Newsletter
- 21st October 2016
Great
news - the Scotland 1881 census is now FREE!
ScotlandsPlaces
is now completely FREE
Tracing
living relatives in Scotland using the NHS Central Register
Bad
news: Ancestry ups the ante
Do you have
a BT email address?
Why more
than 3 million people like you have taken the test
Have
your cousins tested their DNA?
Findmypast
add more Easter Rising records
Victorians
may have been healthier than us
Review:
The Death of Tommy Quick and Other Lies
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
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click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a member,
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new edition of this newsletter available!
Great news - the Scotland
1881 census is now FREE!
Have you tried the revamped ScotlandsPeople site? When you
do, you'll discover that not only are search results free (you used to pay for
each page), you can now search and view the LDS transcription of the Scotland
1881 census completely free. This is great news - because it means it won't
cost a penny to get the information you need in order to search for your 'lost
cousins' whether your ancestors lived in England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey, the
Isle of Man, or Scotland!
If you don't already have a
ScotlandsPeople account you'll need to register (but you won't be expected to
provide payment details); if you have registered previously, but haven't
logged-in since the site was updated you'll be required to choose a new
password. Once you're into the site choose Advanced
Search and click Census returns
as in the example below:
Check the box alongside 1881 (LDS) then
enter your Search - and you'll see that all the results are free to view!
Although it says View image what you'll actually get is the transcription, which
looks like this:
When you discover relatives in the 1881
Census you can use the information to search for cousins, simply by entering
them on your My Ancestors page. In
the past it has sometimes proved difficult to find the census references, but
now it's really easy - I've highlighted the census references in screenshot
above, and since they always appear in the same place, you really can't go
wrong.
If these were my relatives (they're not
- to the best of my knowledge) I'd enter them like this:
It really couldn't be easier - and remember
that by entering those references you're focusing in on a precise page from the
census, ensuring that you don't get matched with someone whose ancestor just
happened to have the same name. (That's how LostCousins is able to offer 100%
accurate automated matching.)
Of course, much of the information is
the same for every member of the household - they'll have the same references
and quite probably the same surname too, so you don't to enter it all over
again (it's filled in automatically). In fact all you'll usually need to enter
is their forename, their middle names or initials (if shown), and their age. So
whereas it could take 20 or 30 seconds to enter the first person, it'll probably
only take 10 seconds to enter each of the others.
So why not celebrate by finding some Scottish
cousins!
ScotlandsPlaces is now
completely FREE
When the ScotlandsPlaces website first
launched in 2010 it was free, but when more records were added in 2013 a
subscription was introduced (£15 for 3 months). However I'm glad to say that
it's now completely free once again!
Records at ScotlandsPlaces include a
variety of historical tax rolls, mostly from the late 17th and 18th centuries,
and Ordnance Survey name books (which are primarily concerned with place names,
but sometimes give the name of an owner or occupier). You can see a full list
of the resources here,
but please note that not all of the records have been transcribed - there are
over 3200 volunteer transcribers already, but I'm sure they could do with more!
Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a
service that could track down living relatives using National Health Service
records - after all, everyone needs to go to the doctor from time to time?
Well, at one time such a service did
exist - at least in England & Wales. It was called Traceline, and utilised
the NHS Central Register - which grew out of the 1939 Register. The NHS Central
Register keeps track of individuals from birth to death, recording the district
in which they are registered with a GP.
Traceline operated between
2000-2008; it was based at the General Register Office premises in
Southport. Traceline was a wonderful service - the search fee was just £30, with
an additional £25 if the search was successful (this covered the cost of
forwarding a letter to the relative concerned). I had the privilege of speaking
to one of the team about 10 years ago, and was told that thousands of people
used the service each year - but sadly Traceline was discontinued when the NHS
Information Centre took over responsibility for the NHS Central Register from
the GRO.
I've reproduced below part of an
official leaflet explaining how it worked:
I was never able to get a straight
answer about the demise of Traceline - had the service closed because the Data
Protection Act prevented the use of the register in this way (it was around the
same time that the GRO stopped selling copies of their birth, marriage, and
death indexes), or was it because Traceline was losing money? I suspect it was
a combination of the two.
