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.

Year Without a Summer

Recently I was talking with a genealogical colleague about doing a talk about natural phenomena and their effects on families and communities. He brought up the subject of the Year Without a Summer and its impact on his ancestors who had migrated to North America.

I do mention the event in some of my talks. I covered it in my book, Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests. But I have not paid a lot more attention to it in terms of how it affected various localities.

Maybe because of the more recent date of the event, at least in terms of human history, there is a great deal of information in books, articles, scientific studies and newspapers. Much of this material was produced by and for local consumption and thus has value in looking at people and communities where our ancestors lived and worked. The Year Without a Summer, of course, has to deal with the impact the 1816 Tambora eruption had on weather and climate around the world.

I commented about the event in my book:

What was to affect the entire globe, though, was a cloud of ash and gases rising into the stratosphere containing deadly sulphur dioxide which, when combined with water produced sulphuric acid (H₂SO₄) – 100 million tons of it! Jet streams began blowing the cloud to the west. Within two weeks it had surrounded the world at the equator; by July it had spread north and south to reach the poles. The Earth was blanketed by a shadowy, poisonous veil of gas. With cold air trapped beneath the volcanic plumes, clouds could not form, thus rain could not fall to wash the pollution away. It took many years for the sulphur particles to finally drop back to the Earth.

In the meantime, the shroud caused havoc with climatic conditions: sunlight was reflected back into space; temperatures at the surface were cooled, and weather patterns were completely disrupted. The year following the Tambora eruption has been called the “Year Without Summer” because in most parts of the world in 1815, conditions were wet, cold and just plain miserable!

There is evidence in many records illustrating the effects on local communities. Eastern Canada and northeast USA experienced highly unusual weather and winter-like conditions in the spring of 1816 that were widely reported in newspapers and diaries. Later studies and reports offered data and comments about the effects of the ash cloud.

Can you find any references to this event in newspapers or other records in the areas where your ancestors lived?

New York Evening Post, Thursday, June 27, 1816 (Newspapers.com): various reports from NE United States

The Franklin Repository, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania 25 June 1816 (Newspapers.com)

Montreal Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 10 June 1816 (Ancestry.com)

You can read more about the event and its repercussions in many books and articles, and on several websites. For Canadian experiences, read:

Canada’s History: 1816: The Year Without Summer https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/environment/1816-the-year-without-summer

Canada’s History: The Big Chill https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/environment/the-big-chill

Canadian History Ehx: Canada’s Year Without a Summer https://canadaehx.com/2020/07/11/canadas-year-without-a-summer/

Reader’s Digest: The Year Canada Didn’t Have a Summer https://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/1816-the-year-without-a-summer/

 

For Northeastern American experiences, read:

Discover Concord: Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death: The Year Without a Summer https://www.discoverconcordma.com/articles/291-eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death-the-year-without-a-summer

Historic Ipswich: 1816, the Year Without Summer https://historicipswich.net/2020/06/25/1816-the-year-without-summer/

NASA: The year without a summer https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/183/the-year-without-a-summer/

US National Parks Service: 1816 – The Year Without Summer https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/1816-the-year-without-summer.htm

USGS: New England’s 1816 “Mackerel Year,” Volcanoes and Climate Change Today https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/new-englands-1816-mackerel-year-volcanoes-and-climate-change-today

The Beehive – Massachusetts Historical Society: 1816: the Year Without a Summer https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2016/11/1815-the-year-without-a-summer/

 

For European experiences and explanations, read:

Andrew P Schurer et al. (2019). Disentangling the causes of the 1816 European year without a summer. Environmental Research Letters. 14(9).  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab3a10

 

For general data:

Klingaman, W. K. & Klingaman, N. P. (2013). The Year Without Summer. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 352 pp.

Do an Internet search for “year without a summer” for many more references to the eruption and its effects around the world in articles, books, blogs, newspapers, journals, etc.