Finding friends in many places…

I recently gave a talk to the Glasgow & West of Scotland Family History Society (GWSFHS) summarizing my research into the life of my wife’s great-grandmother, Elizabeth Cooper. It was titled Looking for Elizabeth. The work involved many twists and turns into assembling information about her and the Cooper family.

I have written here before about various aspects of the search for information concerning this family and what challenges we faced: Sometimes those family stories have a grain of truth (12 August 2014); Using Old Maps (several posts from 22 July 2014 to 26 August 2014); Alexander Coooper – Colour Sergeant, Cameronians, Scottish Rifles (14 November 2017).

As we delved into the Cooper family history, we came to realize that, of the many stories we had been told over the years about her and her son, Alexander, a few contained a little truth while others contained a great deal of misinformation. Sorting out the conflicting information was a major task.

Along the way, we had help from many different people in many regions. Their expertise and experience allowed us to construct a comprehensive story of Elizabeth’s life as well as the family in general. One of the important websites we found has a wonderful amount of information and compiled histories about Shetland families where the Coopers originated – at least in the modern era: Bayanne House/North Isles Family History. This site was set up by Tony G. to help people learn about their Shetland ancestors.

Andrew and Margaret Coupar family on North Isles Family History website

Another researcher, Anne B., was exceedingly helpful in directing us to records in Moray and Glasgow after I inquired about information sources on the Rootsweb Moray email list, since 2020 succeeded by the list at https://scotland-genealogy.groups.io/g/Moray. Finding Elizabeth and her son, Alexander, on the Scottish census, under her married name was an important contribution.

1881 Scotland Census – Govan – Elizabeth Coupar Blackburn and son Alexander

In late 2021 I joined the GWSFHS to make contacts with people I hoped could provide information on the area that I thought might help us in our continuing Cooper family research, especially for Elizabeth. I asked about cemeteries, specifically how I might find where Elizabeth had been buried, not having had luck with previous enquiries, and a very kind member, Leanne P., looked up the information and told me that Elizabeth was buried in Craigton Cemetery, in Govan district, on 11 April 1904. That was a major piece of information about the end point of Elizabeth’s life. I posted here about that event in Elizabeth Cooper Found (23 November 2021).

List of those interred in Craigton Cemetery, Govan plot with Elizabeth

It was not the end of helpful advice from the GWSFHS, though. Following my talk to the society, several members offered advice about other records available at the Glasgow City Archives. One person (Elizabeth) commented to Murray A., the society’s Minutes Secretary: Just listened to the latest talk and really enjoyed it. If you could contact Wayne to let him know there is a Poor Relief application for Elizabeth Couper/Blackburn, Born Shetland 1832. She applied in 1896 D/Hew 10/3/95.

Not long after, another member, Merinda H., actually visited the archives office and photographed the poor relief application for me.

Copy of Application for Relief from Elizabeth Couper Blackburn Ross in Glasgow 1895

This is an amazing document that was completely unknown to me and which I likely would never have found except for the kindness and knowledge of GWSFHS members. In it, we get more insight into what her life may have been like. Elizabeth related information about her parents’ names (accurate in this record in contrast to many other documents in which she was less than forthright), marriages, sibling’s name, residence, etc.

Over the years I have found advice and helpful service in libraries and record offices and local family history societies. My talks have given me not just a forum to present ideas and contribute to the general genealogical community but also resulted in meeting people – new friends – who could help me.

I highly recommend you look for assistance from people and groups in the areas where your ancestors lived for help in finding new records and sources of information. Join the local societies. Get to know the local libraries, archives and record offices. You might just discover many new friends who are able to help you with your family history research.

Thank you GWSFHS members!

More About Blended Families

In January 2015 I wrote about mixed or blended families and how common they are in almost everyone’s family tree – blog post Don’t Forget About Those Half-Brothers and Sisters. In June of that year I wrote again about the subject, this time about remarriages in several Devon parish I look after as an Online Parish Clerk – blog post Remarriages and Blended Families.

In an article to be published in the July 2025 issue Family Tree (UK) magazine, I discuss some of the ways in which blended families might happen and offer several examples.

In the piece I related some of the history of my father-in-law’s family in the article, headed by Alexander and Mary Ann (Milne) McKay. But one other close-to-home story did not make it into the piece, that for my mother-in-law, who was also a member of a blended family.

Jesse Walker Cooper was born on 7 December 1908, in Glasgow, Scotland, to parents Alexander and Elizabeth (Walker) Cooper. Elizabeth was Alexander’s second wife. Their marriage took place in Glasgow on 26 May 1908. Alexander’s unique story can be found in a blog post from 14 November 2017 - Alexander Cooper – Colour Sergeant, Cameronians, Scottish Rifles.

He had previously married Margaret Scott on 5 September 1890 in Hamilton, Scotland. They had two children, a daughter born 12 November 1892 and a son born 23 November 1895, both in Lossiemouth, Elgin, Scotland. The daughter died at sea, while the couple was sailing home from an army posting in India, on 10 February 1895. Margaret died of heart disease on 1 December 1907, in Glasgow.

