From Prague to Vienna - week 7, Třemošnice to Hlinsko v Čechách 

Those of you who know me know that I like to walk. It's a way to see places you wouldn't see from a train, and at the speed where you can stop and take a photograph. Here's one I took a few weeks ago of starlings roosting.

But, I digress. The idea of walking from Prague to Vienna is that the route largely follows railway lines, so I go out by train, walk a bit, catch a train home. Easy - except when it isn't. After seven weeks, I had reached the town of Třemošnice, and here the railway line ends. To walk to the next railway station following Euro Velo Route 4, Hlinsko, it's 49km. 

To put my walking into context, I had come from Kutna Hora in a day and a half, so I was doing two days' walking in a day. (By the way, Kutna Hora is a pretty place. It reminded me of Malmesbury or Chichester.)

But, back to walking 50km. I left Prague at 0600 to give me plenty of time to walk - 4km/h is reasonable with breaks. I arrived at Třemošnice on a train looking like this:

The railway line from Čáslav, just less than an hour away, looks like this:

Back to walking. When you leave Třemošnice to head for Seč, you go uphill and you are walking on the main road. Those first two hours were the only ones where I managed 5km/h. I liked this waterfall on the way to Seč:

There wasn't much in Seč - here's the church:

And here's the sign showing that I was a fifth of the way:

The other important fact of note on that sign is that it's 16km, over three hours, to the next place with a shop. It would have been a good idea to buy drinks and chocolate in Seč, but it was 1000 and the sun wasn't warm. Yet.

Coming out of Seč towards Horni Bradlo, it was beautiful...

...and hilly...

...and sometimes quite formal...

Those two hours between 1130 and 1330 seemed to last forever. My feet were already starting to hurt, and I was craving sugar. I eventually arrived at Horni Bradlo and went to the grocer's shop. After half an hour I ached, but I was somewhat refreshed. I really should have taken a picture of that shop, as it really was a life-saver.

The next stage was 10km to Trhová Kamenice. The fields looked like a hilly version of Lincolnshire:

Vast amounts of not a lot. Here we see a number of tree stumps, although if you want to believe that they are aliens, you may do so:

And here's the contractual obligation arty picture, with me leaving a small village with cyclists just having turned right ahead of me:

 

The journey to Trhová Kamenice wasn't too bad. Another grocer's shop found for a drink, and here's the church.

So I'm almost there, right? Only 13km to go, 12km by the time I reached the end of the village. Wrong. I hit the wall. I had been walking for about an hour when I saw a sign saying Hlinsko 10km. I expected about 7km, but I'd hit the wall at marathon distance. My trusty Tilly (aka Google Maps, don't ask) agreed with me - about 7.5km. I passed this stone in Svobodné Hamry:

Of course, the sign was right, and Tilly misguided but wrong. We took a sensible detour for bikes, and eventually, exhausted, with darkness approaching, I reached a place called Stan. Stan likes carved tree trunks, apparently.

What was brilliant about Stan was two things. See the path on the left? It goes all the way to Hlinsko, so no worry about approaching traffic. Also, the rumour of there being a railway proved to be true, as I saw a train.

An hour later, with nothing in the kitty at all, I reached Hlinsko and a replacement bus, slow train and express train home to the sophistication of Prague, where the grocery shop was still open at 2330. 

Lessons learned:

1. One foot after the other. Repeat.
2. 49km is a long way. Hopefully, never again, but never say never.
3. Take food and drink cans with me, just in case.

Jigsaw puzzle - day 2

Pieces sorted - 3000 

Pieces to sort - 15000 

Pieces placed - 0 

Pieces to place - 18000

The numbers in the box are getting fewer!

Well, it doesn't look quite so bad if I make a burrow at one end. I am a sixth of the way through now, so at this rate it will take 12 days to sort. I'll live with that.

