I've received a faux marriage certificate in the post from Guild member Roger Goacher who recently undertook a Marriage Challenge for the Rye Registration District in Sussex. The certificate is for the marriage Eleanor Crews and Samuel Eldridge which took place in June 1856 in Northiam, Sussex. Samuel was a widower at the time of the marriage. He was a labourer, and is the son of Samuel Eldridge, a bricklayer. Eleanor is the daughter of George Crews, a labourer. I have no further information on this line as yet but if anyone is researching this family do get in touch and I'd be happy to send a copy of the certificate.
© Debbie Kennett 2010
Friday, 3 September 2010
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Surname frequencies in the 1990 and 2000 US censuses
A posting on Dick Eastman's blog has alerted me to some interesting surname data which can be found on the US census bureau website. The bureau provides lists of the most frequently occurring surnames in the 1990 and 2000 US censuses. A surname must be included at least 100 times to be appear in the list and consequently CRUWYS is not shown. I did however find listings for most of the other variant spellings. I've provided details below of the rankings. The final column for the year 2000 is a count of the occurrences of each surname in the 2000 census.
1990 Ranking Count
CREWS 1373
CRUSE 3975
CRUISE 7221
CREW 8148
CRUCE 9146
CRUZE 21658
SCREWS 21905
CRUICE 57820
CREWE 73936
2000
CREWS 1404 23167
CRUSE 3874 8422
CREW 7871 3900
CRUISE 9754 3058
CRUCE 14457 1893
CRUZE 20468 1205
SCREWS 24243 969
CREWE 38706 537
CRUS 41060 501
CRUCES 45829 439
CREWSE 49767 396
For the year 2000 information is also provided on ethnic breakdown. As I cannot format tables properly on the blog I've uploaded the data to Google Docs. You can see the file here.
It should be noted that the surname data from the two censuses is not directly comparable. For the 1990 data a sample was taken from 6.3 million census entries, equating to approximately one fortieth of the US population. The report for 2000 uses "name responses from almost 270 million people with valid name information".
I do not include all of these variants spellings in my one-name study because the high frequency of some of these surnames, especially in the US, would make the task unmanageable. A further problem is that some surnames have developed in different ways on both sides of the Atlantic. We have some evidence for instance that in Virginia the surname Crew evolved into Crews. In the UK Crew and Crewe do not appear to be related to any of the Cruse and variant spellings. The situation is also complicated by the different ethnic composition of the American population. In the US Cruze and Crus seem to be variants of the Spanish surname Cruz. In the UK these names are rarely seen and usually appear as variant spellings in parish register entries. There is a still a long way to go before we understand the full picture of our complicated family of surnames, but the DNA project is already proving to be a very useful way of working out which spellings are related and we will learn more as more people with the many variants join the project.
© Debbie Kennett 2010
1990 Ranking Count
CREWS 1373
CRUSE 3975
CRUISE 7221
CREW 8148
CRUCE 9146
CRUZE 21658
SCREWS 21905
CRUICE 57820
CREWE 73936
2000
CREWS 1404 23167
CRUSE 3874 8422
CREW 7871 3900
CRUISE 9754 3058
CRUCE 14457 1893
CRUZE 20468 1205
SCREWS 24243 969
CREWE 38706 537
CRUS 41060 501
CRUCES 45829 439
CREWSE 49767 396
For the year 2000 information is also provided on ethnic breakdown. As I cannot format tables properly on the blog I've uploaded the data to Google Docs. You can see the file here.
It should be noted that the surname data from the two censuses is not directly comparable. For the 1990 data a sample was taken from 6.3 million census entries, equating to approximately one fortieth of the US population. The report for 2000 uses "name responses from almost 270 million people with valid name information".
I do not include all of these variants spellings in my one-name study because the high frequency of some of these surnames, especially in the US, would make the task unmanageable. A further problem is that some surnames have developed in different ways on both sides of the Atlantic. We have some evidence for instance that in Virginia the surname Crew evolved into Crews. In the UK Crew and Crewe do not appear to be related to any of the Cruse and variant spellings. The situation is also complicated by the different ethnic composition of the American population. In the US Cruze and Crus seem to be variants of the Spanish surname Cruz. In the UK these names are rarely seen and usually appear as variant spellings in parish register entries. There is a still a long way to go before we understand the full picture of our complicated family of surnames, but the DNA project is already proving to be a very useful way of working out which spellings are related and we will learn more as more people with the many variants join the project.
© Debbie Kennett 2010
Saturday, 7 August 2010
Memories of Cruse's Stores, Rottingdean
I wrote back in December 2008 about Cruse's stores in Rottingdean, Sussex with a follow-up post a few days later. I have now been contacted by Terry who worked for a short time at Cruse's stores back in 1970. Terry has kindly sent me a scan of his 1970 payslip, which was handwritten by Ron Cruse, together with a scan of the shop's headed paper which I've reproduced below.