Tracing living relatives in
Scotland using the NHS Central Register
Although the NHS Central Register is no
longer used to help trace missing relatives in England & Wales, there is a
service in Scotland:
The service in Scotland will not act for
companies or law firms, unlike the old Traceline service (or directly for
individuals, who must go through a recognised charity). There had been an
earlier service in Scotland which operated along similar lines - this PDF document
refers to a service which resumed in June 2006.
Is there any chance that a similar
service might resume in England & Wales? Judging from the Information
Commissioner's response
to a 2015 consultation on the use of the NHS Central Register in Scotland there
doesn't seem to be any reason why we can't have a similar service in the rest
of Britain.
Bad news: Ancestry ups the
ante
Some years ago Ancestry took over
Footnote.com, renaming it Fold3 - and for the past couple of years, perhaps
longer, Ancestry.com (the US site) has been offering All Access subscriptions,
which combine an Ancestry World membership with a Fold3 subscription. The
records at Fold3 mostly relate to the US, but they do have a collection of international
records, and I discovered only this week (thanks to LostCousins member Geoff) that
Ancestry.co.uk also offers an all Access subscription, priced at £229.99 -
quite a daunting sum!
More worryingly, images for some of the UK
record sets that have been recently added to Ancestry.co.uk are only available
through Fold3 - yet there's no indication of this when you look at the list of
recently added collections. Some users will no doubt be disappointed (or even
annoyed) when they find that they can't access some of the UK images with a
Premium membership at £119.99 (or even with a World membership costing £179.99)
given the "guaranteed access to all our new UK releases" promise on
the Subscribe page.
Only a small number of military record
sets seem to be affected at this stage but it could be the tip of the iceberg:
Royal
Air Force Muster Roll, 1918
Naval
and Military Courts Martial Registers, 1806-1930
British
Jewry Roll of Honour, 1914-1918
Fold3 offers a 7-day Free Trial, but as
you can do it just once you might want to wait until there are more UK image sets
on the site.
Tip:
the good news is that you can currently get a 4 month Premium subscription to
Ancestry.co.uk for just £20 (£5 a month) when you follow this link.
Do you have a BT email
address?
Over the past few weeks I've received
several emails from members who haven't been receiving the emails that I send
when a new edition of this newsletter goes online - and the common factor is
that they all have BT email addresses. Typically they report that they haven't
received emails in respect of the September and October issues.
It's probably not BT's fault - their
email service is managed by Yahoo, who have come in for quite a bit of
criticism (not least in this newsletter - here's
what I wrote last month). The sad thing is that for every member who contacted
me there are probably another 99 who either haven't realised that the emails
have stopped coming, or have assumed that there's a technical problem at my end
(if only the problem was at my end -
then I'd be able to do something about it!). Even worse, most of those who did write
in assumed that I'd unilaterally taken them off the list because they hadn't
bought a LostCousins subscription - that's something I wouldn't dream of doing.
If somebody intercepted a letter I'd
sent through the post and destroyed it before it could reach the intended
recipient they'd be committing a criminal offence - but do the same thing with
emails, and there are no sanctions whatsoever. There are 6717 LostCousins
members who have asked me to send my newsletter emails to their BT email
address - I just hope that some of them are getting through!
Note:
Yahoo is in the process of being acquired by Verizon for $4.83 billion,
although this article
suggests that following the hacked account scandal Verizon are looking to shave
as much as $1 billion off the price.
If you haven't figured it out yet, the
string of characters in the title of this article can be read as "Too wise
you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for
me".
As kids we used to have fun with these
sorts of puzzles. We didn't need PlayStations or iPhones, Facebook or Twitter -
we made our own fun, even if it was only rolling a hoop along with a stick or
making machines out of cotton reels, lolly sticks, and rubber bands. (I'm
exaggerating slightly - hoops and sticks were a little before my time.)
