Newsletter
- 10th April 2015
Half-price
Findmypast World subscriptions EXCLUSIVE OFFER
Claim a
FREE LostCousins subscription!
Essex
Wills Beneficiaries index goes online
124
million British newspaper articles
Who Do You Think You Are? Live
Tell
your photo story COMPETITION EXTENDED
New South
Wales government and gaol records online
Scotlandspeople
launches 1865 Valuation Rolls
Scottish
Government consults on burials
War
Graves Commission seeks relatives
Imperial
War Museum: Research Room changes
Getting
Started in Genetic Genealogy
Surrogacy
leads to complex relationships
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 3rd April) 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 use the customised Google search below
(that's what I do):
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
the links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're using adblocking software - you need to make the LostCousins site
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To go to the main LostCousins website click the
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Half-price Findmypast
World subscriptions EXCLUSIVE
OFFER
Until midnight on
Thursday 30th April (previously 18th April)
you can save 50% on a 12 month World subscription to Findmypast. This brings
the price at the UK site down from £129.50 to just £64.75 (less than 18p a day),
and there are similar reductions at Findmypast's other sites.
You might think "Why do I need a
Findmypast subscription - I've already got a subscription to xxxxx?". There was indeed a
time when we could choose between the major subscription sites based on our
personal preferences - but that was in the days when most of our research was
done using censuses and the GRO indexes. Nowadays so many records - especially
parish registers - are only available at one or other of the major sites that
we have to seriously consider taking out two subscriptions - BUT when you can
buy one of them at half-price the decision is made so much easier!
Even if you don't know of any overseas
connections, almost all of us have relatives who disappear from the censuses. Often
it's because they've emigrated, and since the World subscription provides
access to ALL of Findmypast's historical records (more than 2 billion of them)
and hundreds of millions of newspaper articles, you've got a pretty good chance
of tracking them down. Most of the records are from Britain, Ireland, Australia,
New Zealand, and the US but there are also some records and newspapers from Canada
and other countries.
And just in case you're wavering about
the need for a World subscription, it's worth in mind
that a Britain subscription would cost £99.50, so buying the World subscription
at £64.75 really is a no-brainer!
Use one of these links to claim your
discount (but make sure you read the small print below):
Findmypast.co.uk HALF-PRICE - SAVE £64.75
Findmypast.ie HALF-PRICE - SAVE
€74.75
Findmypast.com.au HALF-PRICE - SAVE $99.75
Findmypast.com HALF-PRICE - SAVE $99.75
If the links don't work at all for you, see the advice
in italics at the beginning of the newsletter. If they take you to the Findmypast site, but
you don't see the offer, log-out from Findmypast and try again. (If you don't use one of these links
then LostCousins won't benefit, and you won't qualify for a free LostCousins
subscription.)
Terms
and conditions: offer expires at
11.59pm on 30th April 2015 (previously 18th). Discount applies to new World subscriptions. After the
initial 365 day period, your subscription will be automatically renewed at the
normal price unless you un-tick the 'auto-renew my subscription box' in the My
Account section of the site. This discount can only be used once per person, and
is intended for new or lapsed subscribers, not existing subscribers.
Claim a FREE LostCousins
subscription!
When you take up Findmypast's generous
offer using one of the links above you'll also be supporting LostCousins. Since
one good turn deserves another, I'm going to give you a FREE LostCousins subscription
worth up to £12.50, taking your total savings to a possible £77!
So long as you have entered 5 or more
relatives on your My Ancestors page by
the time you make your claim you'll receive a 6 month subscription - if
you've made fewer entries you'll get one month free, plus one month for each entry. But if
you've entered 50 or more relatives I'll double your subscription from 6 months
to 12 months.
Tip:
if you already have a LostCousins subscription you can still benefit - I'll extend
the expiry date.
