Deceasedonline completes Kensal Green database

All 330,000 records for Kensal Green Cemetery and West London Crematorium can now be searched on Deceased Online.

See the blog post here for details including well known people found in the records.

Beyond the Old Bailey Online: Archival Sources for Trials

A post which explores some of the most significant records from the late 18th century onwards, particularly records of the Central Criminal Court held at The National Archives, that can help to flesh out the story of any proceedings you find on The Old Bailey Online. Some of the record groups mentioned are: HO 16, HO 77, CRIM 1, CRIM 4, MEPO 3, HO 17, HO 18, HO 19, HO 12, PCOM 3, PCOM 6.

Read the article by Chris Barnes, Modern Domestic Records specialist at TNA, at http://goo.gl/4L0nIC

TNA podcast: News from FamilySearch

Sharon Hintze, Director of the London Family History Centre, a regular speaker at TNA, provides an update on FamilySearch. It is rapidly evolving, with new features and collections, and partnerships with commercial organisations.
The presentation starts with a discussion of the history and  raison d'etre for the LDS involvement with Family History which leads into discussing the website in its present incarnation. There is a reminder that only about 5% of holdings are online, and that percentage is decreasing as acquisition of new material outstrips the ability to place it online. I was surprised that the same applies to TNA holdings. If you're looking for pre-1857 probate records there's a hint about how to find out about the applicable source and possible access through the FamilySearch microfilm or other medium collection.
Hurrah! You can access audio AND the slides that went along with the presentation, given in mid-January, at  http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/news-familysearch/  The presentation runs 55 minutes, time well spent.

British Library's WW1 website

As the centenary of the start of WW1 approaches websites are springing up like poppies in Flanders Fields. Supported by over 500 historical sources from across Europe, a new resource from the British Library examines key themes in the history of World War One, presents original source material, and over 50 newly-commissioned articles on how war affected people on different sides of the conflict.

www.bl.uk/world-war-one

Finding distant cousins using autosomal DNA

If you're close minded about anything new, so enamored with Y-DNA you can see no further, or get turned off by statistics you should probably leave this post right now.

If you'r still with me open up to the possibilities of autosomal DNA testing which, at its most elementary, allows you to confirm the biological reality of close relationships.
For more distant relationships the often quoted statistics, that with an autosomal test, on average, you have a 90% of matching a 3rd cousin, 50% for a 4th and 10% for a 5th cousin deter many from probing further.

Yet chances are you have substantial segments of DNA in common with more distant cousins, the probability is small but we have many more of such distant cousins. It's a matter of chance.

Kitty Cooper's Blog recently carried the story of her match, a bit under 10 cM on chromosome 16, with two people, 6th and 9th cousins. They were of Norwegian origin and she was fortunate enough to find the matches had good ancestral research.

Unfortunately while DNA provides the evidence, the clue that a connection exists and an idea of the closeness of the relationship, it's not exact. Kitty, who shows up as third to distant cousin on my 23andMe match list, points out in a post on the 23andMe Community that "any two Ashkenazi Jewish participants in the study shared about as much DNA as fourth or fifth cousins."

Maybe one day we'll be able to genetically engrave a family tree in our DNA to be passed along to descendants.

Findmypast British in India collection

Findmypast has just published over 2.5 million records detailing the lives of the British in India from 1698 to 1947. The collection, released in partnership with the British Library, includes:

British India Office birth and baptism records 1698-1947
British India Office deaths and burials 1749-1947
Indian Office wills and probate records 1749-1957
India Office East India Company and Civil Service pensions 1749-1947
East India Company cadet papers
Applications for the civil service

The collection, name indexed with links to image originals, is available across the findmypast system including findmypast.com.

I'll be searching the collection for my lost relatives, the ones who just disappear from the UK and other online records. They can turn up in unexpected places as one of mine did a few years ago in US military files.

How much DNA do you share with your father's aunt's great-uncle's brother?

Its the type of question that now sends me to Wolfram Alpha. Go to www.wolframalpha.com/ and type in the query. The result is a diagram showing the relationship and a table including the information that the person may be a great great granduncle with a blood relationship fraction of 1/64 (1.5625%) or great great grandfather, 1/16 (6.25%).

I've written suggesting they add the average number of centimorgans to the table.

