Newsletter
- 4th May 2017
Who Do You
Think You Are? Live Dead BREAKING NEWS
Three days to save at Findmy past ENDS SUNDAY
How to get a FREE LostCousins upgrade
My birthday present - a brick wall comes tumbling down!
Catholic parish registers online at Findmypast
Were your ancestors closet Catholics?
Win an original 221 year-old document
Documents from the archives - school bills and receipts from 1897
From a reader's collection: certificates with a difference
Free online genealogy course commences 3rd July
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 27th April)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it searches ALL of the newsletters since
February 2009, so you don't need to keep copies):
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 them). If one of
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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!
Who Do You Think You Are? Live Dead BREAKING NEWS
After 10 years the world's biggest
genealogy show is closing down - according a shock announcement
on the website of Who Do You Think You
Are? magazine. Who Do You Think You
Are? Live followed in the footsteps of the Society of Genealogists' annual
fair and quickly attracted a new generation of researchers, but in an era when
so much happens online it must be as difficult for organisers to make a profit
as it is for High Street shops to compete against out-of-town and online
vendors.
But perhaps there is an opportunity for
someone else to fill the gap, possibly with an event that is less show and more
conference? Let's see what happens in the coming weeks and months.
Three days to save at Findmy past ENDS SUNDAY
You've got just three days to save on
World subscriptions at Findmypast's UK, US and Irish websites - and you can earn
yourself a free LostCousins subscription by using one of my links.
With a World subscription you'll get
virtually unlimited access to all 8 billion records in Findmypast's worldwide
collections! The 2 billion British records include the 1939 Register for
England & Wales, one of the most exciting and revealing releases of recent
years, all the censuses (apart from the Scotland 1911 census, which is only
available at ScotlandsPeople), and parish registers for Cheshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire,
Lincolnshire,
Plymouth &
West Devon, Rutland, Shropshire,
Staffordshire
Westminster,
most of East Kent,
large parts of Yorkshire,
and much of Wales.
There are also tens of millions of transcribed parish register entries
including the National Burial Index (which extends to 37 counties).
You
also get unlimited access to the UK Electoral Registers for 2002-14 to help you
track down living relatives - I use it all the time to track down LostCousins
members who have forgotten to tell me about their change of email address.
Your
World subscription will also give you access to the best online collection of
Irish records, as well as nearly 100 million records from Australia & New
Zealand, plus US records which include all the censuses, and millions of marriage
records that you won't find anywhere else. If you're not already convinced,
perhaps I should remind you about the more than 200 million newspaper articles
in the British Newspaper Archive (to subscribe to the BNA on its own would cost
nearly £80 a year), and the growing collection of Roman Catholic records?
Should
you decide to take out a subscription please use the appropriate link below to
ensure that LostCousins benefits and that you have a chance of getting a free
LostCousins upgrade (see the next article for full details, and be sure to read
the terms and conditions carefully).
Note: Findmypast's offer is for new and lapsed subscribers only -
but don't worry, if you are an existing subscriber you are entitled to an
automatic Loyalty Discount when you allow your subscription to renew
automatically.
How to get a
FREE LostCousins upgrade
When you buy a new World
subscription from Findmypast using the link above you can get a bonus - a free
LostCousins subscription worth up to £12.50! To claim your LostCousins upgrade
forward the email receipt from Findmypast, making sure that the time and date
are clearly shown (and time zone, if it isn't London time). You can use any of
the LostCousins email addresses, including the one I wrote from when telling
you about this newsletter.
Please read the important
advice below before you make your purchase, and make a note of the
precise time of your purchase in case the email from Findmypast doesn't arrive.
Terms &
conditions: your free LostCousins subscription will be funded by the commission
that Findmypast pay us; if we don't receive any commission on your purchase
then unfortunately you won't qualify. If you use an adblocker the link may not work; if tracking is disabled in your browser the link will work, but
Findmypast won't know that you clicked it, so won't pay us any commission.
Don't use more than one device, and to give yourself the best chance of
qualifying use a computer rather than a tablet or smartphone. Commission isn't
paid on renewals or purchases that Findmypast regard as renewals, eg when a subscription has recently
lapsed. You might qualify if you upgrade, but there are no guarantees. If you
already have a LostCousins subscription it will be extended; otherwise your
subscription will run from the day you purchased your Findmypast subscription.
My birthday present -
a brick wall comes tumbling down!
