Newsletter – 25th
October 2024
Historical newspapers free this weekend ENDS MONDAY
Ancestry add Teesside
parish registers NEW
The Genealogist adds
2.5 million transcribed Kent records NEW
The 10-day old baby
who DIDN’T die in a house fire
Do you know someone
whose email account has been hacked?
DNA offers ENDS MONDAY
The LostCousins
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(dated 18th October) click here; to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between
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Historical newspapers free this weekend ENDS MONDAY
In
the run-up to Remembrance Sunday Findmypast are making available some of their
most useful records so that we can research the lives of our relatives who
fought in the Great War. This weekend it’s the turn of the newpapers
in the British Newspaper Archive, which can be accessed free through the
Findmypast site until midnight (London time) on Monday 28th October.
Image
© THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by permission of
Findmypast
The
good news (sorry!) is that ALL of the newspapers in
the archive can be viewed, not just the ones from early 20th century
– that’s over 85 million pages and, by my calculations, over 1 billion articles
that you can search, and then download free of charge. In Britain newspapers
really got going after 1856 when Stamp Duty was abolished – the price of the Manchester
Guardian, which had cost 7d in 1825, was reduced to just 2d (see this 2011 article
from the Guardian or follow this link
to see the legislation). By the way, the smudge in the right
hand corner of the image above is the ‘stamp’, which would have been printed
in red.
Search Newspapers at Findmypast.co.uk
Search
Newspapers at Findmypast.com.au
Search
Newspapers at Findmypast.ie
Search
Newspapers at Findmypast.com
Remember,
you don’t need to provide any payment information, but you will need to log-in –
which means registering if you haven’t done so previously. If you attempt to
register but are told that your email address is already in use, then you must
have registered at some time in the past, so go back to log-in, enter your
email address again (if not already shown), then click the Forgotten
password? link.
Many
of you will remember the wording Postage & Revenue which used to appear
on British postage stamps. Do you also remember how, when you went to pay your
gas bill at the showroom, you’d get a receipt with a postage stamp?
In
the days when Royal Mail was owned by the government it was permissible to use ordinary
postage stamps for small amounts of duty – although there were also special stamps
for different taxes. For example, there were still National Insurance stamps
when I started work – and even when they were discontinued people continued to say
‘stamp’ when they were referring to National Insurance contributions. And when
I bought shares for the first time, in the 1960s, there was another special
stamp on the contract note (you can see some examples of different revenue
stamps on this Wikipedia page
– you’ll probably recognise some of them).
At
one time birth, marriage, and death certificates bore a postage stamp – the
first one I came across when I looked just now was dated 1930, with a red George
V postage stamp, but there are many others in my files (as there probably are
in yours).
If
you took advange of the free access to many of
Findmypast’s records last weekend you may have seen the competition they’re
running, about five Welsh brothers who fought in the Great War. Coincidentally
there are 5 brothers in my tree who joined up, though they served with the Canadian
Expeditionary Force (CEF), their parents having emigrated to Canada in 1910.
Service
records of the soldiers who joined the CEF can be viewed online at the Libraries
& Archives Canada site – follow this link.
The
Great War (as it was known until an even greater war came long in 1939) was not
only different from every war that Britain had been involved in before, it was different from every war that Britain has been
involved in since. By the end of the World War 1 almost 25% of the entire male
population of the UK had joined up, over half of them conscripts. When you consider
that a quarter of the male population were either too young to join up, or too
young to serve overseas, and that at the other end of the scale a quarter were
over 40 at the start of the war, it brings home just how traumatic it must have
been for the mothers, wives, sisters, and children who were left behind.
it's
hard for most of us to imagine what it must have been like for them, not
knowing whether they would ever see their loved ones again. In far too many
cases, they didn't – and many of those who did come back were so badly affected
by the war that they were different people. As we now know, not all of the scars were visible.