FreeBMD January update

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Saturday 25 January 2014 to contain 235,362,957 distinct records. Major additions of more than 5,000 entries this update are, for births 1940, 1943, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964-70; for marriages 1952, 1962, 1964-69; for deaths 1967, 1969-71.

Ancestry updates Surrey BMB collection

New records have been added to Ancesty's collection of baptism, marriage and burial records for Surrey, sourced from the Surrey History Centre.
Baptisms, 1813-1912 now has 750,387 records, up from 683,008
Marriages, 1754-1937 now has 600,741 records, up from 543,595
Burials, 1813-1987 now has 506,969 records, up from 458,787.

Canadian WW1 service files plans

"Unprecedented access to .. high-quality digital copies of the more than 650,000 (CEF) service files for free anytime and anywhere." That's the promise from Library and Archives Canada, with completion of the project, expected in 2015.
According to a release from LAC, Public Works and Government Services Canada will undertake the digitization. Each file contains, on average, 49 images, for a total of over 32,000,000 images or almost 617 terabytes of scanned information.
Not being able to handle the original documents will be a pity but that's understandable for the long term preservation with the collection permanently stored at LAC's Preservation Centre for future generations.
Digitization does mean that parts of the collection will be inaccessible for a while.
See the details of the initiative at http://goo.gl/R24Djf

RetroReveal

At Saturday's OGS Ottawa Branch meeting Kyla Ubbink spoke about RetroReveal, a free online tool to uncover hidden text, see faded inks and photographs, and discover what may lie beneath.

To use it go to retroreveal.org, register for a free account and upload an image. Small images work best. You can crop an image after initial processing and resubmit. The program "transforms images from a standard RGB colorspace into a variety of other colorspaces", so it works best on colour images. I found a faded sepia photo of my great uncle, killed in WW1, was improved. Kyla recommended using the RetroReveal output  in conjunction with Photoshop, or other similar software.

Thanks to Paul Jones for a correction to the web address.

Is it the only way to go?

There can be few people who have contributed more to family history in Eastern Ontario than Mike More, and that likely goes for Ontario as a whole. If not for his family tragedy Mike would now be preparing to take over as President of the Ontario Genealogical Society.

On Sunday, in an opinion piece Serving Your Society on the OGS Ottawa Branch blog, Mike mentions that about a quarter of the jobs across OGS are unfilled; branches have closed for lack of leadership; there are important positions, including President and vice-President of OGS, open to be filled in May. Mike's article appeals for volunteers to fill these positions.

What's the alternative? According to the article "let our organizations fold and leave the hobby to the large commercial outfits ... "

Do you buy that those are the only two options? I don't. A variety of active healthy family history organizations exist. What are they doing right? Learn from them and be ready to make necessary major changes. That requires exceptional leadership and a willingness to recognize the need for major change by the voting members.

A healthy plant requires substantial pruning to thrive, not trimming around the edges which is my perhaps not totally informed perspective on what the OGS review has been. As they say, "Sacred cows make great Steaks."

See also At What Point Do You Stop Embracing Change

Copyright chill

The lead article in the latest Mocavo news, by Michael J. Leclerc, is Copyright and the Oral Interview. It relates to recording interviews with relatives for family history purposes.

His advice, qualified as "the important thing," is "to ask every subject to sign a form giving you permission to use the recording any way you like."

I'm not sure if Mr Leclerc is a lawyer or if not where he got his legal advice. There are no references. Is this advice applicable just for the US?

I've been interviewed a few times for broadcast and only recall one occasion on which I was asked to sign a release. What's your experience?

 

Thanks to Marnie Mccall for the tip.

Lancashire BMD update

With all the action at the big commercial websites it's easy to overlook the non-commercial data sites. Lancashire BMD at www.lancashirebmd.org.uk has just added 3,793 Marriages for Blackpool RD from the 1960s to 2012:

Bispham, All Hallows (1984-2004)

Blackpool, Christ Church with All Saints (1966-1989)

Blackpool, St.Paul (1976-1992)

Blackpool, St.Stephen (1985-2009)

Blackpool, St.Thomas (1979-2003)

Blackpool, St.Paul, Marton (1983-2012)

Blackpool, Holy Trinity, South Shore (1983-1991)

Blackpool, St.Peter, South Shore (1985-1991)

Blackpool, St.Mary, South Shore (1983-1998)

Blackpool, Holy Cross, South Shore (1988-1999)

Blackpool, St.Nicholas, Marton Moss (1969-1996)

Blackpool, St.Christopher, Hawes Side (1991-2011)

The music of the genes

Mark A Jobling from the University of Leicester has published a comment in Investigative Genetics.

