Finding lost cousins: the strength of weak bonds

The Lost Cousins website is terrific. I am 'agnostic' about the matching service itself, as I'll explain. I avidly read the regular newsletter which comes out in good chunky quantities. I am perhaps destined to be a late adopter of the website.

I find the most rewarding research partnerships come from finding cousins who haven't got years of experience, as these are greater in number and much more likely to have a dormant or incomplete profile on Genes Reunited. I have posted over 120 letters to new cousins I've proactively sought in the last year, most residing in England, most found through either an address at probate or a search for free at 192.com, and importantly, most replying. On LostCousins I found two relatives who match my attributes rather precisely, middle-class, administrators, web savvy. Whereas what provides the synergies in research are acquaintances you barely know, the 'strength of weak bonds', so called. And what could be a weaker bond than 6th cousinship! I have dined like a prince next to Queens Park golf course, had a personal tour of the Free Church N2 and to show it's not all posh, carried an inebriated (lost?) cousin up the steps of his tower block shortly after he confided some valuable information to me in the pub. So these weak bonds powerfully opened the doors to new terrain.

I prefer to be pro-active in my research. I hunt for specific cousins on Genes Reunited who are most likely to be able to help. I've even extracted data from Genes where the cousin themself was reluctant to tell me anything. They hinted of their descent from a couple, Mr and Mrs Smith, who I knew were uncle and niece. Despite the common name, from the information publicly available on Genes I was able to discreetly identify the line of descent, though I've no wish to alert them to the irregular marriage.

My goal is usually to identify a good cousin, who is likely to reply to my letter, and then to retrieve a mailing address for them and write to this warm lead.

I run the Virgin London Marathon for charity - help me raise £1700!

pubs, gyms, parks, churches, roads, closed... but not the mighty pen

this has been a very long Christmas, betwixmas with an interminable crawl back to civilisation following the nadir of New Year's Eve. And so it has proved useful to have 24 letters to pen to new cousins around the world. It takes something of military planning to create and despatch these packages but I shall expect a rich return when I do. I ploughed through all my notes from this Christmas's bumper plunder. I tried to pick a shortlist of one person from each twiglet of the tree. My Swansea Harrises yielded 8 new cousins. My Salisbury Taylers served me 4 new correspondents, Cornwall, Derbyshire and Somerset fished up 4 each across sundry other lines. Many of this last group were the result of intensive work to bring mid Victorian forebears down to the current generation. I especially salute 1) the Times which let me work around Lt Col Hudson's service overseas with the 9th Gurkhas 2) UK phone books on Ancestry which gave me the initials of E H Pearce's
widow in Somerset 3) the LMA marriage records on Ancestry which found me the missing Broad sister, Louisa's, nuptials and thus her offspring hitherto unknown to add to a colourful tree.

Taylors

My aunt gave us a treasure trove of photographs a few years back.  One of these was cousin Joyce's wedding photograph in the Gower peninsula.  We had no idea of the date but I eventually found the marriage record, and Joyce herself, in 1999.  Her mother was one of my Grandpa's large Taylor clan, born in Swansea around the time of the 1901 census. This last Christmas I decided to sit down for a day or two and worry away at the Taylors.  I've made one or two positive identifications and found several possibles.  I'm proudest of John Jones who lived in Pierce Street Queensferry and married Ellen Louisa Taylor in 1920 - I even have John's date of death (5 Jan), and now an address for his great-grandson. I may have stayed up till nearly 3am. This could have been a frustrating task as Joyce wrote only a brief letter, told me a few cryptic points on the phone and now, I sadly see, died in 2005. Update: her major clue, which at the time seemed like wilful withholding of data, was the firstname of her cousin 'in North Wales'.  Believe it or not, this firstname was enough for me to locate her cousin, twelve years later, in her final years, and from this source get all the missing information, and much more.

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A photographic haul at the station

Very excited as just come back from trip to cousin in Devon with large haul of 500 digital images- photos, postcards, documents, letters. It is pretty comprehensive for my Carlines and Aireys, who were Northcountry folk, while our component branch rested for the main part in North London. There were some oddities - my grandmother turns out to have been baptised at the church where I have for the last two years helped run a Cub Scout Pack. My small cousins are evidently at school in a very lovely setting in Dorset which I know intimately from having walked around it with my sister on our 'early morning runs'. Kath Davies writes a letter of condolence to her aunt on the death of her uncle. Kath's last remaining child died a week ago, (74 years later). Kath could never have written that letter of condolence.