The strategy for sorting is just as I said on Friday - start with six trays and tip to microwave boxes and then to bags. The yellow and green pieces have one overflow to the bag already. Will this strategy continue to work? I don't think so, but it should get me at least half way. 

I'm going at about 1500 pieces a day, so sorting should take another eight days - seven if I can see a light at the end of the tunnel to finish at the weekend. What will I do then? I'll probably look at a colour which has about 2000 pieces as a starting point. That should fit on the living room table, and if the Christmas target is to be achieved, should take four weeks or less. By that time the bookcase should have arrived.

Next update - all being well - Tuesday evening.

Total madness with an 18,000 piece jigsaw puzzle

A month ago, I bought this https://www.playthek.com/ravensburger-rav-puz-magisches-buecherregal-xxl-18000-17825-18000-teile-ravensburger-toys-spielzeug-pZZa1-2097727285.html?language=en&currency=EUR&utm_source=froogle_nl&utm_campaign=froogle_nl&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjPaCBhDkARIsAISZN7R8P1dGoYk2w1a4O5C7NTZQdBchyMUEGXuXJ7KmZTiHhO4ilF8wJEwaAgBFEALw_wcB . I was working on a 4000 piece puzzle at the time, and I have been wanting to do something completely crazy like this for a while. I can do it while I live somewhere rented without a cat - that may change in 2023.

The 4000 piece puzzle took three months - the objective is to finish the 18,000 piece puzzle by Christmas. It has been tipped into one box, and I won't look at the box again until I dismantle it on New Year's Day. Here's the full box with the picture - I've tipped the four plastic bags of 4500 pieces each into the box:

The first thing which struck me was the relative size of the box bottom and the box top. There is no way that I can go through and take the edge pieces out, putting the rest of the pieces into the lid - there simply isn't the space. But it doesn't really make sense, in any case. In a 500 piece puzzle, let's say 25x20, there are 88 edge pieces. That's 18% of the puzzle. However, the 18,000 piece puzzle is something like 180x100 - 478 edge pieces, or 2.65%. Put another way, having sorted the edge (and doubtless having missed a few pieces) I would have 17,522 pieces to go. I need a different plan.

There are two facts you need to know which are input to the plan. Firstly, here's where the puzzle will go:

 

There is just about enough space. The table in the corner may need to move until next year, but we'll see. 

Secondly, I have a new bookcase arriving, allegedly next week. I want the floor space to be clear when the bookcase arrives, so no pieces can go on the floor until then. So how do I approach things?

Well, I kept the plastic bags which each contained 4500 pieces. I have some Ravensburger sorting trays and some microwave reheating dishes. I started out like this:

This is sorting by colour and edge - from the plastic bags clockwise, white, black, yellow and green, edges, red and pink, blue. If it's a mixture, it goes with the colour with fewer pieces. When a tray becomes full, it will be tipped into a microwave reheating dish. When a reheating dish becomes full, it will be tipped into a plastic bag. The thing I really want to avoid is having 9000 "miscellaneous" pieces in the box lid, so new sorting categories may be needed.

Why the bulk approach rather than sorting into smaller groups from the start? Two reasons. One is that I don't want tens of containers all over the place for nine months. The other is that I think I can tip 4000 fairly similar pieces on to the floor and work that way when I need to, keeping the rest fairly out of the way. I tipped the last 2000 pieces out from the 4000, and went much faster once I did.

So, given the floor is out of bounds for a while, how will I approach putting pieces together? Well, I have a puzzle mat I can use on my kitchen table, so I could put sections together there, roll it up, and move it. I won't start with the edge for obvious reasons, but I found that it doesn't give the huge advantage it does with smaller puzzles for the reason stated above. 

I aim to update the blog about three times a week with progress. Please feel free to comment.

Making sense of your Ancestry DNA results

Introduction

My dad recently did an Ancestry DNA test. It made me think a little - it's actually very easy to be underwhelmed by it if you aren't a seasoned genealogist. His comment was something like "there are no surprises in my ethnicity, and I can't see how the people in the list relate to DNA". After a bit of work together, he's now a lot happier.