But this article isn't about children's
games - it's about DNA, specifically Y-DNA, the type that's passed by fathers
to their sons (indeed, it's that little bit of Y-DNA that determined that I was
born a boy). DNA results mean little in isolation - it's only when your results
match with someone else's that you're likely to learn something useful, and
that's how the "two Ys" came into my head. Although it's well over 4
years since I took a Y-DNA test, I still haven't had a match that's close
enough to be useful - and I suspect that many others have had a similar
experience. My own closest match definitely goes back at least 8 generations,
and might not even be in the last 12 generations (which is about as far back as
parish records go).
In the early hours of this morning I had
an email from a member from Australia who asked whether it was worth her male
cousin taking a Y-DNA test as a way of proving her hypothesis about the
identity of their great-great-great grandfather. There's a lot of
circumstantial evidence that points in a particular direction, and she wondered
whether Y-DNA might be able to confirm or deny her suspicions. I have written
on this topic in the past, but almost all of my recent writing has been about
autosomal DNA, so I thought it would be helpful to reproduce my reply....
"Any DNA test depends on having
something to compare the results against - one set of results in isolation
rarely tells you anything useful.
"The advantage of a Y-DNA test is
that is very specific - if you get a match then you know precisely which line
it's in (the direct male line). The disadvantage is that there are relatively
few people who will share that DNA, so the chance that any of them has tested
is quite small.
"In round numbers there are about
half a million people who have tested their Y-DNA for genealogical purposes, most
of whom speak English as their first language, and about 500 million people in the
English-speaking world (the US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New
Zealand). Of course, only half of those 500 million people are male, but it
still means that only about 1 person in 500 has tested.
"The next question is, how many males are likely to share the same Y-DNA? This
is a tricky one - ultimately we're all descended (in our direct paternal line)
from a single male who lived around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, and if it
wasn't for the fact that Y-DNA slowly mutates all living men would carry the
same Y-DNA. The specific markers that are tested have been selected because the
rate at which they mutate is of genealogical value - if you get a very close
match there is a good chance that the common ancestor lived in the last 400-500
years, ie the period since Thomas Cromwell's 1538
order that parishes in England should keep a register of baptisms, marriages,
and burials.
"In practice a match is only going
to useful if you are able to identify the shared ancestor (who need not be the
putative father - it could be someone in his
direct male line), or if the surname of the other person matches that of the
putative father - which would provide strong circumstantial evidence in support
of your hypothesis. I sincerely doubt that there are anywhere near 500 living
males who would fall into one of these categories, which means that your
chances of getting an instant answer are low. Furthermore, because the focus
has moved to autosomal DNA, the number of people taking Y-DNA tests seems to be
quite low (the fact that of the three main testing companies only one - Family
Tree DNA - offers Y-DNA tests could be seen as evidence for this).
"However, you shouldn't despair -
if you can find a documented descendant (in the direct male line) of the
putative father you can ask them to test. If they agree, then you've got
something to compare your cousin's results against - and even if they don't,
there's a chance you might get a match with someone else that provides clues to
the father's identity."
Why more than 3 million
people like you have taken the test
As I mentioned in the previous article
the focus has moved from Y-DNA - which looks at a single ancestral line - to
autosomal DNA, usually abbreviated as atDNA. Because
we inherit atDNA from both our parents, and they
inherited theirs from both their parents (and so on) it is capable of providing
us with matches on any of our family lines, at least in the last 6 or 7
generations - which is where our most perplexing 'brick walls' are likely to be
found.
Note:
although we inherit precisely half of our autosomal from our parents, that
doesn't mean that one-quarter of our DNA comes from each of our grandparents;
that's what it will be on average, but in practice it can vary quite
considerably, and the more generations you go back the greater the dispersion
from the mean. Indeed, there are some ancestors from whom you've inherited no
detectable DNA at all!
The pool of cousins is enormous -
Ancestry DNA calculated that, on average, someone with British ancestry has nearly
200,000 cousins who are 6th cousins or closer. You won't share detectable DNA
with all of them, but you will get lots of matches - the challenge is to identify
how you're related to the people you're matched with (if you're related at all
- there will be some false matches).
Over time there will be more matches, as
more cousins test - and the more of your known cousins
who test, the easier it will be to figure out how you're related to your DNA
cousins. That's because if you and one of your existing cousins both have a
match with the same DNA cousin, you know that the match must be on one of the
lines that you share.