For a family historian there's nothing
more satisfying than knocking down a 'brick wall', and I was absolutely
delighted to celebrate the 13th Birthday of LostCousins by knocking down one of
my oldest 'brick walls'. I hope that by telling the story of how my wall came
tumbling down I will inspire some of you to make similar breakthroughs -
sometimes all it takes is renewed enthusiasm and a fresh pair of eyes.
For well over a decade I've been
struggling to find the baptism of my great-great-great grandmother, Sarah Ann Vize, who - according to the 1851 and 1861 censuses - was
born in Rotherhithe, Surrey around 1812. Rotherhithe is less than a mile from
Tower Bridge, one of London's most famous landmarks, and in my younger days I
used to drive through the Rotherhithe Tunnel to visit The Mayflower, one of the few pubs in central London that is
actually on the River Thames (it's close to the mooring for the ship which
brought the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World in 1620, hence the name). The area
has clearly been gentrified since the
1970s - The Mayflower is now a
'gastro-pub' in 'Rotherhithe village'. But I digress…..
There are several Vize
families baptising children in Rotherhithe in the early 19th century but
there's nothing to indicate which, if any, might be relatives of mine - and as
William Pepperell and Sarah Vize chose to marry in
1836, a year before civil registration began, there are no clues to be gleaned
from the marriage register (the two witnesses were obviously regular signers).
However, as so often happens, the vital clue
turned up when I least expected it. When I was compiling this newsletter on
Tuesday I noticed that Ancestry had recently updated their City
of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery Registers 1841-1966 record set, so I
decided to check whether any of my relatives had been buried there. There was a
good chance of success - all of my ancestors were in east London at some point
during the 19th century - and naturally I started with the less common surnames.
When I got to Pepperell there were several names I recognised, but I also realised
that some were listed twice: when I investigated further I discovered that this
was not, as sometimes happens, because duplicate microfilms had been indexed,
but because one entry was for the burial register and the other for the
register which recorded the ownership of the graves.
One of the latter entries told me that
six people had been buried in grave 5395:
Sarah A Pepperell (née Vize) 1867
William J Pepperell (her only child)
1885
Mary A Pepperell (his wife, another of
my 'brick walls') 29/4/01
Mary Hale & two infants, all in one
coffin 31/1/68
At this point I had no idea who Mary
Hale was, or who the two infants might have been - but what intrigued me most
were the names of the addresses of the owners of the grave, who were Mary Vize and, subsequently, George Henry Vize.
After all these years I had, at last, come across some relatives of Sarah Ann Vize!
I quickly discovered that George Henry Vize was the son of James Vize,
who had been baptised in 1814 at the Albion Street Wesleyan Chapel in
Rotherhithe according to the non-conformist baptisms at Ancestry - but the
register started in 1812, and there was no mention of my ancestor, Sarah Ann Vize. A search for her by name was equally useless, and if
I tried to search using a wildcard in the surname (eg
V*) I was told there were too many results to display, which seems ironic given
that it would allow me to search without any surname at all!
So, as I often do in such cases, I
turned to an alternative source - Findmypast
- who have also digitized and indexed the non-conformist baptisms in RG4 at the
National Archives. And there it was - the record I'd been looking for all these
years!
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy
of The National Archives, London, England and used with the permission of
Findmypast
It turned out that my ancestor had been
baptised in a different Wesleyan chapel, one in Bermondsey, just along the
river. And whilst this record is certainly in Ancestry's database it's almost
impossible to find with a search, and not just because the surname has been mistranscribed. I couldn't find it at The Genealogist
either.
It just goes to show that a subscription
to one, or even two, websites isn't enough to knock down the highest 'brick
walls' - you need access to all the available online resources. So often we see
that this or that website has added a new dataset and dismiss it on the basis
that "so-and-so have had those records for years" - but I certainly
won't do that again, and I trust you won't either!
Tip:
for another example of 'missing' records turning up on a different website see
this article from three years ago, in which I
describe how I discovered my grandfather's WW1 records, which I had previously
thought were amongst the many files destroyed in WW2.
Coincidentally I had an email today from
Jacqueline, a LostCousins member who attended both Genealogy in the Sunshine events, to tell me how she had knocked
down a 17 year-old 'brick wall' using the GRO's new online indexes of births.
These revealed that when her great-great-great grandmother married in 1829 she
wasn't a spinster, despite what it said in the marriage register. Most of her
children were born before the commencement of civil registration in 1837, and
the birth index entry for her youngest daughter, born in 1839 gave as her
maiden surname the name that appeared in the marriage register.
