24 September 2006 LostCousins Late September newsletter
Newsletter - Late September 2006
CONTENTS
* Telephone directories online
* From Mary Bryant to Ann Inett
* Scientific archives free online
* Snobs
To visit the main LostCousins site please go to www.LostCousins.com
Thank you for your patience over the past 2 weeks while we've been testing the next round of improvements to the LostCousins site. Our testing is nearly complete and we plan to implement the changes during October - so watch out for our next newsletter!
This month more resources have become available online, including phone directories from 1880-1984, and scientific papers from 1665. The world of genealogy gets ever more interesting.
Are you an AOL or Tiscali user living in Britain? If so it's particularly important to check out the article "Don't lose touch".
Is researching your family history all about dead ancestors? Absolutely not! Our objective at LostCousins is to find as many as possible of your living relatives - and the chances are there are over 500 of them!
Right now we're only able to find a small fraction of your cousins because our membership is still growing - but it won't be long before the benefits of our accurate automated matching system become clear.
What you can do right now to help is enter more of your relatives from the 1881 Census. Have you entered relatives from every line? Many members haven't, and are missing out as a result.
And did you know that most of the matches we make involve brothers, sisters, and cousins who had families of their own in 1881? That's because Victorian families were large, so there are invariably lots of them!
One way to trace living relatives living in Britain is to look them up in phone book - which you can do free online at http://www.bt.com
But have you ever thought of looking up your ancestors? Ancestry.co.uk has just added the London phone directories for 1880-1984, and other counties are due to follow. London includes the suburbs, so the coverage is already quite extensive.
http://tinyurl.com/hlo8h (Ancestry.co.uk)
http://tinyurl.com/z5qgm (Daily Telegraph article)
Every month hundreds of newsletters are returned to us with the message "user unknown". Have you entered an "emergency contact email address" on your My Details page?
Entering a second email address allows us to get in touch should your main contact email address change, or stop working for any reason. The backup address could be your own, or it could be that of a close friend or relative - we'll use it with discretion.
It's particularly important to take action if you are an AOL or Tiscali user. According to a recent report in The Times their UK operations are up for sale, and it's possible that your email address will change at short notice.
It would be bad enough if you didn't get our newsletters - but just imagine if a 'lost cousin' was trying to get in touch?
In our last newsletter we told the amazing tale of Mary Bryant, and asked whether any members were related to her. So far none has come forward - but we did hear from Dennis who has a similar story in his own tree....
Ann Inett was found guilty of housebreaking and sentenced to death at the Worcester Assizes of 1786. As with Mary Bryant, her sentence was commuted to transportation, and she sailed to Botany Bay with the First Fleet before continuing to Norfolk Island.
There she was offered the chance to become housekeeper to Philip Gidley King, Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, an offer she willingly accepted - and she then went well beyond the call of duty, bearing him two sons!
There's much more to this fascinating story on the Worcester News website:
http://archive.worcesternews.co.uk/2005/1/21/33045.html
If you're enjoying the 3rd series of "Who Do You Think You Are?" you might be interested to know that you can obtain the 2nd series on DVD. The best price we've found (11.99) is at Amazon.co.uk, and the link below will take you to the page:
http://tinyurl.com/j5zdx (Amazon)
We've just come across a copy of the "News of the World Household Guide and Almanac 1957", which had an article predicting the technological advances that were "almost certain" to be made by the year 2000, including
- the conquest of cancer
- transatlantic rocket mail
- cultivation of the Sahara Desert
- the production of plastic beef and other food substitutes
- the atomic plane, car, and household power station
- the turning of night into day by the release of chemicals 70 miles up
- prolongation of the human life span to 125 years
The many inventions that were NOT predicted include bar codes, personal computers, cellular phones, video recorders, audio cassettes, CDs and DVDs, Post-It-Notes, liposuction, Prozac, and of course email and the Internet.
The only prediction made that has so far proven correct was the landing of unmanned satellites on the moon (which the USSR achieved in 1959). But, to their credit, they did highlight the shrinking of the polar ice caps, an early sign of global warming.
Prediction is always difficult (especially about the future, as Sam Goldwyn allegedly quipped). Who could have forecast even 5 years ago that genealogy would become as popular, or that so much of the research could be carried out at home?
SCIENTIFIC ARCHIVES FREE ONLINE
If you're interested in science, or had an ancestor who was a scientist, you may like to know that the Royal Society is making hundreds of papers from 1665 onwards available online - and until December access is free!
Papers include Halley's 1705 description of the comet he discovered, and an account of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with lightning (1752). More recent contributions include the discovery of penicillin and Stephen Hawking's first paper.
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1373
Thanks to all those who pointed out that 'snob' is an old name for a shoemaker or cobbler - and apparently one that is still used in some parts of the country, as well as in the navy.
Ian in Merseyside also told us about another old term which lives on in the navy, 'slops', meaning a clothing store - apparently one of his ancestors was described as a 'slop seller' in 1787.
Some members received a copy of our last newsletter with errors in the article about email signatures, so here's a corrected version.....
One of our most experienced members, who as a 'buddy' devotes a lot of time to helping others, wrote to us with a great idea:
"Would members of LostCousins be willing to have an email signature mentioning LostCousins - I know I would?"
Here are some of the suggestions she came up with:
I'm a Cousin - are you? http://www.LostCousins.com
Cousins circle the world! http://www.LostCousins.com
Proud to be a member of LostCousins! http://www.LostCousins.com
Whichever email program you use it's easy to set up a signature (and it saves you having to type your own name every time). Here's a page that explains how to do it if you use Outlook Express:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/oe/personalize.mspx
Don't forget to include the LostCousins web address as part of your signature!
AND FINALLY......
We'd like to thank all those who have sent us suggestions for increasing awareness of the LostCousins site. The more members we have the more 'lost cousins' we can find - each time the membership doubles we find 4 times as many!
If you have any ideas please send them in - there's a free subscription for the best suggestion.
The LostCousins Team
http://www.LostCousins.com
info@LostCousins.com
© Copyright 2006 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?