Ethnicity estimate

Now don't get me started on ethnicity. It is exactly what it says it is - an estimate. Mine looks like this:

Don't be fooled here - the database isn't giving the East Midlands bit. That comes from your tree and your connections, so if your ethnicity is from the British Isles, your ethnicity is broken down between England, Wales & Northwestern Europe and Ireland & Scotland. Furthermore, if I click on the England... link then it tells me it's in the range 79%-100%. If it were an opinion poll, I'd bin it with that range.

But wait. It can be useful. If you are illegitimate and you don't know who your father was, your mother isn't telling or has passed away, and you suspect you may have Irish/Jewish/African ancestry from your appearance, it may help. However, for most of us it's a bit of fun. In general, my advice is to notice it and move on.

Move on to what, Ian?

I'm coming to that. The first thing you should do is build a tree going back six generations to the best of your ability. That is 64 fourth great grandparents. If you have an Ancestry subscription and a FindMyPast subscription (the latter is particularly good for Lincolnshire) it isn't too hard to flesh out your tree, but you don't need a subscription to create a tree, just an account. But don't get too upset if you can't manage 64 - I only have 56 at present. You just should attempt to go further back than second great grandparents or you will struggle to link your DNA results to any particular ancestor.

It's fairly obvious, but the tree you attach to your results doesn't need to have all your fifth cousins once removed in it - it only needs direct ancestors. Mine has my main tree attached, but dad's has a small tree we built of ancestors only. Here are the ancestors of one of his grandparents. I've chosen this one deliberately, as it illustrates the reality that you sometimes cannot create a tree where you have 64 fourth great grandparents due to illegitimacy. But you do the best you can.

ThruLines

What next? You turn on the beta, as below (although this will become default behaviour, so in time no need to do this). Then you wait a few days, as Ancestry need to run an indexing job between your new tree and your DNA matches.

What you see after turning on the beta is a menu like this.

It's really tempting to click on the ThruLines page and then attempt to work out your relatives. At the time of writing (June 2019) this is really hard to do. The approach is, after waiting the few days for Ancestry to reindex, to click on your nnn 4th cousins or closer, then search for common ancestors. Click Add a filter->Common Ancestors as below.

Hopefully you will see a number of people in the resulting list - here is what my dad's results would have looked like after first creating his tree:

You will see on the right hand side there is a link Add to group. What I am going to suggest that you do at this stage is to attempt to group people only by your eight great-grandparents. Remember that if you do have second cousins or closer in the list, they will belong in more than one group. Obviously, icnore them for this purpose.

So here are Dad's eight great grandparents (redacting his mother's maiden name for security reasons):

You may want to ask why I suggested creating a tree going back six generations when I am only going to use three of them. Simple. Without the extensive tree, Ancestry wouldn't have been able to create the common ancestor hints. Note the word hints - they come from other people's trees, so they may not be correct, and they do need to be researched. However, the chances of someone matching you by an incorrect ancestor is remote (but it does happen).

Adding the people with common ancestors to groups

For each of the people in the list, we add the people to the appropriate great grandparent(s). The person we see is a second cousin once removed, so will need to be attached to two great grandparents:

On the right hand side of the screen, there is a link where we can the person to groups. To start with, we'll create as we find them groups for the eight great grandparents.

We create our first custom group, Parkhouse, and add this relative to the group. I see a yellow dot, and if I hover over it I see the name Parkhouse. You don't need to remember the colours - simply hover over the dot to see its description.

We then add the person to group Turner, and we have two dots against them, as below.

We then repeat the process for all of the people in the common ancestor list. Yes, it's laborious, but you'll thank me for it afterwards as it gives a good start at classification. When you complete, and it might take a few hours, turn off the Common Ancestor filter by clicking on it, then click All matches. You will see the numbers in each of your groups, as below.