But the entry for her youngest son, born
in 1842, gave a different maiden surname, leading Jacqueline to the record of
her ancestor's first marriage in 1817, and eventually to her baptism. A great
result, though as Jacqueline reminded me, every time we knock down a 'brick
wall' there are at least two more behind it!
Catholic parish
registers online at Findmypast
Although there are now parish registers
online for about half of English counties and most Welsh counties, many
collections only include Church of England records. Earlier this year
Findmypast announced
that they were collaborating with the Catholic Church to make available online around
100 million baptism, marriage, and burial records from the UK and the US.
Last year Findmypast made available a
collection of more than 10 million Catholic records from Ireland (and whilst
these Irish records are also available at other sites, you'll know by now that
searching at more than one site can be advantageous); then in February 2017
they launched exclusive collections totalling 3 million records from the
Archdioceses of Philadelphia in the US, Birmingham and Westminster in the UK.
Bear in mind that an Archdiocese can cover a wide area - for example,
Birmingham includes the counties of West Midlands, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire,
Warwickshire and Worcestershire (see this map).
You can find out which parishes are
included in the collections using the following links - but remember that there
are millions more records for the US and UK to come over the next 12 months:
England
- Roman Catholic baptisms
England
- Roman Catholic marriages
England
- Roman Catholic burials
Ireland
- Roman Catholic baptisms
Ireland
- Roman Catholic marriages
Ireland
- Roman Catholic burials
Archdiocese
of Philadelphia - sacramental registers parish list
Were your ancestors
closet Catholics?
I don't have any Catholic ancestors in
my tree - or do I? A discovery I made this week has got me wondering…..
I decided to take a close look at
Findmypast's records for the Archdiocese of Westminster before writing about
them for this newsletter, and as I often do, I used some of the surnames in my
tree for test searches. When I entered the surname Driesen,
the surname of one of my German ancestors, I got 6 results. 5 of those results
were the children of one of ancestor's brothers, so I presumed that his wife
was a Catholic (although their marriage certificate shows that they married in
a Church of England church), but then I noticed that in 1863 my great-great
grandparents, Robert and Ann Wells (née Driesen), were
the godparents of their niece Martha Driesen, who was
baptised at the Catholic church of St Mary & St Michael, in Commercial
Road, east London.
I then realised that one of the baptisms
I'd found was for Ann's youngest sister, also Martha, who had been baptised at
the same church in 1833. Was it possible that my great-great-great grandparents
Francis Driesen and Elizabeth Keehner
were Catholic? They married in the Church of England, though in 1812 they would
have had no other option - but they choose to have their first child,
Elizabeth, baptised at the parish church of St Olave,
Southwark. Why would they have done this is they were Catholic?
Admittedly I'd been aware for some years
that some of their children had been baptised at the German Catholic Chapel on
London, but given the contradictory evidence of their eldest child's baptism,
and the fact that all of their children married in the Church of England, I had
always assumed that this was because they were more comfortable associating
with others of German origin. Now I'm not so sure - I wonder what unexpected
discoveries you might make as more and more Catholic records become available
online?
J M Barrie wrote in Peter Pan that "Whenever a child says 'I don't believe in fairies'
somewhere a fairy falls down dead", and I'm sorry to say that this all too
accurately reflects what happens when a family historian says that they don't
believe in finding cousins, or even worse that they don't have any cousins to
find.
We all have thousands of living cousins,
but sadly neither we nor our cousins will live for ever - surely we should make
an effort to connect with them while we still can? In the play, when Tinker
Bell starts to fade, Peter Pan calls to the audience to demonstrate their
belief in fairies by clapping their hands - similarly you can help your 'lost
cousins', not by clapping or sitting on your hands, but by using them to compete your My Ancestors page.
I know you all intend to complete your My Ancestors page eventually, but I also
remember what the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote: "In the long run we
are all dead".
Win an original 221
year-old document
In the last issue I announced that to
celebrate the 13th Birthday of LostCousins I was giving away an item from my
collection - an original hand-signed and numbered English State Lottery ticket
issued in London in 1796 - as the top prize in our Birthday Competition.
To take part you need only add entries
to your My Ancestors page - which
doesn't require any subscriptions,
not even a LostCousins subscription! To find out more about the competition and
the prizes you can win follow this link
to the original article.