The blackouts refer to the power cuts in the 1970s when the power unions went on strike and the population had to resort to candlelight and oil lamps on strike days.
Terry has kindly shared his memories of Cruse's stores with me and given me permission to publish them here.
Terry has kindly shared his memories of Cruse's stores with me and given me permission to publish them here.
The Stores were a high class grocers.Thank you Terry for sharing these memories with us. It certainly would be hard to find such a shop today!
Ron Cruse worked very hard.
As did his son Alan.
They did home deliveries, as part of the business.
Mr Cruse took the orders by phone.
A list was made by hand.
He then gave the staff the list and the order was made up.
There was a bacon and cheese counter, usually run by a Mr Oliver.
He sliced bacon and cut cheese.
They cured their own hams.
There were "loose" nuts, prunes, huge bags of brown sugar.
They arrived loose and we weighed them out into 1lb bags.
Whole, very large, cheddar cheeses would arrive in wooden "hat boxes".
The cheese was also covered in muslin.
It was my job to unpack these and cut the cheese with a cheese wire.
My job was sort of storeman.
I packed away deliveries.
We had a lock-up garage up the road for extra storage.
I helped pack the van for our deliveries.
Bob was the delivery driver.
The store had another two stories upstairs where we stored provisions.
There was a back room for tinned goods.
They sold a wide range of items.
Rottingdean being a fairly posh village near Brighton, situated on the coast.
Quite a few retired people.
The store provided an excellent service.
We opened Saturday mornings, so it was a five and half day week.
I started at 8 am and finished about 6 pm.
Then there was an hour's travel each way, as I lived in Brighton.
I guess these days it would be hard to find a shop like Cruses Stores.
Its amazing how quickly things change.
It's deemed history now!
I enjoyed my seven months there.
It was a real family business.
I had to move away from Brighton but returned.
When I applied for a job I had to give Cruse's Stores as a reference.
They gave me a great reference, then Mr Cruse wrote to me offering me a job!
But I turned it down, having started a career in the National Health Service.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Exploring my genome with 23andMe - ancestry
This is the fourth and final article in my short series of reviews on my personal genomics test with 23andMe. I wrote last week about my disease risks, carrier status and drug responses, and traits. I'm now going to look at the ancestry part of the service, which as a family historian, was my primary motivation for taking the test.
23andMe provides three different types of ancestry information. For deep ancestry purposes you are given a haplogroup assignment for your mitochondrial DNA and, if you are male, for your Y-chromosome. An Ancestry Painting gives you broad details of your ethnic percentages - African, European and Asian. Finally, the Relative Finder service identifies your close cousins in the 23andMe database and allows you to make contact with them.
I have already had a full mitochondrial sequence (FMS) test at Family Tree DNA and this aspect of the 23andMe test was therefore somewhat redundant for me, but I was nevertheless interested to see how the two results would compare. The FTDNA FMS test looks at all 16,569 base pairs in the mitochondrial genome whereas 23andMe test just 3,000 SNPs. I wrote previously about my unique mtDNA results and my rare U4 haplogroup. When I received my FMS results earlier this year FTDNA refined my haplogroup to U4c1. I have the advantage that I am the co-administrator of the mtDNA haplogroup U4 project at FTDNA. Within the U4 project we have a large body of FMS results and, using these results in conjunction with published sequences on Phylotree and GenBank, my co-admin, Ron Scott, has been able to refine the haplogroups for many of our project members, including me. Within the U4 project I am now classified as a U4c1a1b. 23andMe have also placed me in haplogroup U4. They have however allocated me to a different subclade - U4a2b. I'm not yet certain of the reasons for the discrepancy, but suspect that 23andMe have not tested enough SNPs to provide an accurate haplogroup assignment. This is a very new science, and the haplogroup nomenclature is in a constant state of revision so it is understandable that in the early days there will be discrepancies. Haplogroup prediction is also particularly difficult for rare subclades like U4c. For all practical purposes at this stage knowing the subclade does not tell me very much as so little is known about haplogroup U4. As a bonus, 23andMe do however provide some very interesting background information on haplogroup U4, whereas FTDNA provided hardly anything at all and we have had to work hard instead to build up a list of resources on the U4 project website.
I already know from my family history research that all my lines going back at least to the 1800s, and in some cases for many hundreds of years previously, are from the UK. It was therefore no surprise that my Ancestry Painting showed that I am 100% European.