The first thing you see is that there is one great grandparent (Johnson) missing of the eight. That is nothing to be concerned about. It is when you have an entire side of your family missing that you might think that your paper trail doesn't match your DNA. Even then, don't panic or open uneasy discussions with family until you have more evidence.

Also note that there is only one person in the Surtees group, and that person is below the 'Distant Cousin' 20cM or fourth cousin cut-off. Usually experts advise not to research below that 20cm line. Here is an example where you really should do so to obtain the best evidence from the matches with common ancestors.

Grouping the rest of the people above the 20cM line

If you thought the part you've just done was laborious, the next thing to do is to say that relatives of people related to great grandparent x are also related to great grandparent x with the objectives of giving great grandparent dots to as many people as possible. We start from the top of the DNA matches with the first person with only one dot. Don't worry too much about anyone above them in the list - they are likely to be given dots from numerous places. We look at this person's shared matches, and we give the all the same dot as the person with the shared ancestor, as below.

You then work down with the next person with a single dot until you reach the 20 cM line. Some people will be missed out - don't worry about that at this stage.

You'll hopefully end up with matches which look like this - not too many gaps.

And a considerable number in the various groups:

Now what do you do? You group the rest! You have 24 dots in total, so you have 16 or more left. If you find no shared matches, add a note with a date saying 'No shared matches dd/mm/2019'. It shows you've been there. Also, if you have a dot for groups of two, you'll run out of dots. Use sensible names for your groups: I'm using 'Group D1' onwards, as they are for my dad. A typical page when finished looks like this:

And the grouping look like this. Remember I said that you would miss some people in your great-grandparent groups? Well I did, quite a few, but the mopping up exercise puts everyone in a group, or with no shared ancestors.

Next steps

It's probably time for a cup of tea, but the next thing I would do is to look to break down some of the larger groups to second great grandparents. How to do this? It's a much smaller job than you've done thus far. You delete the dot against everyone for that great grandparent, and then add back the common ancestors at second great grandparent level, then map everyone without a group back to one or the other second great grandparent. Why not do this for a start? Well, you quickly run out of dots (there are only 24) and it's arguably barely worth it when breaking down a group of 5 people.

Conclusion

This technique, while laborious, is likely to give some indications of groupings within DNA matches. Please try it and send feedback.

On the use of FreeBMD and GRO

Often genealogy novices think that the way to discover their ancestors is an account with Ancestry, FindMyPast or both. It is when you are talking about records before births, marriages and death registration began in 1837, but often people don't know much about their grandparents' families, let alone their third great grandparents. There are two great things about FreeBMD - it does exactly what it says on the tin. It gives details about births, marriages and deaths, and it's free!

Most of us know who our grandparents are or were - but sometimes we don't know who their siblings were. The technique I describe isn't great when you have a Jones married to a Smith, but provided one name is relatively uncommon, it stands a good chance. I know that my grandmother was born in 1912 near Worksop as Ada Surtees: let's go to https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl to search for her. We select Births, a surname of Surtees and a first name of Ada. We then press Find.

The result is shown below:

So we can see that my great-grandmother's maiden name was Hadley. Let's now find her marriage: we use the Marriages type and the Surname and Spouse/Mother surname fields leaving the date blank this time:

So we see Alice Maud Hadley marrying a Surtees in Newcastle under Lyme. If we click on the page number (85) we can see who she married:

Alice Maud Hadley married Joseph Chaytor Surtees in the second quarter of 1896. We can apply this same technique to go back to 1837, but two things need to be remembered:

• births only record mother's maiden name from 1911;
• recording of births was often 'overlooked' as we go further back into the Victorian era.

So how do we counter this? Let's attempt to go back another generation with Joseph Chaytor Surtees. We can search for his birth: never give a middle name in full, as they are often recorded as an initial, and sometimes not at all as they have been 'acquired'. We'll give an end date of December 1880 to avoid searching dates beyond which we couldn't have been born:

This gives the following result:

Here I have been very lucky, as it looks like I have two generations at once (indeed I have): but the younger Joseph Chaytor is the one we are looking for. How can we find his mother's name without ordering a certificate?

