30 July 2005 LostCousins Newsletter
Newsletter - July 2005
CONTENTS
To visit the main LostCousins site please go to www.LostCousins.com
The primary aim of LostCousins is to put you in contact with other members who share the same ancestors - your ‘lost cousins’. That’s why, up to now, we haven’t included in the matching process any relatives who are related only by marriage.
In early August we will be introducing Extended Matching, which offers the opportunity to contact other LostCousins members who have entered the same relatives - even though there doesn’t seem to be any shared ancestry. After all, if the same person appears on the family trees of two members, there’s a good chance that there will be information that can be shared - maybe even photographs.
Contacts who are not related will be identified on your ‘My Cousins’ page by being shown in italics.
The best family history book we’ve ever read was ‘Ancestral Trails’ by Mark Herber. A new edition came out last year, and the paperback version has just been released at 20 pounds, which is not expensive for nearly 900 pages. But we’ve just made an amazing discovery - if you’re a member of one of the UK’s leading book clubs (the ones based in Swindon) you can get it for a mere 5 pounds, an amazing bargain!
Did you know that you can get free online access to records of cases at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, from 1674 to 1834? You can search by name, by date, by the form of punishment, and numerous other criteria. Whether you have a ‘black sheep’ in the family, or are just curious, it’s a fascinating site.
Do you ever have trouble finding your ancestors on the census? It’s bad enough when the information is wrongly transcribed - but did you know that even when the information is there, you might be prevented from finding it by the idiosyncrasies of the Search function?
For example, searching by county usually won’t work unless the enumerator actually wrote it down.
Suppose you search the 1881 Census at Ancestry looking for a John Smith born 1869 in St Pancras (which is in Middlesex). You’ll get two results if you enter St Pancras as the “parish or place”, but only one of these also mentions Middlesex. Enter Middlesex as the county and you’ll get just one result.
Had you been looking for that John Smith you would have needed to have known that he was born in St Pancras (or guessed that the census might say St Pancras, even though he was born in an adjoining parish). The same is also true of other censuses at Ancestry.
And by the way, if you search for ‘St Pancras’ it won’t bring up results where the parish is shown as ‘Saint Pancras’, or just ‘Pancras’ (so the answer is to search for ‘Pancras’, as this will find any of the three variations).
It’s not just Ancestry where you need to keep your wits about you! A quirk of the FamilySearch 1881 Census index is that you need to enter the county of birth as London, rather than Middlesex, even if the census shows the birthplace as St Pancras, Middlesex. To check this out try searching for John Smith born 1869. If you enter the county of birth as London you’ll get 27 results, one of which is John Smith born St Pancras, Middlesex.
Even more confusing - if you do enter the county of birth as Middlesex you’ll find the other John Smith, the one who birthplace is merely shown as St Pancras, with no county!
© Copyright 2005 Peter Calver & Lost Cousins Ltd
Please do NOT copy or republish any part of this newsletter without permission - which is only granted in the most exceptional circumstances. However, you MAY link to this newsletter or any article in it without asking for permission - though why not invite other family historians to join LostCousins instead, since standard membership (which includes the newsletter), is FREE?