All you need to do is forward a copy of
the email receipt you receive from Findmypast showing the date and time (your LostCousins
subscription will run from that date, so it's best to get your claim in as soon
as possible), and quoting your LostCousins membership number, which is shown on
your My Summary page. You can forward
it to any of the LostCousins email addresses, including the one I wrote from
when I told you about this newsletter.
If you want to benefit from a joint
subscription, covering two LostCousins accounts, you must link them together
before forwarding the receipt; to find out how to link the accounts just log-in
and go to the Subscribe
page (it takes 2 minutes and only needs to be done once).
Terms
and conditions: your Findmypast
subscription purchase cannot be combined with any other offer; you must click
the link for the Findmypast site where you buy your subscription (and you must
do it before buying the subscription), otherwise the purchase won't
benefit LostCousins and you won't qualify for your free LostCousins
subscription. If you buy a Findmypast subscription that lasts for less than 12
months from the date of purchase your LostCousins subscription will be adjusted
on a pro rata basis.
Essex Wills
Beneficiaries index goes online
This week Findmypast made available an index of
beneficiaries of Essex wills which includes over 150,000 names from 36,000
wills from the period 1505-1916. You can't view images of the wills at
Findmypast, but many of the wills are available online at Essex Ancestors, an
Essex Record Office subscription service which also offers access to parish
registers.
It was a pleasing coincidence that this
index came online just one week after the newsletter article
in which I highlighted the need to be able to search GRO records in different
ways - for example, using the names of marriage witnesses. I hope it's a sign
of even better things to come!
124 million British
newspaper articles
There are now over 124 million articles
from English, Welsh, and Scottish newspapers in the British Newspaper
Collection at Findmypast - the most recent additions are listed here in the Findmypast blog.
Who Do You Think You Are? Live
On Thursday 16th April the world's
biggest family history show opens - and for the first time it's being held at
the National Exhibition Centre, near Birmingham. This year I won't be able to
attend, for family reasons, so I'm asking LostCousins members who are lucky
enough to be there to email me news and photos that I can include in my next
newsletter - that way that those of us who can't be there can get some sense of
what we've missed!
Tell your photo story
COMPETITION EXTENDED
When I look at old family photos they
invariably bring back memories - and I'm willing to bet that it's the same for
you. That's why I've arranged a special competition in collaboration with Repixl,
the independent website that specialises in digitally repairing and retouching
photos.
All you need to do is follow this link to
Repixl, register (if you haven't already done so), and upload one or more of
your favourite family photos. When you move the mouse pointer over a picture
you've uploaded you'll see a number of icons appear at the bottom of the photo
- one on the right looks rather like a cassette, and when you move the pointer
to it the words Submit a Photo Story will be displayed, as you
can see in this screenshot (that's my mum's class in 1934, by the way):
When you click the icon you'll be taken to a page
where you can enter your story - there are some questions displayed, but they
are just suggestions. It's your story, so bring the photo to life however you
want.
After the competition closes at the end
of April, James at Repixl will choose his favourite photo stories from all
those submitted by LostCousins members - and the 10 lucky winners will get a
prize that money can't buy, the chance to submit a black and white or
sepia-toned photograph from their family collection for colorisation!
If you watched the television
series, World War 1 In Colour,
you'll know how much more realistic films are when they're in colour - and when
it comes to still photos the difference is even more pronounced.
Tip: you can enter more than once if
you can't make up your mind which of your photo stories is the best.
A month ago I set out my top Findmypast
search tips in this article -
and just two days later I got this email from Cindy in Canada:
So Happy
to receive this in my inbox while I was pulling my hair out on the Find My Past
website.
I was having no luck and
getting quite annoyed with the search engine on the website. I am an Ancestry user - from the beginning of
my genealogy addiction - and I am thinking Ancestry's interface ruins all other
website searching habits!
On reading your tidbits I changed my search to go directly to Bonby, Lincolnshire Baptisms - and Voila! My Great-Grandmother
baptized in 1856 so now I can say yes, her parents are George and Catherine....
Next it will be off to the
Marriages to see if I can find her mother's maiden name and go on from there!