Elizabeth had had a daughter, Violet Walker, out of wedlock, on 25 December 1905. She was given her mother’s maiden name. Following the marriage of Elizabeth to Alexander, the daughter went to stay with her maternal grandparents, living with them into adulthood. Violet never married so it is not possible to trace her paternal roots through the DNA of any descendants.

The 1911 Scotland census shows Alexander and Elizabeth living in Glasgow with his first son, Alexander Jr., daughter Jesse and another son, John. Alexander and Elizabeth had five more children together between 1910 and 1917.

Alexander Jr. enlisted with the Scottish Rifles in 1914. He was killed in action in France on 4 April 1916.

Alexander Sr. was illegitimate. No information is available that could identify his biological father. He was less than truthful on almost every major document he filed making it much more difficult to trace his origins.

DNA testing of his male descendants has been rejected by them. So, in this case as well, a whole family line is unidentified and likely to stay that way unless we can make significant headway in the analysis of autosomal DNA tests of female members of the family.

Jesse’s story highlights some of the difficulties in unravelling blended families without additional written records of DNA tests. We did not think to get a DNA test from her before her death which would have assisted in sourcing her paternal roots.

If you do not have a subscription to Family Tree (UK) I recommend doing so. You may also enjoy being part of Family Tree Plus, which will give you access to not only the magazine, but webinars and videos, instructional classes and other resources. www.family-tree.co.uk

Given the harsh living conditions of past centuries, even extending into the 20^th century, losing one parent to accidental death, natural disaster or epidemics was a frequent occurrence. With few church, community or governmental assistance programs, surviving spouses would have been quick to find new partners to share parenting.

Most family historians will find many blended families in their tree, often with children as part of them that do not share blood connections. That does not make them less related, however, in a truly familial sense.

Reading and Transcribing Old Handwritten Documents: Transkribus

I have previously written about reading old handwriting and whether children in school today will be able to even write cursively. I stated in one blog post about poring through hundreds of pages of old parish registers and learning how to read Old English as well as interpret poor handwriting of some scribes of yesteryear. And I lamented that many students today are not learning cursive writing that many of us older folk did and may not be able to read old documents.

Well, help may be on the way!

We have seen the large strides made in converting printed material into digital documents. Most family researchers, or even casual readers now take advantage of thousands of books and articles, both old and current, now being available online as a result of extensive scanning efforts.

I also commented back in 2017 that “technology is being developed to read handwriting through optical character recognition. That will be a great boon to anyone dealing with old documents, but it is likely still a long way off before we have such a program on our own computers.” It is now a lot closer to reality than I imagined back then.

One of the major applications to reading and transcribing old documents is through Transkribus. I mentioned it in a recent presentation to the Family Tree (UK) Brickwalls, Skills & Solutions Club.

Transkribus has become one of the go-to programs for transcribing historical documents. The development of software to transcribe old records began back in the late 1990s. Libraries were already using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to digitize books, but primarily for those written in English.  Another program was needed for printed material in other languages commonly used in Europe.

Researchers came up with Analysed Layout and Text Object (ALTO) format which stored text and images of letters and words. The images were transcribed and stored for use in comparison to other documents over time, building up a library of words and phrases. Such documentation became what is called Ground Truth, a growing repository of images that could serve machine learning, or artificial intelligence processing.

The Transkribus project was established and backed by several institutions, coming together as the READ-Coop, formed to test and further develop the programming. The group became the official guardians of the Transkribus platform. There are now more than 100 European members of the coop. The first version went online in February 2015.

Read more about the history and development of Transkribus in a 2023 post on the Transkribus blog.

Costs to use the platform vary depending on the purpose and organization type of size. There is a free version for genealogists and students although the waiting period to get transcriptions done can be longer as the priority for these accounts is lower.

The process is simple.

•      Set up an account.

•      Open the Transkribus program.

•      Drag an image into the left-hand side of the window.

•      And the program will begin to transcribe it.

There may be a wait while the image is in a queue.

I wanted to test the technique, so I uploaded one of my family documents from the 17^th century. This was a purported will for Sampson Shepheard of Cornwood, Devon, but it was actually a forgery conceived by his brother, William. But that is a story for another time. Anyway, it seemed like a good document to try out on various transcription programs.

Once a document is uploaded it enters a transcribing queue. Within a few moments a transcription will appear.

You can get a better view of the results on the Editor screen where you can see a line-by-line transcription. In this case the Transkribus version, aside from a few words and phrases, was not all that bad.

Then you can compare it with your own transcription or one from a published source.

The Transkribus results had 56 errors in 286 words, a Character Error Rate (CER) of 20%. Most of the errors were ones with different letters interpreted, like adding an ‘s’ to the end of a word that had a squiggle, interpreting a ‘p’ for a similarly shaped ampersand, or using a slightly different spelling. So, the CER of 20% was a bit misleading.

By the way, I did tests on Transkribus with other documents. Some were good; some were poor. What I found was that there are positives and negatives with their process, although admittedly I tried a very small sample.

Note that Transkribus is a transcribing software, as the name suggests. It does not translate documents, though, from one language to another.

I recommend that genealogists try Transkribus for themselves. Compare it with other AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot as well. You might be amazed what results you get.