Newsletter
- 7th October 2016
Ancestry.co.uk
is FREE this weekend ENDS SUNDAY
Do
you have Scottish ancestors?
Oxfordshire
parish registers go online
Was
your ancestor a dentist, a midwife, a masseuse, or a physiotherapist?
Early
travel records (1573-1677) at Findmypast
New
York marriage licences online (including Donald Trump)
What
are your chances of finding a DNA cousin?
Elderly
New Zealanders build their own coffins
Review: Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 23rd September)
click here; to find earlier articles use the
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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,
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new edition of this newsletter available!
Ancestry.co.uk is
FREE this weekend ENDS
SUNDAY
From now until midnight (London time) on
Sunday 9th October all UK & Ireland records can be accessed free at the Ancestry.co.uk
website - so it's a great opportunity to fill in the gaps on your tree as well
as the gaps on your My Ancestors
page.
Follow this link
to Ancestry to support LostCousins - thanks!
Tip:
don't click the Free Trial link on the Ancestry website - if you do
you'll be asked to provide your credit card details. To take advantage of this
weekend's offer you will need to register, but you won't have to provide
credit card or bank details.
Do you have Scottish
ancestors?
Ancestry is the only site (apart from
the pay-per-view ScotlandsPeople site) which has the census references you need
to enter relatives from the Scotland 1881 Census on your My Ancestors page - you won't find the references at FamilySearch
or Findmypast.
So, please make use of this weekend's
free access to note down the references for your Scottish relatives - and
increase your chances of connecting to your Scottish cousins!
Oxfordshire parish
registers go online
I have ancestors from Oxfordshire, and
whilst I visited the Oxfordshire History Centre many years ago I wasn't able to
see the entries for my relatives because the registers hadn't been microfilmed.
Bad news for me, but good news for everyone with ancestors from Oxfordshire,
because it meant that for Ancestry to put the registers online they had to
arrange for them to be scanned.
This means that I now have beautiful colour
scans to back up the notes I took from transcriptions all those years ago -
including my great-great-great-great grandparents' marriage at Daylesford in
1791, which - unusually - had only one witness, rather than the statutory two.
Daylesford, by the way, is now in Gloucestershire but until 1931 was a detached
part of Worcestershire - however, just to confuse everyone the registers are
held in Oxford and are included in the Ancestry's Oxfordshire collection!
According to the Oxfordshire History Centre website they hold parish registers
for the Archdeaconry of Oxfordshire, which roughly corresponds to the pre-1974 county
boundary.
These links will take you straight to
the search pages:
Oxfordshire,
England, Church of England Baptism, Marriages, and Burials, 1538-1812
Oxfordshire,
England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1915
Oxfordshire,
England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1930
Oxfordshire,
England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813-1965
LostCousins member Mary has pointed that
the way that some of the burials have been indexed will make them difficult to
find - for example, an entry which refers to 'John, son of John Smith' may have
been indexed simply as 'John' with no surname. Similarly
'Ann, wife of John Smith' may be indexed as 'Ann'. As with any record set, the
key to finding the entries you want is to understand the records.
Tip:
marriage registers for the period 1754-1812 will sometimes be found with the combined
registers for the period 1538-1812, so if you can't find a marriage for this
period in one record set, try the other one.
Was your ancestor a
dentist, a midwife, a masseuse, or a physiotherapist?
This week Ancestry have released a
collection of occupational records that might tell you a little more about what
your ancestors did:
Medical
and Dental Students Registers, 1882-1937
Physiotherapy
and Masseuse Registers, 1895 -1980
Roll
of the Indian Medical Service, 1615 -1930
UK
& Ireland, Medical Directories, 1845-1942
I haven't had a chance to look at these
records - and in truth I doubt that any of my ancestors, who were mainly 'ag
labs', will be recorded there. But hopefully some of you will find them useful!
Early travel records
(1573-1677) at Findmypast
It might not be one of their biggest
datasets, but the 27,000 records in the Licences
to Pass beyond the Seas collection that Findmypast have made available
today in conjunction with the National Archives are some of the oldest travel
records that have survived. According to the press release they record "the
details of pioneering early travellers who left Britain for Ireland, continental
Europe, New England, Barbados, Bermuda and other overseas colonies at the dawn
of the age of sail".