So Thank You
for your perfect timing!
Every website is different - and so we
need to adapt slightly to get the best out of all the different sites - but in
this case the parish registers haven't been transcribed yet and until they are,
the baptism would never show up in a name search. Most major websites,
including Ancestry and FamilySearch, have records which have yet to be
transcribed - it's a way of making the registers available sooner.
It's another reason to search specific
record sets, as I strongly recommend, rather than searching entire collections.
The Origins website has now closed
following the takeover by Findmypast - all of the records previously available
at Origins are now at Findmypast, and all remaining Origins subscribers have
been upgraded to Findmypast subscriptions.
New South Wales government
and gaol records online
Two New South Wales datasets added this
week at Findmypast might feature your relatives, one large and one small. The
smaller dataset is the more interesting because it features photographs of
convicts - see for example this blog entry
which recounts the notorious case of Louisa Collins, who murdered her husband
using arsenic. But let's hope you don't find your relatives in this dataset....
The larger dataset, with over 1.2
million entries, records names from the New
South Wales Government Gazette Indexes for the period 1832-1863. The
entries aren't particularly informative - I think you'd need to view the
gazette itself to make much sense of the data, and fortunately I found many of them
here.
Tip:
the forerunner to the gazette was the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales
Advertiser, which can be read online at the free Trove website (it covers the
period 1803 to 1842); you can view the NSW gazette from 1836-51 free at the
Victoria state archives website.
The Irish civil registration indexes,
which had been removed for data protection reasons, are now back online at IrishGenealogy.ie but only
births more than 100 years old, marriages more than 75 years old, and deaths
over 50 years old are listed.
According to Claire Santry,
whose blog is usually the
first place I look for Irish genealogy news, the birth indexes consistently
show the mother's maiden name from 1900 onwards, but some earlier entries do
also show this important information.
Scotlandspeople
launches 1865 Valuation Rolls
While Genealogy in the Sunshine 2015 was taking place in Portugal Scotlandspeople
launched the 1865 Valuation Rolls.
The extract below shows the house at 131
Sauciehall Street, Glasgow owned by Dr Edward
Pritchard, the Glasgow Poisoner - at the time the Valuation Roll was compiled
he was awaiting trial, having murdered his wife and his mother-in-law.
Crown copyright: reproduced by kind
permission of the Registrar General for Scotland
Pritchard was the last man to be
publicly hanged in Glasgow, on 28th July 1865.
Scottish Government
consults on burials
Burial legislation in Scotland is over
150 years old, and The Scottish Government is proposing
to bring it up to date. Of particular interest to family historians will be the
section of the consultation document starting at paragraph 58 and headed "Alleviating
pressure on burial grounds".
You can download a copy of the consultation
document from the LostCousins website here
(thanks to John for alerting me to this issue).
War Graves Commission seeks
relatives
James wrote to tell me that the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission is keen to make contact with relatives of
around 70 soldiers, sailors and airmen who are buried at cemeteries in the UK.
You can see a list of them here.
Imperial War Museum:
Research Room changes
From next week the Research Room at the
Imperial War Museum will be open 4 days a week, from Monday to Thursday, and
appointments can no longer be booked by telephone. You can read more about the
current arrangements here.
Getting Started in Genetic
Genealogy
At Genealogy
in the Sunshine last month Debbie Kennett - author of DNA
and Social Networking, author of The
Surnames Handbook, Honorary
Research Associate at University College London, and a long-time member of
LostCousins - used one of the morning sessions to provide an introduction to
DNA testing.
For those of you who weren't able to be
there, a 45 minute presentation at Rootstech 2015 by Diahan Southard which is available to view online also
provides a gentle introduction to the topic - you can find it here.
Surrogacy leads to
complex relationships
This week the Daily Mail wrote
about a family where the relationships are so complex that few family tree
programs could cope! What do you think about them?