Whichever company you test with you can
support LostCousins by using one of the following links:
Have your cousins tested
their DNA?
When I founded LostCousins in 2004 I
knew that finding cousins was important, but with the advent of DNA testing it has become more important than ever before. In the past we
searched for cousins in the hope that their research would fill in some of the
gaps on our tree (and ours in theirs), and with the aim of collaborating on
future research - but now we're after something more personal, their DNA!
Although autosomal DNA tests have been
around for a number of years it's only quite recently that sales have boomed,
increasing the user base from a few hundred thousand to a few million.
So far just over 1100 LostCousins members
have indicated on their My Details
page that they have tested their autosomal DNA (though I'm willing to bet that the
true figure is much higher) and, as previously promised, this information is
now available to their cousins. That means you can see which of your cousins
have tested, and they can see whether you've tested or not - information like
this is essential when you're working out how best to employ DNA testing as
part of your research
When this new feature went live last
week I discovered that more of my cousins had tested than I previously thought,
and this has opened up new opportunities to identify DNA cousins. Whether
you've personally tested or not, why not take a look at your My Cousins page to see which of your
cousins have already tested?
Tip:
the My Cousins and My Contact pages (there's one for each relative on your My
Cousins page) provide a great way of keeping track of your cousins, whether you
found them at LostCousins or elsewhere. It's one more reason why it makes
perfect sense to invite the cousins you already know to join LostCousins.
Findmypast add more
Easter Rising records
This week Findmypast added another
48,000 records to their Easter Rising &
Ireland Under Martial Law 1916-1921 collection, which documents the names
of both civilians and soldiers who were court-martialled in the years following
the Rising, as well as British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary search and
raid reports. I also found the papers from Court of Inquiry held in lieu of an
inquest which looked into the death of a civilian knocked down by an army
vehicle, so it's quite a wide ranging set of records.
The events of Easter 1916 provide a
backdrop to The
Irish Inheritance, the genealogical mystery which I reviewed last month.
It's the first book in the Jayne Sinclair series, and I'm sure I'm not the only
one looking forward to the second (in the last newsletter the author, M J Lee,
described how he wove together fact and fiction in the creation of the novel -
you can read his article here).
Victorians may have
been healthier than us
On Monday 17th October a new documentary
series began on BBC2 entitled The
Victorian Slum - you can find out more about it here and if you have
licence you can catch up with the first two episodes on BBC iPlayer. This article looks into the
Victorian diet, and questions whether it may have been
healthier than ours.
Whilst we think of Victorians as dying
young, a study entitled How the
Mid-Victorians Worked, Ate and Died published in 2009 noted that life
expectancy at the age of 5 was as good or better than today, while the
incidence of degenerative disease was 90% lower!
Talking of diet, recently published
research suggests that if young children are fussy eaters, it's not the fault
of the parents. Mind you, when I was growing up being fussy wasn't an option -
we were grateful for what we got (and woe betide us if
we left food on the plate). There's a BBC article about this new
research if you want to know more.
Review: The Death of Tommy Quick and Other Lies
This is a wonderful book. I greatly enjoyed A Habit of Dying, the first book to feature
Lydia Silverstream (you can read my 2014 review here),
but the follow-up, The Death of Tommy
Quick and Other Lies, is astonishly good!
Many genealogical mysteries have
multiple threads, so that we can be a fly-on-the-wall as the events that are
being investigated take place - but whilst it's a great way to bring the story
to life, it doesn't accurately reflect what it’s like for the investigator. In The Death of Tommy Quick we see
everything through Lydia's eyes, so it's much more realistic - and, like us,
she has other commitments and roles to play, as an employee, a colleague, a
partner.... the way in which her relationship with Stephen develops is
beautifully handled.
And, as so often happens in real life,
the initial investigation warps into something completely different - Lydia
starts out by trying to return a set of Great War medals to the soldier's
family, but in the process she makes one discovery after another, so that
before long we've forgotten about the medals (although, to her credit, our
heroine never does).
