used for statistical purposes only, and the raw data is unlikely to have
survived. However I shall certainly do my best to track down the statistics, as
they might provide some interesting background data for our 20th century
research - it might even shed some additional light on the research mentioned
in the next article.
Did your ancestors have more sons than
daughters?
In the last issue I wrote about some
recently research suggesting that older men (over the age of 55) are more
likely to father daughters. I was able to spot some examples in my own tree
that seemed to confirm this, but I found it remarkably difficult to check,
since - unsurprisingly - this sort of thing isn't a feature of my tree program.
I was therefore delighted that one of
the members of the LostCousins forum offered to add this feature to an
extremely useful utility he has written called Family Tree Analyzer. Instead of spending
hours working my way around my family tree I was able to get the answer I was
seeking in seconds!
This invaluable FREE utility works with Gedcom files. It takes about 2 minutes to download the Family Tree Analyzer program, unzip the
file (right click and select Extract All),
then install it by double-clicking the main file (called 'FTAnalyzer').
Tip:
Gedcom is the standard for sharing genealogical
information, so all family tree programs will Export a tree in Gedcom format - you can even download a Gedcom
copy of an Ancestry
or Genes Reunited
tree!
After running the program select Open from the File menu, and choose the Gedcom file you
want to analyse. You'll probably see some error messages as the file is
analysed - most family trees acquire errors and inconsistencies - but it won't
stop Family Tree Analyzer
working (in fact, it will help you put the errors right). Now go to the Report menu, and select the Child Age Profiles - this displays a
chart showing the parents' ages when their children were born:
There's also a table showing the number
of children born in each 5 year period. If you then want to know who the older
parents were, close the pop-up windows and choose Older Parents from the Reports
menu (if you want you can transfer this information to a spreadsheet
using copy and paste).
In my case I discovered an anomalous
entry - a mother who supposedly gave birth at the age of 54. When I
investigated I discovered that the child's baptism date had been incorrectly shown
as the birth date, so this was an unexpected bonus!
At this stage I'm not going to amaze you
by telling you about all the other things that you can do with this great
little program - because I need you to tell me how many sons and daughters were
born to fathers who were over 55. Send me an email with the answer, and I'll
send you some tips on how to use Family
Tree Analyzer to do all sorts of other things
To download your free copy of Family Tree Analyzer
click here.
Japanese quake boosts the
number of female births
Fewer boys than girls were born after
the huge 2011 earthquake, according to researchers at the University of
California which was recently reported in the Japan
Daily Press. Other similar responses to disasters - both natural and
man-made (such as the 2008 stockmarket crash) - have
been reported by previous studies.
Britain on Film reveals
gender imbalance
The BBC 4 documentary series Britain on Film draws on the Look at Life magazine programs that ran
in British cinemas from 1959 onwards - there are three episodes from the first
series available at BBC
iPlayer.
I've recently been watching the second
series - which isn't currently available online (apart from a few clips).
Episode 3, entitled Island Nation
looked at the islands around Britain - and the piece that I found particularly
interesting was the one on Fair Isle, Britain's most remote inhabited island.
Best known for the distinctive woollens that are still hand-knitted on the
island, Fair Isle has (or had) another claim to fame - two-thirds of the
children born there were boys.
There are 5 episodes from the second
series that haven't aired yet, and I imagine that both series will be repeated
in time - well worth looking out for!
Derek - the British
Genghis Khan
It has been estimated
that about 16 million men, or about 10% of the male population of the former
Mongol Empire have a Y-chromosome that is descended from Genghis Khan
(remember, Y-DNA passes from father to son). In a culture where high-ranking
males are able to mate with large numbers of females it's perhaps not
surprising that one man might come to dominate.
However, that doesn't explain why
thousands of people in Britain today are descended from Derek, who fathered 496
children between 1917 and 1950. A Mail
on Sunday article describes how in the days before IVF and other modern
treatments Derek was able to help women conceive, even though their husbands,
who were physically or emotionally scarred as a result of the Great War were
unable to fulfil their role. (Thanks to Marilyn for pointing out the article.)
How many of you reading this are
descended from Derek, I wonder?
Wool you find ancestors in
the Sheep Returns?
Findmypast.co.uk have
made available to World subscribers a number of new datasets from Australia
& New Zealand including the New Zealand Sheep Farmers' Records, based on
the Annual Sheep Returns.
To search overseas records at findmypast.co.uk
click on the Search Records tab and
choose Search All Records from the
dropdown menu (or click here).
As findmypast said in their email
"don't be sheepish, search for your ancestors"!
Janet wrote to let me know that Cheshire
Archives & Local Studies have just launched a free database of crew lists
for ships registered at Runcorn which includes nearly 30,000 names (the lists
were transcribed by members of Runcorn Family History Society). The lists cover
the period 1863-1913 and can be searched here.
The biggest online source for crew lists
and merchant navy records is findmypast, with over 413,000 entries from Crew
Lists from 1861-1913 and 2.6 million Merchant
Navy seamen records from 1835-1941.
Canada 1921 Census
goes online
I was virtually alone in refusing to
repeat the scurrilous rumours about the release of the 1921 Census being
delayed by politicians who cared nothing for genealogists - but it seems that I
was right to do so, because the census has been launched at Ancestry
today.
Currently there are just browsable images - no transcriptions - but I'm sure that
won't be the situation for long.
Society of Genealogists has 12 million
names online
The Society of Genealogists may have
been in existence for over a century, but that doesn't mean they're behind the
times. Their extensive online database - free to members - now includes over
1000 datasets, 300,000 digitised images, and almost 12 million names.
