Outrage is a great motivator

My statistical history as a blogger is not a pretty sight. There have been periods where my level of activity was enthusiatic (perhaps even manic); but there were even longer times when "desultory" would be a kind description of my engagement with the platform. But Google has found a fool-proof way to stir me into renewed action.

At 10:17 on Saturday 15 May, I received an email indicating that a post originally published on 4 March 2021 had been reviewed and determined to have "violated our malware and viruses policy". It was then deleted. 50% of my output for the calendar year was gone at the stroke of a (digital) bureaucratic pen!

Naturally, I had not kept a copy of the post because such responsibility was a characteristic of the former me who managed his blogging schedule studiously. So a detailed review of the (now invisible) text to identify the offending material was ought of the question. On the other hand, I had little difficulty recalling the general content of the post. It was one of two grumpy-old-man reviews excoriating My Heritage for the less than stellar quality of the predicted family relationships that they insisted on emailing me.

It was at this point that paranoia and conspiracy theories kicked in. Surely it could not be that my humble rants had so enraged the corporate behemoth My Heritage that it sought the assistance of its fellow on-line Titan to silence me? Of course not.

While I wondered how to seek redress, a second email arrived (at 21:10 Sat 15 May) advising that the post had been re-evaluated and was now "reinstated" at its original URL. Except, when I clicked through, it was not available for viewing. The page loaded with a message advising the post did not exist. Perhaps it would take a few minutes to appear.

30 hours later, I was still unable to see the post that had apparently caused such offence against the good-governance standards of the community. Clearly, I need to intervene but all the information that I had received from Blogger came from a "no reply" address. Eventually I found the Blogger Support Community, where the trending topics (headed Error Messages and Accessing my Blog) suggested that I was not alone.

A stream of posts complained of receiving the very same unwarranted deletion notice and a Platinum Product Expert (sic) responded "your posts may have been removed in error. Blogger is aware of the issue, and is working on a fix." A little further down the conversation trail was the revelation that the purportedly reinstated posts "will be drafts, so you have to republish them".

I have now finished repairing the damage wrought by Blogger's artificial intelligence. When I hit Publish, my output for 2021 to date will actually exceed that of the whole of 2020. Oh for the heady days of 2012, or even 2013.

I really must find a way to recapture the enthusiasm that once saw me commited to regular posts that in turn drove me to undertake the type of focussed investigation that would generate good post fodder. I cannot continue to rely on big corporations making me suffiently angry to switch into keyboard warrior mode in order to be productive. (Blogger please note.)

If the name fits

There are many different ways in which our given names are decided. Some prospective parents spend months poring over books and magazine articles devoted to anthroponomy. Others wait for inspiration to strike after the birth: "As soon as I held her for the first time, I just knew she was a Marie".

The decision-making method of most interest to family historians is the practice of following a traditional naming pattern: "This is my fourth son, so he is named for my eldest brother". If you are researching a family who adopt this method and an expected name is "missing" from your search results, then you have a good idea of whom you are looking for.

The best known of these patterns are found in thousands of families within a particular culture now spread across the globe. Sometimes you may detect a pattern with limited applicability that proves equally useful in guiding your research.

Arthur Chandler, gamekeeper of Beckenham in Kent, and his wife Jane Taylor had a large family (at least by modern standards). Some online trees listed as many as 12 children for the couple. I was able to account for five of them in the civil registrations of birth and they were confirmed by the details of the 1851 Census. Pre-1837 baptismal records added four more documented children.

As I contemplated the list of known children and those yet to be found, a pattern in the names suddenly became glaringly apparent. Arthur and Jane had named their children Arthur, Asenath, Alfred, Andrew, Amelia, Antoinette, Amy, Angelina and Alice.

Might this explain my inability to find evidence for their purported siblings Joseph, Caroline and Bob?

It was a straight-forward task to establish that the births supposed to have occurred in 1851 (Caroline) and 1853 (Bob) did not involve Jane Chandler (or take place anywhere in England, for that matter). Perhaps these were added to the family by international "cuckoo" researchers dropping their ancestor into the nest of any UK family of the same name to establish their immigrant origins - a type of retrospective informal adoption?

The status of Joseph is more challenging. In the 1841 Census he is listed after Arthur and Janet with the surname "do", but without any indication of a family relationship (a feature not introduced until 1851). His stated age (15) would mean that he was born some years before the marriage of his putative "parents". Might he be an ex-nuptial child of Jane or a pre-nuptial child of the couple who was named by Jane's parents (and so missed receiving an A-name from Arthur)? On the other hand, Joseph might be a nephew or cousin of Arthur residing with them at the time of the census. I said that a naming pattern could guide your research not find all the answers!

In case you are wondering how the children felt about their names; Arthur junior had thirteen children (born in Surrey and then in New South Wales) and he named them Arthur, Amos, Alma, Andrew, Abraham ... you see the pattern. Young Alice (who came to Queensland) was a rebel with a not a single A-name among her five children despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that their French father Gustave Collin also had the names Antoine and Alexandre.

Transcription challenges

The current buzz in some high-profile American blogs concerns the allegedly high error rate in the 1940 Census Indices published by Ancestry.

This reminded me of a puzzling aspect of the 1911 England Census for our 2xgreat grandfather Frederick THORPE. The transcript available on line listed the family's address as 300 New Sunnyside Worksop. But the neighbours appeared to live at numbers 16, 15, 14 and so on. Why the sudden jump in numbering?

At the time, I was more worried about what seemed a strange change of occupation. In 1901, Fred had been a Spindle Setter. How was it possible that in 1911 he was called a Naturalist?

When I saw an image of the 1911 form, I realised that my two concerns were one and the same. Fred had indeed become a naturalist and dealer in animals and, as a result, the locals regarded his home as being like those new "Zoological Gardens". What had been interpreted as a number (300) was actually a word written in script (Zoo).

As we move to on-line completion of census forms with built-in error checking, our descendents will be deprived of the thrill of making these wonderful little discoveries in our returns.