Genealogy: the danger of trusting official documents

Newcomers to family history research can be forgiven for believing that official documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates are "gospel", so to speak. Not true.

When I was researching my book, God's Triangle, the story of a scandal involving my Baptist missionary Great Aunt Florence M. "Florrie" Cox, I came across the civil marriage record in Calcutta of her ex-husband and his mistress. The document contained several errors and misleading statements.

Even though the husband, Frank E. Paice, and his mistress, A. Olga Johnston, had been ordained missionaries, they were not above telling a few fibs. Olga gave her age as 32, just a year older than Frank, but three years younger than she really was. She wouldn't have been the first woman to lie about her age, but there was also a whopping deceit about how long she and Frank had been living in Calcutta. Frank claimed to have lived there for seven years, while Olga said she had been there for five years. This was blatantly untrue. They could not have been there for more than a few months as they had been in Australia for at least a year and before that, had been stationed for about six years in remote missionary outposts in East Bengal. Presumably they had lied because of residential requirements for their marriage.

There were several other aspects of the official record that could be seen as misleading, but I won't bore you with those. The point I want to make is that if the civil marriage record had been the first document I had found in my research, I would have been sent down routes that might never had led to me establishing the truth.

Similarly, anyone researching my Australian maternal grandfather, Arthur Joseph George Cox, would have been seriously mis-informed about his life had they gone first to his death certificate. His mistress-then-second-wife, Phyllis, had deliberately not mentioned that he had been married before and fathered 10 children, including my mother, Rena.

Not all errors in official family history documents are deliberate. Sometimes they are just careless mistakes. An example: the death certificate of my Great Aunt and opera singer, Reba Rangan, was wrong in several respects. For starters, Reba was her nickname, not her real name. Then her father was given as "unknown", which wasn't true. Her aunt was named as her mother, which also wasn't true, and it was further stated that she had spent all her life in Australia -- overlooking the fact she lived and worked in London for some time as an opera performer.

The death certificate details had been provided by a nephew and when I challenged him about the inaccuracies, he said simply that he had made no real attempt to establish the facts. He had just guessed most of the information.

I could give other examples of incorrect family history documents, but I hope that I have successfully made my point: treat all certificates with an element of caution.

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Learn more about the Rev Frank E. Paice by going HERE   

Learn more about A. Olga Johnson by going HERE

Learn more about Florence M. "Florrie" Cox by going HERE

Learn more about Reba Rangan by going HERE

Sub-titles -- the good and the bad and those that are just not there

UPDATE: Wonderful new live sub-titling error on a BBC weather forecast: “Miss Dan Fogg could be found in Scotland yesterday morning."
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My wife and I are not deaf, but we have to admit that at our advanced years our hearing is not perfect. The top frequencies don't register very well and consequently we sometimes have to wear our hearing aids at lectures or while watching TV.

We are immensely grateful to the BBC and the main British commercial channels for routinely offering sub-titles. We've never had trouble with sub-titles, having loved watching foreign-language movies in our younger days in Australia. What surprises us is the number of British films that are being offered on DVD without sub-titles. It is now the fashion with television and feature film dramas to have the actors speak "naturally", i.e. not producing and projecting their voices as was the practice in days gone by. All very well, but the directors and producers must accept that there are now more old people than youngsters in Britain and with age comes hearing problems. Therefore, sub-titles are important for a great many people who buy or rent DVDs. Without sub-titles, many DVDs are of little or no use to many potential buyers. So, how about it guys and gals: spend a little more time and money making sure that your DVDs have sub-titles. It will make many of your customers happy and may well result in increased sales.

Going back to the sub-titles offered with programmes transmitted on mainstream television channels in Britain, there is sometimes fun to be had watching the automated sub-titling on live shows. This is usually done with voice recognition software with its inevitable dangers. A friend of mine recently spotted these three amusing mis-translations in just an hour or two of watching a live television programme:

--- A shrug of carriage = Nigel Farage
--- Gaultier a brat on strike = Gaultier Breton stripe
--- Richard had a habitation below the knee = ... an amputation...

But my favourite of recent times concerns the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
His name came up on the TV news screens one day as "So gay lover of". This is additionally amusing in the light of Russia's difficulty coping with homosexuality.

What comes first -- the book or the film of the book?

UPDATE: Since posting the message below I have received very useful suggestions about the need to make my book less like a film script. In view of this, I have made several changes (see the link towards the bottom of the page). Feel free to make any other suggestions that you feel might improve the telling of the story. Ian R
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As much as there are any hard and fast rules in the film-making business, it is the received wisdom that a book is written then someone else buys the film rights and turns it into a movie.

That's not the way it is with me, but then perhaps I am just perverse.