The music of the genes

The most famous of musical dynasties is that of the Bachs. In Leipzig for a conference, I visited the Bach Museum opposite the Thomaskirche where the greatest Bach of all worked as Kapellmeister for 27 years, and is now buried. There, the family’s many names are laid out on a wall, from Johann Sebastian’s great-great-grandfather Veit, a miller and player of the cittern, born around 1550, via J.S. himself, and on to his grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst. One by one, the names light up, and as each Bach is illuminated his music fills the air.

The occurrence of so many great musicians in seven generations of one family might suggest musical ability in the genes. Francis Galton, in his Hereditary Genius[1], studied musicians alongside judges, statesmen, scientists, commanders, authors, poets and artists, as one of his classes of ‘eminent men’ (note, no women). As well as these brainy and artistic types, he cast wrestlers and rowers into the mix, too. Galton investigated the pattern of inheritance of exceptional ability within families, showing that the eminence of relatives of an eminent man declined with the degree of relatedness, and taking this as evidence of heritability.

There are two difficulties with Galton’s approach to musical ability - the phenotype (general eminence) is complex and vaguely defined, and the influence of the environment is not accounted for. In the Bach family, for example, musical training at a young age was the norm, and clearly led to a good living, so alternative careers were not necessarily high on the agenda.

Modern geneticists have also been interested in questions of musical inheritance, and have mostly focused on a simpler phenotype, absolute pitch (AP) - the ability to instantly recognize and correctly name the pitch of any of about seventy different notes in the middle of the auditory range. The phenotype is generally rare, and found in only approximately 1% to 2% of music students and musical professionals, so is far from being a proxy for musicianship. Clearly, AP requires some prior exposure to notes and their names, and an ability to fix and recall these associations. Oliver Sacks, in a chapter of his book Musicophilia[2] entitled ‘Papa Blows his Nose in G’, points out that the real wonder of AP is that for people who possess it, each tone has its own unique characteristic (for example, F-sharp-ness), which to them is often analogous to colour. Indeed, some composers, including Scriabin and Messiaen, explicitly linked notes and colours, possible examples of synesthesia, in which one kind of sensory stimulus evokes another.

AP is a complex trait, involving both genetic and environmental factors: musical training during early development contributes to its acquisition, and it is more frequent in Asians than Europeans, a finding that some have attributed to early exposure to languages in which tone is particularly important. Genome-wide linkage analysis [3] in families showing both AP and synesthesia highlighted a shared region on chromosome 6, supporting the relationship between these phenotypes. Subsequent sequencing of candidate genes revealed otherwise rare amino-acid-changing variants in affected members of four families in EPHA7, a gene encoding a member of a family of cell-surface-bound receptor tyrosine kinases that may play an important role in neural differentiation and connectivity in the developing brain.

One particular genetically defined group appears to exhibit a high natural ability for music. These are people with Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS [4]). Carrying a 1.5- to 1.8-Mb deletion on the long arm of chromosome 7 that removes 26 to 28 genes, subjects suffer from a constellation of abnormalities, with a mean IQ of 55, and severe difficulties in spatial tasks such as solving jigsaw puzzles. However, there are compensating strengths in musical ability, with many showing skill in singing or playing instruments. There is disagreement about the incidence of absolute pitch in WBS: in a study by neuroscientist Howard Lenhoff [5], five young WBS subjects all had AP, but a more recent larger study has failed to find a convincing association [6]. Lenhoff’s own daughter, Gloria, has WBS and is a musical savant, singing almost 2,000 songs in many languages from memory, and performing with renowned orchestras.

