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Genealogical Mystery: The Vanished Child by M J Lee

Here is a novel that could keep you enthralled as the evenings draw in. Although it is a work of fiction it contains some useful tips about tracing ancestors who were part of the child migrant programme.

The Vanished Child by M J Lee is the fourth in the Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery series and sees the ex-police detective and Genealogist investigator search for a long lost man. The researcher must find the older half-brother that her elderly step-mother never knew she had until her own mother confessed on her death bed to having had an illegitimate first child.

The boy had been placed in a children's home while his mother attempted to get back on her feet, only for him to be shipped off to Australia before she and her new husband could claim him back.

Background to the novel

In the 1920s to 1970s more than 130,000 children were sent to a “better life” in Australia and Canada, under the child migrant programme.

The children ranged in age between three and 14 and mostly came from deprived backgrounds and were already in some form of social or charitable care, such as the boys' home in the fictional story. At the time, it was believed that the children would lead happier lives in their new countries and charities such as Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society, the Anglican and Catholic churches and local authorities helped with the organisation of their emigration.

The truth is that many ended up being abused or suffering hardship.

 

Well worth a read:

The Vanished Child by M J Lee

Here is the blurb on the author's website:

What would you do if you discovered you had a brother you never knew existed?

On her deathbed, Freda Duckworth confesses to giving birth to an illegitimate child in 1944 and temporarily placing him in a children's home. She returned later but he had vanished. 

What happened to the child? Why did he disappear? Where did he go? 

Jayne Sinclair, genealogical investigator, is faced with lies, secrets, and one of the most shameful episodes in recent history as she attempts to uncover the truth.

Can she find the vanished child?

This book is the fourth in the Jayne Sincalir Genealogical Mystery series, but can be read as a stand alone novel.

Every childhood lasts a lifetime.

 

http://www.writermjlee.com/the-jayne-sinclair-genealogical-mystery-series

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S&N Genealogy Supplies 2020 Catalogue is out!

S&N Genealogy Supplies, the family run largest UK genealogy publisher and award winning retailer has announced its 2020 catalogue filled with all sorts of items that the family history researcher could require.

You can download a digital version, or order a paper copy of this useful catalogue by going to this page now:

 https://genealogysupplies.com/catalogue-request/

 

As we are now approximately a month off Christmas perhaps it would be a good time to start thinking of those festive presents for the genealogist?

Take a look at their website for a number of special offers and gift ideas including free charts, over 60% savings on some books and upgrades to software packages.

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On this day in 1965 Winston Churchill passed away

The 24 January 1965 saw the death of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill aged 90. He died at his London home nine days after suffering a severe stroke on the morning of Sunday, 24 January 1965. Coincidentally it was 70 years to the day after his own father's death.

 

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New Book - Keeping Chronicles by Rosemary Sassoon

Keeping Chronicles is the latest book by Rosemary Sassoon. It intends to show the many ways handwritten and other documents from family archives and other sources are so valuable, not only to the family concerned, but to local as well as national museums.

The many examples within the book illustrate different categories such as letters, diaries, travel records, business and legal ones, personal scrapbooks, school books and cookery books etc. Also included is practical advice from professionals in the field about how to preserve such items and present them for safekeeping to museums.

Rosemary discusses her own memorabilia collection and shows how she has preserved these historical items. After giving talks on the matter of preserving written items, Rosemary was saddened to hear that so many people discarded such memorabilia, destroying family history in a minute, because they were unsure of how to preserve these items to keep. This book will inspire readers to start their own memorabilia collection.

Rosemary Sassoon has written over 30 books across a variety of academic and design subjects. She was originally a designer in textiles and various aspects of letterforms. Later she was asked to deal with serious handwriting problems in schools. This developed from educational into more medical aspects of the subject and resulted in a PhD from the University of Reading. Research then ensued Rosemary’s family of typesets, originally called Sassoon Primary, to find what typographic letters children could read the easiest. This was later developed for other purposes including as a stylistic model for handwriting. Both are widely used worldwide. Rosemary now lives in Australia.