Rationing
hit hard when Germany implemented a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. From
1915 Germany airships terrorised the population: there were 84 airships which
made 51 raids, dropping more than 5,800 bombs which killed or maimed nearly
2000 people, most of them civilians. By 1917 most of the raids were carried out
by aeroplanes – they made 52 raids in all, dropping 2,772 bombs which killed
857 people and injured more than 2,000 others. Compared to what was to come in
World War 2 it was nothing, but I doubt that the civilian population had suffered
as much since the English Civil War, more than 250 years earlier.
If
you follow this link
to the Imperial War Museum website you can hear archive recordings made by
people who were on the Home Front during the Great War.
Ancestry add Teesside parish registers NEW
Two
days ago Ancestry unveiled their new Teesside
collection. They describe Teesside as an ‘historical county’, but I think they’ve
got their wires crossed – it actually includes parts
of North Yorkshire and County Durham centred on the River Tees (though all of
the parishes in this collection seem to be in North Yorkshire). There have been
numerous boundary and name changes over the past 50 years, so I’ll defer to
Teesside Archives, who describe the collection as Parish Registers for the
area covered by Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland.
Teesside,
England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812
Teesside,
England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1923
Teesside,
England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1939
There
are well over a million baptism, marriage, and burial register entries in this new
collection and the total is likely to increase significantly when post-1812
burials are added.
Researchers
with interests in this part of the country will know that Findmypast have had
parish registers from this area for some years, however there are bound to be
differences in coverage and in the transcription. For examples, Findmypast have
marriages for Kirklevington up to 1861, but the marriage
registers for the same parish at Ancestry extend to 1939. You can see a summary
of Findmypast’s Yorkshire parish register coverage if you follow this link.
The Genealogist adds 2.5 million transcribed Kent records
NEW
I’ve
done well with my Kentish ancestors – though it was an unpromising start, since
the surname I started with was Smith. Fortunately he gave
the correct birthplace in the 1851 Census, and now – thanks to the Canterbury Cathedral
Collection at Findmypast I’m back to the mid-1500s on one of Edward Smith’s
lines, to a Walloon carpenter by the name of La(u)ncelot
Vandepeer.
But
there are lots of gaps in that part of my tree, so when I heard that The
Genealogist had added 2.5 million transcribed records
I decided to see what I could find – and within minutes I’d found a marriage and
a couple of baptisms that had previously eluded me, just from one line. There
are very few parish register images at The Genealogist
(none of them for Kent), but they have a lot of transcribed records – and that’s
the first key step in obtaining a copy of the original entry (assuming it has
survived). You can see their Kent coverage here.
If
you want to try out The Genealogist you can save £50 on their top subscription,
bringing the cost down to under £90 – not only in your first year, but in
future years (should you decide to continue). Please follow this link
to take advantage of the exclusive offer!
Tip:
in your first year you’ll also get a free 12-month subscription to the online
magazine ‘Discover Your Ancestors’.
When
I was growing up the saying “a stitch in time save nine” was heard a lot and we
all knew what it meant – delay doing something and it’ll
take 10 times longer. These days you don’t hear it said very often, and I’m not
sure that youngsters would even know what it means – but it’s just as true as
it ever was. Here’s how I know….
You
wouldn’t believe how many readers of this newsletter tell me that they don’t
have time to complete their My Ancestors page. Hmmm – so you’d rather waste
your valuable time duplicating research that your cousins have done, and bashing
your head against ‘brick walls’ that your cousins have already knocked down? Pull
the other one – and that’s another phrase from my youth that you don’t hear any
more.
LostCousins
is not a social networking site – the reason we want to connect with our
‘lost cousins’ is because they’re researching OUR ancestors. It might be hard
to believe that connecting with someone through the 1881 Census can help knock
down ‘brick walls’ in the 1600s and 1700s, but that’s often what happens when
you collaborate with your ‘lost cousins’. Which reminds me of another saying
from my youth: “a problem shared is a problem halved”. So true!
Note:
if you received an email telling you about this newsletter – or, indeed, any of
my newsletters – then you’re a LostCousins member. So you can add relatives to
your My Ancestors page, search for cousins, enter the competition, and win
prizes – all without ever paying a penny to anyone (since most of the censuses
we use are free online) When the prizes are being handed out there is no discrimination
against members who don’t pay a subscription – the only people who miss out are
the ones who haven’t entered any data.