As well as phenotypes that enhance musical abilities, there are some that do the opposite. Congenital amusia (or tone deafness) is the failure to acquire the perception and recognition of music, despite having normal hearing, language, and intelligence. One patient seen by Sacks [2] could not recognize ‘Happy Birthday to You’, even though, as a school-teacher, she was obliged to play a recording of it at least 30 times a year. To her, the sound of music was ‘like pots and pans being thrown on the floor’. Family studies [7] show a genetic component, since 39% of first-degree relatives of subjects have amusia, compared to a population frequency of about 4%, but no gene hunts have yet been undertaken.

Setting aside these unfortunate tone-deaf cases, music is a cultural universal, and findings of prehistoric bone flutes in southern Germany show that humans have been making sophisticated music for at least 42,000 years [8,9]. But what is it all for? Darwin believed that music evolved through sexual selection; by analogy with birds and their songs, the creation and appreciation of music was part of the complex process of attracting the opposite sex. ‘Music has a wonderful power … of recalling in a vague and indefinite manner, those strong emotions which were felt during long-past ages, when, as is probable, our early progenitors courted each other by the aid of vocal tones’ [10]. In Darwin’s opinion, language came after music. Herbert Spencer disagreed, claiming that music arose naturally from the cadences used in emotional speech. In modern times, Steven Pinker [11] has sided with Spencer, arguing that music is simply a useless byproduct of language (‘auditory cheesecake’). Steven Mithen [12], however, believes that music is too different from language to be a byproduct, and that its emotional power indicates a long and important evolutionary history. A consensus seems unlikely to emerge any time soon.

The Leipzig conference in which I participated was concerned with language, and I learned that linguists disagree violently about some fundamental aspects of what modern languages can tell us about populations in the distant past. Funnily enough, music might help here. Analysing characters such as rhythm, pitch and dynamics in traditional vocal songs from nine indigenous populations of Thailand [13] allows a music-based distance measure to be calculated between them. Comparison of this to analogous distances based on languages and genetics (using maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA) shows that music is a better fit to genetics than language is. Likewise, a geographically broader study of Eurasian populations [14] shows that high musical similarity predicts high genetic similarity, and that the relationship is stronger for maternal than for paternal lineages.

Perhaps, then, musicology could replace historical linguistics as a tool to find cultural connections that reflect deep shared ancestry - the language changes, but (like the legacy of Bach) the melody lingers on. Mothers sing to their babies, after all.


Reproduced from Investigative Genetics 2014, 5:2 under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The electronic version of this article, which includes references, can be found online at: http://www.investigativegenetics.com/content/5/1/2

Forgery

An interesting story An ‘Antique Smith’ Burns forgery in Ayr Carnegie Library

Thanks to Brenda Turner for the tip.

Australia Day

Happy Australia Day. Enjoy your barbies and be grateful you don't have to huddle around it for warmth as anyone foolish enough to stay outside in Ottawa's weather long enough to cook a steak would today.
Access to Ancestry Australian records is free for this weekend and will last until 27 January. http://goo.gl/u5jl0S

Ancestry updates Dorset electoral registers

Ancestry's collection Dorset, England, Electoral Registers, 1839-1922 now has 1,584,958 entries.

Immigrants to Canada 1930-1950

A new website, a private commercial initiative, is now online with names contained in Orders in Council of the Privy Council of Canada for the years between 1930 and 1950. The names are in free browse lists which show names of immigrants approved to come to Canada as well as the people in Canada sponsoring them.
Those of British or Irish origin were exempt from the regulations requiring notice in the Orders in Council. I found a man who was an Emeritus Professor at a university I attended. There's a contact address to purchase additional information about the immigrant:

Family name and first name
Age
Citizenship
Ethnic or religious identification
Address
Intended occupation in Canada

Normally also show is the following information about the sponsor of the immigrant:

First name and family name
City in Canada where they are living
Relationship to the immigrant
If they are Naturalized and when that occurred
How long they have been in Canada
Their occupation and financial situation

Find the site at www.orderincouncillists.com/

Thanks to Glenn Wright for the tip.

Phishing Alert

Wikipedia defines phishing as the act of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
In the past 24 hours I've received two three such attacks, by way of emails purportedly from known genealogy contacts, containing a link to click. In both cases I was tempted but resisted. Phishing attempts can almost always be recognized by their generic nature as well as the request to click a link. Legitimate e-mail messages usually contain information to which phishers would not have access. If in doubt don't click the link. Contact the person from whom the communication is from to verify the authenticity.