 

£9.95

 

 

Read more here: /https://www.bookguild.co.uk/bookshop-collection/non-fiction/education/keeping-chronicles/

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Who Do You Think You Are? UK series 13 starts on Thursday 24th November 2016

We are all looking forward to the very delayed (!) start of the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? on the BBC. We had been expecting it to start, as usual in August...then we were told it would be after the Olympics. Well it certainly is after the Olympics as it is kicking off with the first programme on Thursday 24th November. This show promises to be a fascinating look at Cockney actor Danny Dyer and his connection to a man at the heart of the Tudor court of Henry VIII who lost his influence and his head when he fell out with the king. That is not where it ends as the publicity coming out from the BBC is that Danny Dyer is related to royalty! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b083wt14 Looking forward to Thursday evening.

Danny Dyer

Photo By Hilton1949 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14309355
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Discover Your Ancestors Periodical has some great articles...

Discover Your Ancestors September 2016 Edition

Discover Your Ancestors Sept 2016

Read about The great fire brigade of London: Nicola Lisle looks at how the Great Fire led to the formation of the London Fire Brigade. Find out about 1666 and all that: Margaret Powling looks at the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire 350 years ago. Explore the records in Tracing the trails our ancestors leave behind: Nick Thorne finds out about a soldier who served in every engagement from Corunna to Waterloo. See the article... Roast beef and rain?: Ruth A Symes uncovers a 19th century Frenchman’s views of our Victorian ancestors. Discover An English eccentricity: Colin Ellson explores the forgotten role of the ‘squarsons’ – wealthy priests at the head of their communities. And take a look at History in the details: Jayne Shrimpton on men’s shirts. As always the online magazine includes a number of Regulars: This month's region: Worcestershire / News & Events / Books  / Classifieds. If you are not already a reader then go now to: http://www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk/
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New Passenger lists go online with unique search facilities

New Passenger lists go online with unique search facilities

Departure of the RMS Campania from Liverpool

RMS Campania, one of the ships included in the passenger lists.

TheGenealogist has just released five million Emigration BT27 records as part of their growing immigration and emigration record set. Uniquely TheGenealogist allows you to track transmigration of people across countries routing through British ports on their way to America. TheGenealogist is the only website with the facility to discover families travelling together on the same voyage using our SmartSearch technology.

The new records, with original images, contain the historical records of passengers who departed by sea from Britain in the years between 1896 and 1909. These new records significantly boosts the already strong Immigration, Emigration, Naturalisation and passenger list resources on TheGenealogist.

TheGenealogist has further revealed that these records will be shortly followed by the release of many more unique migration records.

The searchable records released today will allow researchers to

  • Find people using British shipping lines and travelling to places such as America, Canada, India, New Zealand and Australia in the Passenger lists of people leaving from, or passing through the United Kingdom, by sea which were kept by the Board of Trade's Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors.

  • The Homestead Act of 1862 in America gave free land to settlers who developed it for at least five years, and became a particular magnet for Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes, who arrived in their millions. To reach America, it was necessary to travel initially to England in order to then board one of the large transatlantic passenger ships and this preliminary journey has been recorded for many transmigrant passengers within the BT27 records. For the first time these can be easily found using the unique transmigration button.

  • SmartSearch identifies potential family members travelling together. When our system recognises groups of people on the same voyage as a potential family it displays a family icon. This then allows you to easily view the family.

  • Family SmartSearch

  • These fully indexed records enable family historians to search by name, port of embarkation, port of destination, country of departure, country arrival and nationality.

This release adds to TheGenealogist’s Immigration and Emigration records that already include the useful Naturalisation and Denization records.

Those with ancestors who travelled out of Britain will welcome this fascinating new release from TheGenealogist that reveal the details of the coming and going of passengers and is a precursor of a set of unique records joining the collection shortly.

Nigel Bayley, MD of TheGenealogist said: “We intend to make researching migrating ancestors easier with our new smarter interfaces and adding more records covering a growing range of countries.”

An example from the passenger list records:

Within the passenger lists, on TheGenealogist, we can find the passage of the Dunottar Castle from Southampton to Cape Town in South Africa on the 14th October 1899. One of the passengers was the young Winston Churchill who, at that time, was a member of the Press and was going out to report on the start of the Second Boer War.