This feature is probably of more interest to people of mixed ancestry where, for example, Aboriginal or Native American ancestry will show up as "Asian". A new feature, Ancestry Finder, has been introduced in the last few weeks which will tell you which countries your ancestors might have lived in. As I already know that all my ancestors are from the UK this feature again did not really tell me very much. I was however somewhat surprised when I lowered the threshold to five centiMorgans (a measure of matching DNA segments) to see that I matched people with four grandparents from Romania, Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden, with just 0.3% of my genome from the UK. This result is probably more of a reflection of the lack of UK testees in the 23andMe database. It is also possible that some of the participants have provided incorrect information on their ancestry (the country information is taken from a customer survey).
Relative Finder is an opt-in feature of the 23andMe service. It works by detecting shared segments of autosomal DNA and predicting the relationship based on the number and size of the shared segments. I currently have 151 matches in the Relative Finder database. Twelve of these matches are predicted to be fourth cousins, and the remainder are predicted to be fifth cousins or distant cousins. For each prediction a relationship range is given. Some of my fifth cousins could be third to sixth cousins; others could be third to tenth cousins. The names and contact details of your matches are not made available to you. You are instead given information on their haplogroups, and, if they have filled in the information on their profile, their country of residence and number of surnames listed.
You can contact your matches but are restricted to contacting just five people per day. Over the last few weeks I have religiously contacted all 151 of my matches, but have been very disappointed that so far only 14 people have accepted contact, a mere 9% response rate. Much to my surprise two people have actually declined contact, which was somewhat unexpected for what is meant to be an opt-in service. Of the 14 people who responded 13 are in the United States and just one is in the UK. Although I've exchanged details with all of these people we've not been able to find our common ancestor. American research is particularly challenging and American researchers are rarely able to trace their lines to a specific location in the UK. Without a surname in common there is, therefore, little hope of finding the link in the paper trail. My sole UK match had taken advantage of the special offer for Parkinson's disease patients, and had only just started to research her family history.
All in all the ancestry part of the 23andMe service has not been particularly informative. I am pleased that I was able to purchase the Complete Edition as, much to my surprise, I've found it far more rewarding than I expected exploring my health and traits with 23andMe than my ancestry. Relative Finder is however still very new and it is quite possible that I will have more responses and more meaningful matches in the future as the database grows. 23andMe currently have in excess of 50,000 people in their database. The company does not however disclose how many people have opted to use the Relative Finder feature. Other genetic genealogists have reported a similar problem with a lack of response to Relative Finder requests with response rates ranging from about 10% to 30%. From a British perspective another problem with the Relative Finder test is that the vast majority of the 23andMe customer base, probably well in excess of 90%, is in America. While it is interesting to know that I have lots of distant genetic cousins in America it is not going to help my family history research if there is no way of finding the connection in the paper trail.
For ancestry testing the Family Finder test from Family Tree DNA is likely to be a much better option. FTDNA have a very large customer base who are primarily interested in genealogy. In contrast, it would appear that the majority of 23andMe customers have tested primarily for health reasons and have little interest in, or knowledge of, their family history. In addition, Family Tree DNA, thanks to their partnership with the Genographic Project and their sponsorship of Who do you think you are? Live, have a much more international customer base and, more importantly from my point of view, more customers in the UK. I've already had Family Finder tests done on both my mum and dad, and I wrote previously about my dad's Family Finder test. My mum's results have just come in and I will write more about this test in future posts.
Autosomal DNA testing for ancestry purposes is still in its infancy. Whether you test with 23andMe or Family Tree DNA such a test should be considered as more of a long term investment. In the short term the test is best used to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis, such as whether or not two people share a common great-grandparent. The cost of the test is still a formidable barrier, especially for those of us in the UK where the weak pound makes the tests comparatively more expensive. However, as the cost of the tests come down and the databases grow in size, autosomal DNA testing will become an increasingly useful tool for family history research.
See also
Part 1 Disease risks
Part 2 Carrier status and drug responses
Part 3 Traits
*Updates*
- The cost of autosomal DNA testing tumbled in 2013 and the three providers now charge just $99 for the test. There are significant differences in the features offered, the international availability and the shipping costs. For an up-to-date comparison see the ISOGG autosomal DNA testing comparison chart.
- 23andMe updated their ethnicity predictions in December 2012. See my post on 23andMe's new Ancestry Composition - a British perspective for a review.
© Debbie Kennett 2010
23andMe provides three different types of ancestry information. For deep ancestry purposes you are given a haplogroup assignment for your mitochondrial DNA and, if you are male, for your Y-chromosome. An Ancestry Painting gives you broad details of your ethnic percentages - African, European and Asian. Finally, the Relative Finder service identifies your close cousins in the 23andMe database and allows you to make contact with them.