Documents from the archives
- school bills and receipts from 1897
Because there's so much available online
it's easy to forget that only a small fraction of the holdings of local
record offices have been digitised. The Essex Record Office offers a regular
reminder with their Document of the Month series, and I found this month's
particularly interesting - you can find it here.
As it happens I not only have ancestors
from Essex, I have ancestors from the Coggeshall area,
and as many of them were baptised at the Congregational Church I suspect some
of them also attended the Coggeshall Congregational
School (though they would have been there long before 1897). But you don't need
to have ancestors from the area to find the documents fascinating - just look
at the prices on the invoices!
Does your local record office have a
similar blog?
From a reader's
collection: certificates with a difference
I've seen many birth certificates in my
time, but I don't recall seeing one quite like this example that Colyn shared with me recently - the information is the
same, but it has been issued for a very specific purpose. Robert Redvers Baden Fairbrother was just coming up to his 13th birthday
- and in the early 20th century there were restrictions on the employment for
children of school age, governed by the Factory and Workshop Act of 1901 (you
can download the original Act here).
The certificate which follows is
self-explanatory - note that the small print at the bottom, which reads
"If not so employed the child must attend School whenever it is open until
the age of 14":
Items like these don't often survive,
but seeing them doesn't simply provide insight into the lives of the individuals
they relate to, it also tells us something about the society in which they lived.
Free online
genealogy course commences 3rd July
Tens of thousands of family historians,
ranging from beginners to experienced LostCousins members, have enjoyed the
free FutureLearn course Genealogy: Researching Your
Family Tree - so I was delighted to learn that there's a fourth presentation
starting in July.
You can find out more and sign-up here - and by the way,
it really is free, no matter who you are or where you live.
Sometimes we may feel that we're being
exploited by companies who don't deserve our loyalty and certainly don't reward
loyalty when they get it - broadband
suppliers and energy companies are prime culprits who have been in the news
recently. So it was refreshing to receive this email:
Findmypast want you to keep enjoying their
unbeatable Findmypast service. So when you come to renew your 12 month
subscription, you will save by being on the lowest price available. Your
subscription will automatically renew and when it does, they'll ensure you get:
15% OFF
You'll be paying 15% less than non-renewing
customers will pay
EXCLUSIVE PRICE FOR RENEWING CUSTOMERS
This annual subscription price is not available
to non-renewing customers - it's Findmypast's way of thanking you for your
loyalty!
You don't need to do anything - just log in,
check your card details are up-to-date and your auto-renewal is switched on.
I'm currently reading The Blood
Detective by Dan Waddell, who wrote the best-selling book that
accompanied the Who Do You Think You Are?
television series. Published in 2008 it was the first genealogical mystery I
ever bought - and yet it has sat on a shelf in my library until now, for the
simple reason that I bought a paperback, and I generally read fiction while I'm
travelling, so prefer Kindle books. (It's now also available as a Kindle book -
I'm not sure if it was when I bought my copy.)
I'm already half way through, so I hope
to have a review in the next newsletter. In the meantime, a reminder that Steve
Robinson's latest genealogical mystery is out today - you'll find my review here.
I don't know how many of you followed my example by
making Sloe Gin last autumn, but you might be interested to know that I've yet
to decant mine - leaving the sloes in
allows a richer flavour to develop, and it just seems to get better and better.
I've done the same with half of the Shepherd's Bullace
Gin that I made, and it too seems to be maturing nicely.
(In case anyone is wondering, I don't
operate an illegal distillery - I buy London gin in the supermarket when it is
on special offer and use that as the base.)
It's a while since I've written about
supermarket bargains but I couldn't resist sharing my latest coup with you. As
ever it's all about being in the right place at the right time, and in my local
Tesco Superstore the right time is between 7pm and 7.30pm, when they mark down fresh
food by up to 90%, as you can see from this receipt. I slow-roasted one of the shoulders
of lamb last night - it was delicious.
Not all supermarkets operate in the same
way, but it's worth finding out when your favourite supermarket makes its final
reductions - it's likely to be towards the end of the day (in the morning the
discount could be as low as 10%).
Of course, it helps to have some space
in your freezer! I tend to fill ours up with bread (another bargain buy at 8p to
13p a loaf), which I can move to the fridge when the space is needed.
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......
I hope you've found this,
the first newsletter of our 14th year useful - and I trust there will be many
more to come. After all, if Prince Philip can soldier on until the age of 96 I've
got no reason to think about retirement!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2017 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