Two days before his ship’s departure the war had broken out between Britain and the Boer Republic. At the news of this conflict Mr Churchill had obtained a commission to act as a war correspondent for The Morning Post newspaper. In return he was to be paid £250 a month for his services.

After spending a number of weeks in the Colony he managed to get himself onto an armoured train, loaded with British soldiers, performing a reconnoitre between Frere and Chieveley in the British Natal Colony during November 1899. A Boer commando force, however, had placed a big boulder on the track and the train crashed into it. The Boers, having succeeded in stopping the train, then opened up with their field guns and rifle fire from a vantage position.

After a fight a number of the British were taken prisoner, but the locomotive, decoupled from the carriages and ladened with men, managed to escape. Churchill, unfortunately for him, was not one of those on-board the loco. Without his sidearm, which he had left on the train, he had no option but to surrender to the Boers. Churchill was then imprisoned in a POW camp in Pretoria. After being held captive for about four weeks Churchill escaped on the evening of 12th December 1899. He did this by vaulting over the wall to the neighbouring property and taking flight.

Churchill passenger

If we look at Churchill's travelling companions on the ship out to Cape Town, scheduled to take 65 days, we can see that he was sailing with a mixture of merchants, a jeweller, an actor, a Peer of the Realm (Lord Gerard), an optician and a couple of lawyers. The Hon A. Campbell was also listed, he was another member of the press corps who had made it on to that particular Castle Line sailing to the war zone with Churchill.

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Family History Abbreviations

 

Just a little confused by family history abbreviations?

John Smith,  bach;  MS. 

b: 1847   d: 1889

  If you find an ancestor was "b 1847" does this mean they were born or baptised in 1847? What is the agreed abbreviation for buried, or if you find an ancestor in the records with the shortened word "bach" what does this indicate? Or what does "do" mean? If these and many other abbreviations are taxing you then take a look at this website here: http://www.familytreeassociation.org/abbreviations.html

English Family Tree Assoc

  Answers: "b" means born, "bur" is used for buried, "bach" is bachelor and "do" is Ditto.
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Sir Derek Jacobi's Ancestral Story

The Sir Derek George Jacobi's story  on Who Do You Think You Are? was one of equal contrasts. Though we found out that he is from working class roots in London, with a boot maker for a grandfather, as we delved further back in time we discovered that his family are from much grander stock, one having mixed with Louis the Sun King until his religious belief had him imprisoned and he escaped to England. Sir Derek's ancestor was Joseph de la Plaigne, a financier and French Protestant from Bordeaux who had to conceal his religious beliefs from his monarch in order to remain in favour with the Catholic Louis XIV. In 1701 de la Plaigne was found out to be a Protestant and incarcerated in prison at Loches in the Loire Valley. Making his escape he, like many Huguenots, made his way to England. In 1708, at the age of 70 and living in England, Joseph de la Plaigne married Salome de la Bastide. Researchers have found that the wedding took place on the 7th August at St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street, London. The couple's son, Guillaume, was born soon after this with his christening taking place on the 28th May 1709. The now elderly Joseph died not a long time later and researchers from TheGenealogist website have been able to find his will in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills collection accessible on TheGenealogist where if you are a subscriber you will be able to search for images of the actual Wills that  had been lodged with the PCC for probate. In de la Plaigne's case the document shows that Joseph was born at Bordeaux and was living in the Parish of St Anne's, Westminster when he made the will. To see a copy of the will and to read TheGenealogist's full article on Sir Derek Jacobi's family history click this link. TheGenealogist website has a broad suite of resources to find ancestors in the records.

Derek Jacobi, Who do You Think you Are? Wills of his ancestor

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The National Archives release more MI5 files.

  The National Archives blog has announced the release of the latest batch of the MI5 files to view at TNA in Kew while a selection have been digitized. They write that "As always they contain a fascinating new glimpse into the murky world of Second World War and Cold War espionage and provide extraordinary insights into some of the most famous of all spies." http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/grandmother-us-spy-recruited-philby/

The National Archives

The National Archives

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