Newsletter - 30th June 2018
GRO's
PDF trial likely to continue
FamilySearch adds 135 million Scandinavian records
Records kept by 18th century male midwife go online
Will
your descendants be extra-terrestrials?
Save
on DNA tests in Australia & Canada URGENT
A chance to get 5 issues of WDYTYA mag for £1 each
Bad
news travels fast, fake news travels faster
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GRO's PDF trial
likely to continue
It's unlikely that the GRO's
PDF trial will end on 12th July after 9 months - this was a minimum period, and
unless the GRO are losing money I can’t see why they wouldn’t continue, perhaps
until a permanent solution is introduced. The best information I have from the
GRO themselves is that it's very improbable that they would end the current trial
without giving some notice to their customers.
But do bear in mind that PDFs
aren’t always the cheapest option. If you’re not certain that the entry you've
found is the correct one, it might work out cheaper to order a certificate -
see this article
from last October.
FamilySearch
adds 135 million Scandinavian records
If I'm looking for records in
countries which aren’t English-speaking I always start at FamilySearch, since
they have an amazing collection of records from (almost) all over the world.
This week FamilySearch added more than 135 million new records from Denmark, Sweden,
and Finland - you can find out more about these records here.
Records kept
by 18th century male midwife go online
One of the smallest online
record sets, and also one of the most unusual, has
just gone online at Findmypast. It's
comprised of the records kept by one William Waylett
who, most unusually, was a midwife (as recently as 2015 only 122 out of more
than 40,000 midwives in the UK were male). Waylett
lived from 1729-1815, and the collection includes records of more than 2000
births in Lydd, Kent between 1757 and 1815.
Will your descendants
be extra-terrestrials?
I was a big fan of science
fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, and the incredible rate of progress between the
first Sputnik in 1957 and the first moon landing in 1969 made it seem as if all
my dreams were going to come true. But now, nearly half a century on, we're no
closer to having a permanent base on the moon, Mars, or anywhere else in the
Solar System.
So it came as quite a surprise to read in article in last
week's New Scientist which talked
about some of the issues involved in travelling to another star system -
perhaps to Proxima Centauri b, the closest planet that is thought to have
similar characteristics to Earth. Using technology that currently exists it would
take around 6300 years to make the one-way journey, so clearly the settlers who
arrive won’t be the ones who left Earth, but their distant descendants - and
this creates a problem, because unless the spaceship was very large it would be
inevitable that, after a few generations, all couples would be cousins.
Astronomer Dr Frédéric Marin
from the University of Strasbourg and a colleague have worked out that to
guarantee a population on the new world that wouldn't succumb to inbreeding would
require a minimum of 49 men and 49 women to set out on the great journey - you
can read their paper and the assumptions they made if you follow this link.
Of course, colonists from
earlier centuries also faced a similar challenge, though their knowledge of
genetics and their computational abilities would have been very limited - they
wouldn't have been able to run simulations on an abacus, let alone a computer. Those
who can trace their ancestors to the arrival of the Mayflower invariably find that many of the marriages of the earlier
generations were between cousins, and in some communities there was a
determination to avoid marrying outside - for example, Martin Van Buren (who
served as the 8th President of the United States between 1837-41) wrote in his
autobiography that his family was “without a single intermarriage with one of different
extraction from the time of the arrival of the first emigrant to that of the
marriage of my eldest son, embracing a period of over two centuries and
including six generations."
Save on DNA tests
in Australia & Canada
If you live in Australia or New
Zealand you may already know about Ancestry's DNA offer, which ends today (Saturday
30th June) - but now you can support LostCousins by
using this link when you
place your order.
There's also a special offer
for Canada Day - until Tuesday 3rd July you can buy Ancestry DNA tests for just
$89 plus shipping when you follow this link - and Ancestry.ca
also have a free access
weekend.
A chance to get
5 issues of WDYTYA mag for £1 each
At this
time of year there are often
bargains on offer, and this summer is no exception. If you live in the UK you
can get 5 issues of Who Do You Think You
Are? magazine for just £5 in total, which is less than you would pay for a
single copy in the newsagents! Click the link below and enter the promotion code SS18AWIN.
There is a catch, of course -
to get this special deal you have to fill out a direct
debit form, and if you don't cancel your subscription it will continue, but the
extra special pricing won’t. On the other hand I read
it every month, and have done ever since the first issue - so you might well
get hooked like me! Follow this link to
secure the special price (and support LostCousins at
the same time).
Tip: there are special deals on other BBC and
Immediate magazines, including Gardeners' World, BBC Good Food, and the Radio
Times - this link will list them all.
Bad news travels
fast, fake news travels faster
Research carried out at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology has found that fake news travels further and faster than
the truth. The researchers examined how 126,000 stories spread between 2006 and
2017, then arranged for the stories to be fact-checked by independent
organisations (you can view an abstract from the research paper here).
Is this relevant to family
history? I suspect it is - my perception is that public family trees which are
full of errors tend to be copied more frequently than those which have been properly-researched.
It seems very unlikely that
this is true, but according to an article by Lucinda Lambton - daughter of the
late Viscount Lambton - in the Spring issue of The Oldie magazine she was told by a distinguished historian, now
deceased, that when working in the archives of Windsor Castle he had come across
a certificate proving that there was a marriage between Queen Victoria and John
Brown, her retainer (you may recall that they were superbly played by Judi
Dench and Billy Connolly in the film Mrs Brown).
Apparently, the historian
excitedly showed the certificate to the Queen Mother, who was having tea by the
fire - and she promptly consigned the evidence to the flames.
It all seems most improbable
- until one remembers that Queen Victoria's diaries were rewritten by her daughter,
Princess Beatrice, after her death to expunge them of anything considered
'unsuitable'. You can browse the expurgated copies here.
I'm currently reading two
very different books written by LostCousins members. An Extraordinary Ordinary Family, by Keith
Hopkinson, is a slim volume which brings together a range of disparate characters,
all interesting in their own way, and all related to one person - the author.
The focus of The Hundred Parishes, by Ken McDonald,
is very different - an enormous tome in
landscape format, it features 104 parishes which are all in the same quiet corner of England, each with their history, each with
their historic buildings. There are over 6000 listed buildings amongst these
parishes, and many of them are featured amongst the nearly one thousand colour
photographs that bring this massive volume to life. If you have connections
with north-west Essex or east Hertfordshire you'll
find a list of the parishes on the Hundred Parishes website.
Do you have an electric car?
I don’t know anyone who does, but apparently tens of thousands of owners in the
UK have been fined because they didn't tax their vehicles - even though there's
no Road Tax to pay. It's bad enough to be fined for not paying something, but
to be fined for not paying nothing…..
This is where any
major updates and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted
an error first reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check again before writing to me, in case someone else has
beaten you to it......
I've rushed this
issue out because I'm starting jury service on Monday - which also means I won't
be able to respond to emails as quickly as I normally would.
Peter Calver
Founder,
LostCousins
© Copyright 2018
Peter Calver
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