Very
soon I’ll be announcing the prizes for my Annual Competition, which runs up to
31st January in each year. When does it start? Well, it’s already
started – every ‘direct ancestor’ or ‘blood relative’ you have added to your My
Ancestors page since the
last competition ended counts as an entry for the current competition (and
entries from any of the 1881 Censuses count double, as you’re far more likely
to connect with ‘lost cousins’ when you use this census).
In
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the dodo pronounced that
”everybody has won and all must have prizes” and that was close to being
true for my competition last year, when over 1000 prizes were awarded, including
opportunities to attend exclusive Zoom presentations with top speakers. Very
soon I’ll be announcing the list of this year’s prizes, but you don’t have to wait
to add even more relatives to your My Ancestors page – you can start
right now, and that way you’ll also have a chance of winning one of the prizes
that are being given away DURING the period of the competition, rather than
waiting for the end.
Tip:
even if your ancestors left the British Isles long before the censuses we use,
most of your living cousins will still be here – and of course they’re going to
be descended from the relatives who stayed behind. What really matters is not
where your ancestors were in 1881, but where your cousins’ ancestors were.
The 10-day old baby who DIDN’T die in a house fire
Last
month I wrote
about the man who was kidnapped at the age of 6 and only reunited with his
family 73 years later. This week I heard about a girl who was stolen as 10-day-old
baby, an abduction that was apparently concealed by burning down her home. She
was relatively lucky as it was only 6 years before she was reunited with her
real mother, though for a 6-year-old it was extremely traumatic. You can read
all about it in this Guardian article.
Do you know someone whose email account has been hacked?
Although
there are many wonderful things about the Internet, there are some bad people
who attempt to exploit our security weaknesses and our human weaknesses. One of
the most common problems over the years has been email accounts being hacked,
either because the email provider was hacked, or because a weak password was
used. Accounts run by Yahoo seem to have been particularly vulnerable, and
because Yahoo have provided email services for some of the biggest ISPs (including
BT) a lot of people have lost control of their email accounts over the years.
Unfortunately
the people who lose out aren’t necessarily the ones whose email has been hacked
– they’re often the people who had the misfortune to be in that person’s email address
book – so if I become aware that the email account of someone I know has been
hacked the first thing I do is contact them in some other way and suggest that
they contact their friends and relatives to warn them. That’s easily done if
you have 50 or 100 email addresses, but what if you have a 1000 or more? Fortunately
there is a way to send out bulk emails…..
In
the days when there were only a few thousand LostCousins members I would send
out emails and newsletters 100 at a time using blind copies. This method is
still used by some clubs and societies, and even from time to time by bigger
organisations (including government departments) when they're sending out press
releases. Here’s an example
of how you could do it using Gmail (which is a good choice for your new email account
if your old one has been hacked – Gmail is very secure).
The
limit of 100 recipients isn't imposed by Gmail, it's a more general limitation.
Note too that Gmail will probably limit you to sending 500 emails over a 24 hour period, so if you have a really big address book it
might take a few days to contact everyone.
Most
people aren't going to fall for these scams but, depending on the content of
the message, some will. Bad grammar isn't necessarily going to act as an
effective warning – you should see some of the genuine emails I've received
over the years, even from big companies – and once an address book is on the
dark web there's nothing to stop it falling into the hands of someone who does
know how to write good English. Of course, almost everyone's email address has
been stolen at a some point – but when an email
account is hacked it provides the scammers with an opportunity to make their
scams more plausible. The most sophisticated scammers will look through past
email correspondence, but fortunately this is currently rare (however it cost a
friend of mine several hundred thousand pounds in proceeds from a property
sale).
I’m
particular sensitive to this issue, not because I object to receiving the scam
emails – it’s par for the course when you run an online service. No, it’s
because our cognitive abilities decline with age, and most LostCousins members
will have people in their address book who are less able to spot scams than you
or I.