Most people in the registers fall into one
of two categories: soldiers taking the oath of allegiance before going to serve
in the Low Countries between 1613-33, and persons going to Europe, chiefly to
Holland but also Scotland and Ireland, in the period 1573-1677. However,
according to the National
Archives there are also several registers of passengers to New England,
Barbados and other colonies between 1634 and 1639, with one of 1677.
New York marriage
licences online (including Donald Trump)
An index to more than 3 million marriage
licences filed in New York City between 1950 and 1995 has gone online thanks to
Reclaim the Records, a
not-for-profit group of genealogists, historians and others with an interest in
ensuring that data which should be publicly-available can be easily accessed by
members of the public.
As far as I know none of my relatives
married in New York during that time period, but I did find a name I recognised
- a certain Donald J Trump applied for marriage licences in 1977 (with Ivana M Winklmayr, formerly Zelníčková),
and 1993 (Marla Ann Maples). Follow this link to carry out your own
search.
Note:
Trump's third marriage, to Melania Knauss, formerly Melanija Knavs, didn't take place until 2005, so doesn't appear in
the index.
An application for a licence doesn't guarantee that a marriage subsequently took
place, but in most cases it will have done. Images of marriage licence indexes
for the period 1908-29 are online at the Internet Archive, and can be viewed here.
Earlier this year Software MacKiev took over Family Tree Maker from Ancestry - as
developers of the Macintosh version they were well-placed to do so. The information
Ancestry held about many users will have been passed to MacKiev,
but in Europe they were unable to do this because of data protection legislation
- so instead emailed individual users to let them know.
If you haven't received one of those emails,
or inadvertently deleted it, this link will take you a
page on the MacKiev website where you can register to
receive information about new versions and free updates to existing versions.
What are your chances
of finding a DNA cousin?
John Reid, who gave some excellent talks
during the last Genealogy in the Sunshine
course, is best known as the author of Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections, one
of the most popular genealogy blogs. At the beginning of the week he posed the question
"Will you find a cousin using a DNA test?", and it's well worth
reading what he wrote.
Whilst he concludes that it's very
likely you'll find cousins - virtually certain, in fact, given the millions of
people who have tested - he points out, as I did in my DNA Special newsletter
earlier this year, that the chance of recognising the common ancestral surname
is low. (This is why I recommend looking for places that you and your cousins
share, rather than surnames - they can come later.)
Note:
I was delighted to see that several of the people I voted for were in the British
top 10 in John's 2016 list of 'Rock Star' genealogists. Three of them have
spoken at Genealogy in the Sunshine, including Chris Paton (2), Debbie Kennett
(3) and Else Churchill (6), whilst three more long-term supporters of
LostCousins were also in the list: Nick Barratt (7), Audrey Collins (8), and
Celia Heritage (9=). But in pole position was Kirsty Gray,
who also won in 2013 & 2015 - congratulations, Kirsty!
Ancestry DNA recently made some changes which
mean that it's currently not possible to transfer your Ancestry DNA results to
Family Tree DNA, a popular option since it enables matching with an additional
pool of researchers.
However this shouldn't affect your decision to test, or which
company to test with - I'm sure that Family Tree DNA will soon update their
software to accept the new format (after all, they probably make more profit on
a DNA transfer at $39 than they do on the sale of tests at the new low price of
$79!).
Whichever company you test with you can
support LostCousins by using one of the following links:
I wrote in the last newsletter about how
much easier it is to find the births (and deaths) of children who didn't live
long enough to appear on a census now that many of the historic birth, marriage,
and death registers for Ireland are available online - follow this link
to the article if you missed it first time around.
Unfortunately it isn't nearly as easy to find missing children who
were born in England & Wales, or Scotland - even if you know of their
existence from the 1911 Census, which uniquely gives the number of children
born to each married woman, and states how many were still living at the time
of the census.
For example, I know from the 1911 Census
that my great-grandmother Rose Bright had three children who don't appear on my
family tree, but I don't know what their names were, or when they were born
(though there are some ominous gaps between the births of the children that I
do know about). They lived in the London area, where Bright is such a common
surname that the chance of identifying them in the GRO birth indexes is
minimal.