The answer lies with the GRO (General Register Office) site. Here you can register for free at https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ . Births go up to 100 years ago (1918 currently) and deaths to 1957. Additionally, any certificate reference you find at FreeBMD you can order here.

Go to https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp then click Birth:

Enter Surname at Birth as Surtees, First Forename as Joseph, Second Forename as Chaytor, Gender as Male, Year as 1875. The result is shown below:

We see that the mother's maiden name was Shearer, and we are back two generations in a matter of minutes.

Christmas Day 2019 in Paddington

It is Christmas Day on Paddington Station. As is traditional but not always reported, IK Brunel and Paddington Bear leave their plinths each Christmas today to meet and talk on the silent station. It's Paddington's birthday - well, one of them...

IKB: Good morning Mr Brown. Happy Birthday!

PB: Good morning Mr Brunel. Merry Christmas!

IKB: Well, this year was supposed to be the year what was the hole in the ground on Eastbourne Terrace became the Elizabeth Line station. And it hasn't happened. I'm very disappointed.

PB: I'm sure that you are going to remind me that it only took a weekend to remove your broad gauge.

IKB: An act of the greatest vandalism that was. Thank goodness I was dead by then.

PB: But where would you have been without Mr Gooch to make the engines work?

IKB: I knew how to build bridges and a flat railway. I surveyed the route myself to make sure that it was right. That legacy is still there long after the engines became museum pieces. And I knew from the start that I needed Daniel to make the engines work. It's good that his part in the building of our wonderful railway is honoured by him having a local pub named after him.

PB: I loved those steam trains.

IKB: But, as I've said to you before, the electric trains are so much cleaner. Haven't you noticed how much cleaner the air is on our station with the gradual introduction of electric trains?

PB: Yes, but the people who stop in the Paddington shop on the station love the steam trains, or so I'm told.

IKB: But think about the times when the commuters arrive! They want the station to be clean and to breathe fresh air. And they cleaned the roof of our station. Do you want it to be dirty with soot from slow steam and diesel trains?

PB: The new long distance trains won't be much faster as they have to switch to diesel beyond Swindon.

IKB: It's the same as with Crossrail - they need innovators to fix the issues they find. They decided not to electrify to Oxford as it is wet. Take a walk there any winter day - it's self-evident that it is a flood plain. Easy to know, not too difficult to rectify. Stations are behind on the Elizabeth Line - well, open the line with fewer stations so it is making money. They just aren't prepared to improvise. But one day we'll have electric trains to Temple Meads.

PB: And everything else in London is now delayed because there is no money.

IKB: Things will change. Even a new Transport Secretary and the need to create jobs might mean that the Bakerloo might be extended to Lewisham quicker. Whose crazy idea was it to terminate at Elephant and Castle? Trains make money when they are full! Otherwise I would just have gone as far as Slough.

PB: You are right Mr Brunel - but it is almost time for my elevenses. But before I go, I have to say something. You aren't much taller than me!

IKB: The two people most associated with Paddington are both small in stature but giant in intellect. Enjoy your marmalade sandwiches Mr Brown!

1911 Scunthorpe - a young town with more outsiders than the rest of the locality?

By a young town, I mean that the average age in the town is younger than the norm for the locality as young, adventurous people moved from the countryside to better paid jobs in ironstone, iron and steel. For outsiders, I had to make a few judgments - what is local and what isn't? I had to make some arbitrary decisions, so I've classified the data into four categories:

1. Born in the parishes of Scunthorpe;
2. Born in the rest of North Lincolnshire;
3. Born in the rest of Lincolnshire;
4. Born elsewhere.