Finally there is a photograph for grandma's grandma Ellen Carline, and she is sitting in her chair to boot - was the photograph thus taken at home? I have seen the chair, a Windsor, much more comfortable than it looks. Ellen looks a stoic as well she might having seen off an alcoholic husband yet provided so fully for her children that her estate was not finally resolved until 1976, three-quarters of a century after her demise, and around the time of my own birth. I was further able to compare her photograph with that of her cousin W B Hannan, the Jamaican farmer, and I was pleased to report a significant similarity. Their cousin 'H E C' sends a postcard of the Eyam Plague memorial service of 1902 with a pinhole through the likeness of herself and her (deceased) husband. Having scanned in the image, I'm now not sure where the pinhole was.

Another postcard begins with the words 'Dear Cousin' and is signed E Turner, of Woodseats, Sheffield 1911. It may be that the word 'cousin' is my fevered imagination, but I'd like to yet think that Mrs Turner might prove to be a granddaughter perhaps of John Bagshaw, needle grinder of Sheffield - Ellen's uncle (update: unfevered and corroborated).  It's most pleasant to have this deluge of information from the past, though I'm sanguine that it may be the last for a little while.

Meat in your surname soup

I am focussing these days on my father's family in Manchester and the northern towns. They possessed common lastnames but no middle names. They left no wills. You can't search through the small and neighbourly parish records as you can in southern villages, nor are they in and out of each other's houses at census time.

You really have to work to tease out the data.

Yet I have traced marriages for these people with rather common names: Ann Gibson, Jane Bell, 'Sarah Stevenson', John Jackson, Elizabeth Ann Jones, Edward Jones (no relation).

Thanks to the census, principally, one can follow families through fairly persistently. It would have been an impossible exercise without today's finding aids:

* the census (for a birthplace for Jane Bell)
* a parent's will viewed for free at LDS (for Sarah Eleanor Stephenson)
* checking the original registers having found a possible marriage in a named parish on LancashireBMD (for Edward Jones)
* the 1900 census for the US (which told me that John Jackson had married about 1878 and that his wife's name was Mary Jane)
* the Ancestry probate index which allows you to search for a few towns (like Birkenhead) but mostly only counties: it yielded an administration for J T Jones in Birkenhead with his daughter Elizabeth's married name
* the Newcastle Courant newspaper available free at BL/LDS which yielded an announcement of marriage for Ann Gibson with the crucial information: daughter of Charlton

All these tools helped enormously, yet they've only recently become available, due to the rising revenue from family historians, which stems in part from the hard work of those who have transcribed records accurately and shared them freely.

Mystifying motives: the 1911 census index

Interestingly the 1911 census has twice listed relatives on the form and then these were crossed off so they DON'T appear in the index! One of these was Ellen Elizabeth Cooke (really Cook) who was a nurse in Stoke on Trent living with her aunt Hannah. Ellen must have got called in to the hospital or something as she is deleted from the form and missing entirely from the indexed census. Very strange. Without that deleted line I would never have found Ellen's lovely granddaughter a piano teacher in Derbyshire who has her photographs and stories.
Ellen was born in 1881, and her parents died shortly afterwards. She isn't living at home in 1891 nor in 1901, so without the 1911 census, we'd never have known about her.

Reply from BrightSolid 18 Sept 2010
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Good afternoon,

Thank you for your email.

If the entries are crossed out on the original page they will not be included in our transcript as the individuals would not be present when the census was being recorded.

Best regards,

FindMyPast Support Team

Comment
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Here’s my gruntworthy reply from the usually on-the-money bright solid. The whole point of the index and indeed the interest family historians have in the data, isn’t to know precisely whether a given relative was at home though this is nice, nor to have an exact list of who WAS at home (with the implicit assurance that those who bedded down elsewhere must strictly be omitted). No! It’s to capture all and sundry data which could be useful genealogically. An index which omits this data to satisfy notional and conflicting criteria does not serve the genealogical community well!