It's ironic that just a few months after
the 1911 Census was taken the GRO started to include the mother's surname
(generally her maiden name) in the birth indexes. When you search using two
surnames it greatly limits the number of results, even if both surnames are
fairly common - for example, according to FreeBMD there
were 12924 Smith births in 1912, but in only 77 of these was the mother's
surname was Brown.
The good news is that for some parts of
England, mostly in the north, there are local BMD indexes which include
additional information - such as the mother's surname (for births before 1911)
and the age at death (for deaths before 1866). The UKBMD website acts as a portal to those
local indexes which are online - look for the Local BMD link at the top left.
Tip:
the inclusion of extra information in the GRO indexes after 1911 makes it
feasible to extend our trees beyond the last published census, and the 1939
Register also helps - see this Masterclass
article from last December.
US scientists have recently published a
study suggesting that despite apparently ever-increasing life expectancies, 115
might be a natural limit. I'm a little sceptical about their reasoning - see
this BBC News article if
you want to know more.
Elderly New Zealanders
build their own coffins
None of us likes to be reminded of our
own mortality, so I was quite surprised to learn that in New Zealand elderly
people are joining together to form 'coffin clubs' where they can make new friends
and build their own caskets! If you really want to know more follow this link.
How does an author weave together
imagination and historical fact - and where should the line be drawn? The
author of The Irish Inheritance (which
got a glowing review
in my last newsletter) lets us into the secret….
Hello, my name is M J Lee and I write a particular type
of historical fiction dealing with genealogy and family history. I believe all families have stories they can tell that reveal the
truth about the past on a very human level.
But how much is true and how much is fiction?
I love historical fiction. I grew up on a diet of I, Claudius by Robert Graves, The Three Musketeers by Dumas, and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, through to War and Peace by Tolstoy. I read
history at university and ending up doing a research
degree in the subject. And, even though I left the academic world to work
commercially, I still read historical fiction. Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian, Julian Rathbone, and Hilary Mantel all being favourite writers.
I believe all these latter writers had something in common.
They created works produced by the imagination and
based on or concerned with events in history. Some used more imagination than
others but all researched their periods thoroughly, basing any
actions in their books on real historical events.
I do the same with my genealogical mysteries. In my latest genealogical novel, The Irish Inheritance, the main characters, Declan and Michael, are fictional, but the
events that they experience are as true to history as I can make them.
In this case, the history is that of the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916, and the subsequent War of Independence. To
ensure accuracy, I dug through the extensive archive of interviews with the
participants in the Rising at the Irish Archives, on RTE, the state television
station, the Pension service, as well as many memoirs
for the period from the likes of Eamonn O’Malley. The Bureau of Military History in Dublin
contains over 1200 interviews from people involved in the Easter Rising,
transcribed in the 1950s. These are a wonderful trove of original material
which I used extensively to ensure the events I
described actually took place.
I try to make the genealogical research as accurate as
possible too. The Irish Inheritance has a simple idea at its centre; how can a
genealogical investigator discover the truth of an
adopted businessman’s past when all she has are two clues: a book and an old
photograph.
Here, the skills of genealogical and historical research
come in. Parish registers, lists of war dead, interviews with veterans,
meetings with relatives, old books and old pictures,
all can be brought to life to reveal the truth.
Historical accuracy is incredibly important to me, but I’m
writing a novel not a work of non-fiction. The imagination comes into play when
I see the events through the eyes of my characters,
with all their eccentricities and flaws.
So my version of history isn’t ‘real’, but a version of the
truth. But isn’t that true of all history, whether it’s fictional
or not?
What a wonderful explanation! I don't
know about you, but I'm very much looking forward to reading more Jayne
Sinclair genealogical mysteries - and if a learn a little bit of history in the
process, that's a bonus!
Of course, there's a big difference
between fact-based fiction, like The
Irish Inheritance, and fiction presented as fact - I hope you'll never
dishonour your ancestors (and mislead your descendants) by taking that
wrong-turning when you're writing about your own family tree.
You may recall that at the end of August
I published an exclusive preview of Nathan Dylan Goodwin's latest Morton
Farrier genealogical mystery, commenting that the first page was so powerful
that I had to stop for breath!
Well, the rest of the book certainly
lived up to that impressive start, with twists and turns that kept me guessing
right to the end. In fact, the surprises continued even after the story ended,
when I discovered that not only were many of the characters, places, and events
real - the inspiration for the book had been provided by events in the author's
own family. (Intriguingly one of the key characters was said in the novel to
have attended my old school - I wonder whether there was any truth in that part
of the story?)