Never
assume that just because you wouldn't fall for a particular scam, other people
won't either. Sometimes people are too busy or too tired to give something
their full attention before clicking a link or opening a document - and
sometimes coincidence plays a part, like the time I received a scam COVID text
alert which arrived a few days after I'd had my first meal in a restaurant
since the start of the pandemic. Or the fake email about a delivery, which
arrives when the reader is expecting a genuine delivery. I know someone who
fell for that scam.
Most
importantly, never assume that just because the first scammer who gets hold of
your address book is lazy and has poor English the next scammer will be equally
incompetent. Recently someone got hold of the mailing list of a family history
society and sent out emails offering life memberships at a very attractive rate
– lots of people where convinced by the emails,
including me (though, fortunately, as I'm an honorary member of that particular
society I didn't consider taking up the offer).
Some day, probably quite soon, scammers will be able to use AI to
generate personalised emails which take into account past correspondence – that
moment can't be far away. Will one of your relatives fall for it because you
didn’t think to warn them?
Note:
please make sure you provide a secondary email address on your My Details page
so that I can write to you if and when your primary
address is hacked. It’s something you should do anyway – every year I lose
touch with hundreds of LostCousins members who have forgotten to tell me that
their primary email address has changed.
Novelist
Wendy Percival, whose Esme Quentin mystery series is a favourite of mine, has kindly
agreed to write an article about her grandfather, whose change of name
concealed a dark secret…..
I
always knew my thespian grandfather’s name, Ken Barton – actor, comedian,
pantomime dame – was only a stage name but it would be many years before I
discovered the real reason he adopted it.
His actual name was
Herbert Henry Coules Colley. I learned from my mum that when ‘Bert’ married my
grandmother, Winifred Griffiths (a professional singer), in 1929 he’d been less
than candid about his age, making out that he was 48, when he was actually 59. His unsuspecting bride was a mere 26. i never met Bert: he died in 1945 when my mum was 10 years
old. By then he and my grandmother were living apart, partly – it was said –
because of irreconcilable differences caused by their 33-year age gap.
During my family
history research, I’d tracked his theatrical career through the newspaper
archives, finding reviews of his performances along with advertisements in
publications such as The Stage and The Era, touting for work – a
sort of theatrical LinkedIn of its time. In December 2020 I posted a blog post
about my grandparents’ performing in pantomime (It’s Panto time!)
and a reader left a comment that my grandfather’s name had come up during a
search for his own theatrical ancestor, around 1899 and 1900. I immediately
spotted an intriguing anomaly. Bert hadn’t been using his stage name back then,
as I had previously assumed, but his real name.
[Cutting from
Music Hall and Theatre Review 30th May 1912 Image © THE
BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by permission of Findmypast]
The
immediate benefit to me, of course, was that I could widen my research into
Bert’s career by searching using his real name. Returning to the newspaper
archives I discovered a fabulous article in The Era, dated 1910, in
which Bert cites a huge list of parts he’d played along with his “adventures”
in South Africa in the mid-1890s, confirming a well-told family story (albeit
with the usual caveat about what you read in newspapers!). So
if he’d had such an illustrious career as Herbert Colley, why had he taken on a
stage name? It wasn’t as though he’d changed his theatrical genre – his
repertoire had always been light entertainment and pantomimes.
Perhaps
the first clue was in the 1911 census: his first wife Ada, whom he’d married in
1895, and his 11-year-old daughter Zillah, were living with Ada’s widowed
mother. Of course, one possible explanation could be that Bert was performing
elsewhere in the country – his own 1911 census entry, recorded in Barnsley,
Yorkshire, lists him as a visitor. But trawling through the theatrical press in
1912 and 1913, I came across advertisements searching for work in The Stage by
a Miss Adah Adaird, who identified herself as Mrs
Herbert Colley and alongside is “child actress” Zillah Colley. (Previously Bert
had always used The Stage to promote his services but
he seems at this point to have swapped his allegiance to The Era as I can find
no mention of him in the same publications as his wife and daughter.)