Whilst some of the data - such as Boyd's
Marriage Index, an invaluable source of pre-1837 marriages - has been licensed
by the SoG to findmypast, much of it is exclusively
available through their own website (where else could you hope to find records
of 18th century christenings in the Portuguese Embassy Chapel?). Although the
records there are only available to SoG
members, you can carry out a free
surname search.
Tip:
the default search includes surname variants; you might do better to use the
Advanced Search and select 'Exact matches only'.
1790 Survey of the High Roads from London
In 1790, the engraver John Cary
published maps showing the main routes out of London - I recently purchased a
facsimile of the North set from the British Postal
Museum and Archive.
Beautifully reproduced in colour on good
quality paper they're good enough to frame, but they're also of interest to
family and local historians because of the detail that they show, such as the
names of inns (there are many that are familiar to me from my youth!), the
occupants of big houses, and the locations of turnpike gates.
I consider the collection well worth the
£14.50 I paid (£10 plus £4.50 postage). The one disappointment is that the
South set is no longer available, otherwise I would
have bought both!
Note:
some of the maps are larger than A4 and have been folded to A4
Is there a difference between
Ancestry and Starbucks?
To the best of my knowledge Ancestry don't sell coffee and Starbucks don't dabble in genealogy -
but that wasn't really what Mike was asking when he emailed me last week. What
he was wondering is whether the fact that Ancestry's European operation is
based in Luxembourg is designed to reduce their tax bill?
I don't know. It certainly seems that by
basing themselves in Luxembourg Ancestry are able to charge a lower rate of VAT
than competitors like findmypast, whose parent company is in Scotland, but I don't
know whether Ancestry are also managing to avoid paying Corporation Tax in the
UK (as Starbucks seem to have done in the past).
In my last newsletter I wrote about Barnardo's, which prompted Josie to mention the Hidden Lives Revealed website, which
is a remarkable record of some of the thousands of children who were cared for
by the Waifs and Strays Society (now the Children's Society) in the late 19th
and 20th centuries.
There are photographs, anonymised casefiles, and details
of over 170 homes across England & Wales - and the closer I looked the more
I found. Well worth a look!
I recently watched a fascinating film
documentary from the 1960s: The
London Nobody Knows is narrated by James Mason, the English actor who
became a Hollywood star. It focuses on the parts of London that tourists
wouldn't normally see - the back streets, the bomb sites, the local street
markets, the gas lamps, and the Salvation Army shelters. Whilst some of the images
were familiar to me from my own youth, there were many that weren't.
Available on DVD for under £8 including
delivery, it's well worth a look - and for around the same amount you can buy
the book that inspired the film, written by the artist Geoffrey Fletcher.
There's another short film on the DVD - a sugary-confection called Les Bicyclettes de
Belsize which is very much of its time, and mainly notable for a starring
performance by Judy Huxtable, who was to marry the
late, great Peter Cook.
I had quite a lot of correspondence
following my mention of Coursera, which
offers free online courses from a wide range of providers. The comments were
generally very positive, and I was so impressed by what Diana wrote that I'm
thinking of taking the same course myself:
"I
have recently completed a 6 week course with Coursera entitled 'Cardiac Arrest,
Hypothermia and Resuscitation' from the Perelman School of Medicine at
Pennsylvania University. The
presentation was excellent and the lecturers dedicated to their subject. If
other courses are of the same standard of excellence I see this taking off in a
big way. I can't wait to do another course."
However, one or two members were
disappointed with the courses they chose. I guess it's a case of
"Coursera, sera - whatever will be, will be". (Sorry - couldn't
resist it!)
Talking about printers in my last column
prompted Ken to ask for my advice about smartphones - and since others might
also be interested I thought I'd repeat my comments here (click the links to
find out more):
"Despite
what some people might say, a smartphone can't replace
a computer when it comes to family history. However if you want something that
you can carry in your pocket wherever you go, then a smartphone is well worth
considering.
"I
can only really tell you about the phone I use - it's a Samsung
Galaxy Note 2 (I previously had the original Galaxy Note which was almost
as good). Earlier this year I paid £339 on eBay for an unlocked phone that was
a few months old and came with some extras, but on the whole I'd recommend
Amazon over eBay as you are better protected in the event of any problem
arising. And today you can buy a NEW phone on Amazon
for LESS than I paid for my used phone.
"You
can buy a cheaper smartphone but it would almost certainly be a false economy.
I chose the Galaxy Note because it has the largest screen of any phone, and at
my time of life it's wonderful that I can read what's on the screen without
putting my reading glasses on.
"My
wife's iPhone
4 has a 3.5in diagonal screen which for someone like me is far too small
for surfing the Internet (but she's younger, she has smaller fingers, and she has
better short-range vision).My Galaxy Note 2 has a 5.55in diagonal screen, which
makes an amazing difference - it's like the difference between an old style
26in TV and a 42in flat screen."
The way things are looking in the
garden, if I'm going to be making tomato jam this year it's likely to be green
tomato jam, not my usual red tomato jam with lemon and ginger. On the bright
side there's a good crop of wild plums in the hedge - last year we didn't get
any at all.
This year the birds haven't stripped our
Juneberry tree as they usually do, so I'm looking for
recipes - does anyone have a favourite?
This where any late
updates will be posted, so it's worth checking back after a few days.
All the best until next time,
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2013 Peter Calver
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