The plot unfolds during the early years
of WW2 as a recently-widowed housewife volunteers to join the WAAF (Women's
Auxiliary Air Force), and discovers that her fluent German is a valuable asset
- but I can't tell you any more, because I've signed
the Official Secrets Act. What I can tell you is that there are a multitude of subplots
playing out in the present day as Morton Farrier carries out his research:
there's not only his impending wedding (will he and Juliette finally tie the
knot?), but also his search for his own father. As the story neared its
conclusion I found myself conflicted, for much as I wanted to know how Morton's
assignment panned out, I was enjoying it so much that I really didn't want this
book to end!
The Spyglass File is available in paperback, or as a Kindle book - I
can thoroughly recommend it, and whilst you needn't have read the earlier books
in the series, it would be an awful shame to miss out on all that extra
enjoyment! As usual you can support LostCousins by using the relevant Amazon
link below when you place your order:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
When I last checked 20 of the 22 reviews
at Amazon's UK site gave the book 5 stars (the maximum) - so I'm clearly not
the only one who was enthralled!
Review: Amelia Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders
Angela Buckley is not only a member of
the Crime Writers' Association who specialises in Victorian crime, she's also
the Chair of the Society of Genealogists - who better to write about one of the
most infamous villains of the 19th century, Amelia Dyer?
Amelia
Dyer and the Baby Farm Murders tells
us everything we want to know about those awful events (and sometimes a little
bit more). Employing aliases and misleading advertising, and with more than a
little help from her daughter and her husband, Amelia Dyer managed to get
around the regulations in order to line her own pockets - but at the cost of
countless young lives. Nobody knows how many children died at her hands - a
2013 article
in The Independent suggested it could
have been as many as 300, putting her on a par with Harold Shipman (although
what Dyer did was far, far worse).
Reading this book just after finishing The Spyglass File it struck me how both
featured adoption and unscrupulous women.... but I mustn't say any more,
otherwise I'll risk giving the game away.
I read the Kindle version, but it's also
available in paperback. These links will take you straight to the Amazon page
so that you can read what other reviews have to say (18 out of 19 reviewers at
the UK site gave it the maximum rating of 5 stars):
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
I don't know about you, but I'm finding
that I read far more books than I ever used to, partly because they're cheaper,
and partly because they're easier to get hold of - I remember when I'd have to
go my local bookshop, give them a list of the books I wanted, then wait several weeks for the
books to come in. And far from getting a discount I'd have to pay the full list
price plus the cost of postage from the publisher to the bookshop. How
things have changed!
Being able to choose between physical
and digital editions also helps - my fiction tends to be digital, and the basis
that I won't read it more than once, while I generally prefer physical copies
of non-fiction volumes. You'll probably have noticed that I usually include
links to Amazon when I review books - partly because it gives you a chance to
see what others think of the books, but also because you can support
LostCousins by using those links when you order from the three Amazon sites
listed above (even if you end up buying something else entirely).
In some parts of the world you'll find
it cheaper to order books from The Book Depository, because the price
they quote includes shipping to almost anywhere in the world. Whilst there
aren't any reviews at their site, so it's still worth following the Amazon
link, the good news is that you can still support LostCousins when you order
from The Book Depository provided you use this link.
Here in the UK summer is over and
Christmas is fast approaching, promising a plethora of televisual delights -
it's the one time of the year when I would feel lost without a copy of the Radio Times. Like many of you, I
suspect, I can still remember when you had to buy the Radio Times to find out what was on BBC, and the TV Times to find out what was on ITV;
"What a palaver!", as my late father would have said.
The good news is that there's an offer
just starting where you can get 12 issues of the Radio Times, including the Christmas issue, for just £1. Not £1
each, but £1 for the whole lot or less than 9p each - that's an amazing 97%
discount!
To take advantage of this rather
generous offer just click the banner above, or else this link.
Incidentally, I had an email this
morning from Antoinette who took up the Who
You Think You Are? magazine subscription offer in
my last newsletter - she wanted to let me know that she'd just received her
free 3 month Findmypast Britain subscription. I'm glad to say that (as I write)
the offer is still running - you'll find full details here.
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......
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?