By
1915 the name Herbert Colley has completely vanished from the theatre press and
instead Ken Barton begins to appear. I can only conclude that Bert wished to
distance himself from his wife and therefore from the name Colley. So, perhaps
it’s no surprise that in 1929 when Bert married my grandmother he did so under
the name of Kendal Barton (Barton was also added to his deceased father’s name).
When the births of their daughters were registered in the years following, it
was also under the surname Barton.
But
despite Bert’s declaration on the marriage certificate that he was a widower,
the first Mrs Herbert Colley (aka Ada), was still very much alive. In 1938, Ada
emigrated to the US. On her immigration documentation, she states on the form
that her husband didn’t come with her. Ada died in Los Angeles in 1941.
When
Bert died 4 years later, the name on his death certificate is recorded as
Kendal Barton, otherwise known as Herbert Henry Coules Barton. My grandmother
was the informant – she’d returned temporarily to nurse him before he died. So,
was she genuinely unaware of her husband’s real name at this time? Or was it a
matter of expediency? Because, of course, had she given the registrar Bert’s
correct surname, Colley, she may have worried it could cast doubt on her own
legitimacy as his lawful wife and that of her children. Perhaps she hadn’t
wanted to take the risk!
Thanks,
Wendy, for that fascinating true story. I wonder whether your grandmother
deliberately exaggerated your grandfather’s age when she registered his death –
he was 76, not 77 when he died. For anyone who is yet to discover the Esme Quentin
series, here’s a link
to my review of the first book.
The
Ancestry DNA test is the only one that I can whole-heartedly recommend – and
I’ve taken ALL of the tests from ALL of the major
companies. But it’s a bit more expensive than some of the competitors tests, so
it makes sense to place an order when there’s an offer on.
You
can currently save on DNA tests at Ancestry’s UK, Australian, and Canadian
sites, so whether you’re taking the test yourself or asking cousins to help out, now’s the ideal time. True, you might save a few
dollars more by waiting for Black Friday, but that’s 5 weeks away and there
would be zero chance of getting the results back in time for Christmas. The
offers end at midnight on Monday 28th October (GMT, AEDT, or ET).
Please
use the relevant link below so that you can support LostCousins with your
purchase (if it doesn’t seem to work first time log-out from Ancestry then
click the link again):
Did
you read about
the hoard of 11th century silver pennies that was discovered by
detectorists, and recently sold for £4.3 million? A great find for them – and for
the farmer who owned the land – but was it a good investment. What I mean is,
had the coins been buried as an investment for the future, rather than simply for
safe-keeping, would the annualised rate of return have
been impressive?
You’d
think that turning coins with a face value of £10 15s 4d into a £4.3 million
bonanza has to be a good investment, but when you
consider that they were probably buried 956 years ago (the coins are dated 1066-1068)
the rate of return is well under 2% per annum. And if you wanted to borrow
money in medieval England you’d have paid a lot more
than that in interest – perhaps 3% or 4% per month, so 36% to 48% per
annum (they didn’t do compound interest in those days). Even the King of
England had to pay high rates of interest on his borrowings.
Our
cat is getting on (aren’t we all) and we got the impression that she was being
terrorised by other cats, and that sometimes they would come in through the cat
flap and steal her food. Yes, we know all about cat flaps controlled by magnets
or microchips, but Missie couldn’t get on with them at all, so we ended up leaving
the cat flap unlocked. Recently we decided to install a camera in her room so
that we could spot any intruders, and it has been quite a revelation. Considering
that the camera cost under £20, but can see in the dark
and swivel to follow Missie or any interlopers around the room it was an
absolute bargain. If you want to try it out yourself
you’ll find the details here – there are
lots of other uses, of course. And there are no subscriptions to pay, though I
did have to install a memory card – which cost under £10 for 128GB, over 15 million
times as much memory as my first computer!
Finally,
a reminder that much of the knowledge included in this newsletter is only
revealed when you click the links – so if you’re reading a printed copy you’re
really missing out. Viewing the newsletter on screen also allows you to increase
the size of the lettering if your eyesight is on the wane (like mine).
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......
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2024 Peter Calver
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