The website Exploring
20th Century London is the result of a collaboration between 19 museums in
the London area, and whilst it seems to be aimed primarily at schools there are
facts and figures that family historians with London connections will also find
interesting. The audio slideshows require Quicktime,
which I chose not to download, but all the information is in the accompanying
PDF file, including links to the images.
Most of the books I read (and review)
are newly-published - but the book I've just finished reading was published in
1999.
My
East End by the late Gilda O'Neill
reminds me what was good - and bad - about the East End of London, where my
ancestors lived through most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. Early
in the book she records how Lord Ashley, better known to us as Lord Shaftesbury
(he took the title on the death of his father in 1851), told of 5 families
living in one room - one in each corner, and the fifth in the middle.
Overcrowding and squalor contributed to the cholera epidemic of 1848, but it
wasn't until the slum clearances of the first half of the 20th century that
government really got to grips with the problem.
The book focuses on the recollections of
residents and former residents who the author interviewed personally; many, if
not most, of those interviewed are no longer be around to tell their story, so
the book is even more important to us today than it was when it was first
published. Here are some quotes:
"[Grandad]
told me that, at one time, he and his brothers took it in turn to go to school,
because they had only a single pair of boots. A frequent meal was boiled rice,
with a spoon of jam if they were well off that day."
"No
shoes on their feet, four and five to a bed, and freezing-cold bedrooms with
old coats chucked over them..... they wasn't
necessarily bad parents, they was probably doing what they could, but it wasn't
always enough. Being hungry, really hungry, is a terrible thing. Having a
hungry child must be worse."
"....one of the boys found the end of a
stale loaf that someone had chucked out for the street pigeons. He was from a
right poor family and he dived on this bread like he was starving."
"Dad
being the breadwinner had egg and bacon on a Sunday morning if there was the
money, and us kids took turns to be given the bacon
rind, which was a real treat."
The photo on the dust jacket of the book
may have come from a photo library, but it's a joy to behold - you can see a
larger version if you click 'see this image' in the Amazon
listing. There also some wonderful photos inside - this is one of those
occasions when an e-book simply wouldn't work as well.
Holly wrote to tell me that LostCousins
has been mentioned in Stolen
Futures, a genealogical mystery book by John Nixon - this follows on
from the key role LostCousins played in The Orange Lilies by Nathan Dylan
Goodwin, one of my favourite books of the past year.
This is very good news for you and me,
because the more LostCousins is talked about the more researchers will join, and
the more 'lost cousins' we'll find (those of us who've completed our My Ancestors page, that is, not the lazy
so-and-sos who can't be bothered!).
On 6th April those of us who have
defined contribution pensions at last gained control over our own money - from
the age of 55 onwards we can take as much money as we want out of our fund,
though we have to pay income tax on 75% of it (so you may have to take it out
over several years to avoid paying higher rate tax).
For those of you who have already
reached state pension age, or will - like me - reach state pension age before
6th April 2016 there's a fantastic opportunity to, in effect, use the money
from your private pension to enhance your state pension.
For each year you defer your state
pension it will increase by 10.4% over and above the normal annual increases
(see this government
guide), and you also have the option of taking your deferred pension as a
lump sum should your personal circumstances change. Whilst there will be some
people for whom this isn't such a good idea, the fact that the government are
making the terms much worse for people who reach state pension age after 6th
April next year strongly suggests that for most of it's a jolly good deal.
Previously many people haven't been able
to afford to defer their state pension, because their private pension was too
small - now you can draw on your pension fund it makes things a lot easier. You
can defer your pension even after you have started drawing it, but you can only
defer once.
Disclaimer:
I am not a qualified financial adviser and even if I were, everyone's situation
is different; I'm just highlighting an opportunity that is worth investigating.
Until Sunday 12th April you can make big
savings on perfumes, after-shave and other cosmetics at Allbeauty. Even after that date it's
worth checking out the site because their everyday prices are better than
you'll find in supermarkets or even Duty Free stores at airports.
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 Peter Calver
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