I don't know whether there's going to be
a third book in the series - I sincerely hope so - but the first thing I did
when I finished this one was to buy a second-hand copy of another book by DJ
Wiseman. Even if it's only half as good as the Lydia Silverstream
books it will be money well spent!
The
Death of Tommy Quick and Other Lies
was published as a paperback and on Kindle, but the paperback edition is
only available from the publisher,
which means it's rather expensive (£11 including postage within the UK, £19.50
elsewhere). However the Kindle version costs just
£3.49 and remember, you don't need to own a Kindle to read the e-book, you can
do what I did and read it on your smartphone (or a tablet, or a laptop). As
usual I've provided links to the relevant pages at different Amazon sites so
that, if you want to, you can support LostCousins:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
From time to time I review books that have no direct
connection with genealogy, but which have really impressed me - The
Persuaders: The hidden industry that wants to change your mind is one
of those books. Even though I've had an interest in psychology for half a
century I was still amazed to discover just how easily people can trick us into
making decisions, sometimes for our own good, but more often than not as a way
of selling us something we don't really need, or getting us to vote for someone
who doesn't deserve our support.
The author, James Garvey, is editor of
The Philosophers' Magazine so there was a little more about the Greek
philosophers than one might have expected in a popular book, but it was very
relevant to the subject in hand. Nevertheless, I suspect that many of us are
more worried about the impact that sites like Facebook and Twitter are having
on politics and on society, and that's another important section of the book.
Inevitably the book looks at
advertising, and the ways that we can made to believe
things that aren't true - even packaging can influence our decisions. Clever
advertisers can create a demand for their product by convincing us that it
fulfils a need we didn't know we had, and sometimes this involves positioning
an old product in a new market. When I first started buying mouthwash back in
the 1970s it was Listerine - I'm not sure there were any others then - but I'm
not sure I would have been so ready to use it if I'd known it had first been a
surgical antiseptic, then a floor wash, and finally a treatment for gonorrhoea!
I bought the Kindle version of this
eye-opening book, but it’s also available as a paperback.
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
I mentioned last month that I still had
a bottle of Elderflower Vodka that I'd made a few years ago - well, a couple of
weeks afterwards we had friends coming to dinner, and double cream was on
special offer in Tesco - can you guess where this is leading? I didn't have the
time or the inclination to make 'proper' ice cream using egg yolks, so instead
I looked up this recipe
for Philadelphia-style ice cream and adapted it to suit my needs, leaving out
the milk, the vanilla, and half the sugar, but adding equal quantities of my
own unsweetened Elderflower Vodka and shop-bought Elderflower Cordial (which
had also been sitting in the cupboard for a couple of years). I'm sure I don't
need to tell you that it was absolutely delicious!
I've had my ice cream maker since 1983 -
in those days they were very expensive, but I bought it with the proceeds of an
endowment policy that my mother took out for me when I turned 21 (it was about
£230, almost exactly the price of the Gelato Chef). My mother had passed away
in 1976 so I wanted to buy something really special, and whilst the choice of
an ice cream maker didn't go down well with my stepmother the fact that I'm
still using it 33 years later demonstrates that I got it right.
Coincidentally 1983 was also the year in
which the kitchen at our present house was installed (though we didn't move here
until 1997). And, since so many of you have asked, I can reveal that at long
last we're well on our way to a new kitchen! For the past two weeks I've been
using the downstairs cloakroom as a makeshift kitchen, but there's only so much
you can do with a microwave and portable hob - so we were absolutely delighted
to discover late this afternoon that we now have a working oven. No sink, no
taps, no worktops, no cupboards, and no floorcovering - but we do have an
oven, so tonight we'll be celebrating with a roast!
Update 23rd October: Although Yahoo operate the email service for many BT customers, I understand that those who have signed up since 2014 use BT's own email service (ie BT Mail rather than BT/Yahoo mail). I'd be interested to know whether both sets of users are affected by the problems mentioned above.
That's all for now - but I'll be back
soon with yet more news from the world of family history.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for permission in
advance - though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins
instead, as standard membership (which includes this newsletter), is FREE?