Why the need for arbitrary decisions? Well, there was no way I was transcribing the whole of the locality: it had to be automated from data taken from family history sites. I had to make some call as to what is local and what isn't, and this is as good as anything. I could have taken the 1974 districts of Glanford and Scunthorpe, but then Keadby isn't local but Kirmington is. My way Scotter isn't local but Owston Ferry is, which probably isn't any better, but it is easier for people who don't know the political history of the area to understand. 

I chose Lincolnshire rather than "within 50 miles" for a slightly different reason. The automation is equally difficult, as many census entries lack a county. 1911 is the first census where people filled in their own forms, and we see Scunthorp, Crossby, Froddingham, etc. instead of Scunthorpe, Crosby, Frodingham. Sometimes with Lincolnshire, sometimes without. Or with Lincs, Linc, Lincoln, Linshire, and many others. I digress, but it should be clear that any automation is going to involve creating a huge list of acceptable places with large varieties of acceptable spellings.

So the reason for choosing Lincolnshire? The sense that people might have told their families "at least it's in the same county" as they left. The same reasoning that Scunthorpe United fans have for close rivalry with Grimsby and Lincoln rather than Doncaster and Hull. It may be relevant or not, and it's hard to prove in any case - but it makes the data easy to understand.

Now back to the age thing - if you have a larger percentage of younger people in an area, you will almost certainly have a larger percentage of children. So when you look at where the children were born, you see 'Scunthorpe' - which skews the data as to whether the family are local. Imagine a family of man, wife, four kids - man and wife born Doncaster, four kids born Scunthorpe. That gives two born elsewhere and four Scunthorpe, which isn't really what we need to measure if looking at who migrated coming to Scunthorpe and who was there beforehand. I therefore looked at only the people who were 18+ at the time.

Having collected the data, and defined a few rules for what constitutes a steel worker (contains the word "Mill" but neither "Miller" nor "Milliner", for instance), an ironstone miner, a farm worker and a domestic worker, I can classify workers as being in one of those categories or 'Other'. We don't need to be rocket scientists to believe that there would have been more iron and steel workers than ironstone workers in the parishes of Scunthorpe and that there are more farm workers elsewhere in the locality. However, the proximity of Ashby to Yarborough Mines at Ashby Ville meant that there were more ironstone workers than iron and steel workers in Ashby, which surprised me. Also, Scunthorpe has a much greater proportion of outsiders than Ashby. 

What constitutes the locality? Here I did choose Glanford and Scunthorpe simply due to the amount of work involved in the extract. Even to do this requires the processing of 68 enumeration districts. The family history sites, quite understandably, protect themselves against distributed denial of service attacks by only allowing a limited number of searches per minute. Unlike Google Maps, there is no application programming interface, so you have to simulate hitting every page of an enumeration district, storing the output, post processing into a spreadsheet, then checking that there aren't silly errors where an occupation is obviously in the wrong category or someone has invented another spelling of Scunthorpe. It takes time.

A few words of warning. The data might be slightly inaccurate for a few reasons:

1) I've assumed if someone writes just the word Ashby, that's Scunthorpe not Ashby de la Zouch. But if they've written Kirton or Kirton Lincolnshire, I don't know that it isn't Kirton near Boston, so that's Lincolnshire.

2) I have looked at transcriptions, not images. I rely on the transcriptions making sense even if spelt wrong. If they don't make sense, the occupation becomes 'Other' and the place of birth 'Elsewhere'. This may inflate those categories, but it isn't going to be by much. 

3) If the place of birth just says Lincolnshire, this could be Scunthorpe or North Lincs, but I assume it isn't as I think it likely that people would remember the name of somewhere local. This slightly inflates the county statistics, but it is really marginal.

Now one thing I have to say. I would dearly love to make the whole of the data I have collected available for download. However, that would only be allowed by permission of both the web site I've used to collect the data and The National Archives, so I can't do so. However, the metadata I've collected isn't available anywhere else, so I can publish that.