I have already had a full mitochondrial sequence (FMS) test at Family Tree DNA and this aspect of the 23andMe test was therefore somewhat redundant for me, but I was nevertheless interested to see how the two results would compare. The FTDNA FMS test looks at all 16,569 base pairs in the mitochondrial genome whereas 23andMe test just 3,000 SNPs. I wrote previously about my unique mtDNA results and my rare U4 haplogroup. When I received my FMS results earlier this year FTDNA refined my haplogroup to U4c1. I have the advantage that I am the co-administrator of the mtDNA haplogroup U4 project at FTDNA. Within the U4 project we have a large body of FMS results and, using these results in conjunction with published sequences on Phylotree and GenBank, my co-admin, Ron Scott, has been able to refine the haplogroups for many of our project members, including me. Within the U4 project I am now classified as a U4c1a1b. 23andMe have also placed me in haplogroup U4. They have however allocated me to a different subclade - U4a2b. I'm not yet certain of the reasons for the discrepancy, but suspect that 23andMe have not tested enough SNPs to provide an accurate haplogroup assignment. This is a very new science, and the haplogroup nomenclature is in a constant state of revision so it is understandable that in the early days there will be discrepancies. Haplogroup prediction is also particularly difficult for rare subclades like U4c. For all practical purposes at this stage knowing the subclade does not tell me very much as so little is known about haplogroup U4. As a bonus, 23andMe do however provide some very interesting background information on haplogroup U4, whereas FTDNA provided hardly anything at all and we have had to work hard instead to build up a list of resources on the U4 project website.
I already know from my family history research that all my lines going back at least to the 1800s, and in some cases for many hundreds of years previously, are from the UK. It was therefore no surprise that my Ancestry Painting showed that I am 100% European.
Relative Finder is an opt-in feature of the 23andMe service. It works by detecting shared segments of autosomal DNA and predicting the relationship based on the number and size of the shared segments. I currently have 151 matches in the Relative Finder database. Twelve of these matches are predicted to be fourth cousins, and the remainder are predicted to be fifth cousins or distant cousins. For each prediction a relationship range is given. Some of my fifth cousins could be third to sixth cousins; others could be third to tenth cousins. The names and contact details of your matches are not made available to you. You are instead given information on their haplogroups, and, if they have filled in the information on their profile, their country of residence and number of surnames listed.
All in all the ancestry part of the 23andMe service has not been particularly informative. I am pleased that I was able to purchase the Complete Edition as, much to my surprise, I've found it far more rewarding than I expected exploring my health and traits with 23andMe than my ancestry. Relative Finder is however still very new and it is quite possible that I will have more responses and more meaningful matches in the future as the database grows. 23andMe currently have in excess of 50,000 people in their database. The company does not however disclose how many people have opted to use the Relative Finder feature. Other genetic genealogists have reported a similar problem with a lack of response to Relative Finder requests with response rates ranging from about 10% to 30%. From a British perspective another problem with the Relative Finder test is that the vast majority of the 23andMe customer base, probably well in excess of 90%, is in America. While it is interesting to know that I have lots of distant genetic cousins in America it is not going to help my family history research if there is no way of finding the connection in the paper trail.
For ancestry testing the Family Finder test from Family Tree DNA is likely to be a much better option. FTDNA have a very large customer base who are primarily interested in genealogy. In contrast, it would appear that the majority of 23andMe customers have tested primarily for health reasons and have little interest in, or knowledge of, their family history. In addition, Family Tree DNA, thanks to their partnership with the Genographic Project and their sponsorship of Who do you think you are? Live, have a much more international customer base and, more importantly from my point of view, more customers in the UK. I've already had Family Finder tests done on both my mum and dad, and I wrote previously about my dad's Family Finder test. My mum's results have just come in and I will write more about this test in future posts.
Autosomal DNA testing for ancestry purposes is still in its infancy. Whether you test with 23andMe or Family Tree DNA such a test should be considered as more of a long term investment. In the short term the test is best used to prove or disprove a particular hypothesis, such as whether or not two people share a common great-grandparent. The cost of the test is still a formidable barrier, especially for those of us in the UK where the weak pound makes the tests comparatively more expensive. However, as the cost of the tests come down and the databases grow in size, autosomal DNA testing will become an increasingly useful tool for family history research.
See also
Part 1 Disease risks
Part 2 Carrier status and drug responses
Part 3 Traits
*Updates*
- The cost of autosomal DNA testing tumbled in 2013 and the three providers now charge just $99 for the test. There are significant differences in the features offered, the international availability and the shipping costs. For an up-to-date comparison see the ISOGG autosomal DNA testing comparison chart.
- 23andMe updated their ethnicity predictions in December 2012. See my post on 23andMe's new Ancestry Composition - a British perspective for a review.
© Debbie Kennett 2010
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