To be honest, I had never intended to become a screenwriter -- certainly not one so late in life after more than 40 years in print and broadcast journalism in Australia and the United Kingdom. Nor had it ever occurred to me that I might write a book. Quite the contrary. I always thought a book would require too much damned effort. But here I am, both screenwriter and book author and doing things in what many professionals think is the wrong way around.

But to go back a bit...

My first screenplay, GOD'S TRIANGLE, came about by accident. My wife, Rosemary, and I are keen genealogists and stumbled across the fascinating and sad story of my Australian Great Aunt Florence "Florrie" Cox. Florrie was a Baptist missionary in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) during the First World War, and as the story emerged of why her marriage to the Rev. Frank E. Paice went into meltdown, Rosemary recognised its potential as a feature film.

I sold the idea to an official of  Film Victoria, the Victorian State Government film agency in Melbourne. But pitching an idea to someone who thinks it is a great idea is the easy bit. In my case, I also naively believed that a total of seven years in television news qualified me to write the script for a film lasting between 90 and 120 minutes. Wrong. So wrong. My first attempt at a script was truly terrible, chiefly because it was dialogue driven and gave away too much information too early. Gradually I got the hang of screenwriting, but still no-one came forward with a firm offer.

The turning point came when Rosemary pointed out that I should be drawing up a detailed chronological account of our God's Triangle research for the historical record. This soon morphed into diary that became a paperback and ebook. And that did the trick. Once that was published, the interest grew and the film rights were picked up. The screenplay is now in pre-production development with two producers in Melbourne, financed by Film Victoria.

This got me thinking about my three other screenplays -- in particular The Moral Maze, a fictional thriller about a foreign correspondent corrupted by the intelligence services with disastrous consequences. Why not also write the book version of this story, I wondered? And that's what I am now doing, in the hope that its publication will lead to the screenplay being picked up by someone with access to about $US10m.

The book should be published before next Christmas. I'm just loving writing it because it requires such a difference approach to a film script. If you interested in making the comparisons, I have posted the opening scenes and chapters on my main Richardson Media Limited website. Here are the LINKS to the SCREENPLAY and to the BOOK.

Feel free to send me your comments to me: ian*at*richardsonmedia.co.uk

PS: Sorry that I can't give you a link to any extracts of the God's Triangle screenplay at this stage, but the script is again a work in progress and currently subject to commercial confidentiality.

When does a film become "period" in Australia?

A long-standing mate who runs a TV production company in Australia is passing through London this week and we caught up for lunch today. In addition to selling his programmes, he is looking for small-budget films to make. I gently suggested that he might be interested in Blind Mike, a music-laden screenplay that I had written, inspired by Grantley Dee, the famous Australian pop singer  and the world's first blind DJ. He couldn't remember Grantley and in any case, "we don't have a market for period films". "What do you mean 'period films'?" I responded with some astonishment, "this was in the 1960s!"  "But that was last century, mate!" he said dismissively.

TV: changing social attitudes

My wife and I have just finished watching a re-run on BBC4 of the wonderful comedy series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. It was a laugh-out-loud series in which the humour had worn extremely well, despite it being first broadcast 40 years ago. But there were occasions -- particularly in the final episode -- when we were taken aback by comments that would not get past script editors today. Example: would a comedy be produced in this age in which homosexuals were routinely referred to as "poofs"? Most unlikely. And would there be scenes in which it was made to appear normal for young men to drink several pints of beer and a couple of whisky "shorts" -- then go out and drive away from the pub in a car? I doubt it.

Still, with those reservations, I thank the BBC for giving viewers another chance to watch and enjoy this fine series.It was high-class, finely-tuned comedy.

Joan who? The fragility of fame.

My wife went into a bookshop in Ealing, London, the other day. She wanted to buy an easy-read book for a friend who was incapacitated and feeling a bit down after a bad fall. She asked for a copy of Passion for Life, the new book by Joan Collins. "Who's Joan Collins?" asked the young sales assistant.

It reminds me of a similar sort of experience several years ago when I went to a large bookshop in central London seeking a copy of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. When I failed to find it in the Drama section, I sought help from a young woman behind the counter. "Have you checked in Business?" she asked.

Understanding God's Triangle

I very rarely get upset if I get critical comments about my book God's Triangle or any of my other writings. Sometimes the criticism is not to be taken too seriously, such as when a woman in Sydney told me that my book was rubbish without having bought or read it, but often criticism can be very constructive. By that, I mean that it can expose the fact that I have failed to get my story across successfully, either because of a poor choice of words or an unnecessarily complicated sentence.

When I first wrote God's Triangle I arranged to have test readings by people I either didn't know or whom I was convinced would not flinch from telling me the truth. The feedback was immensely useful and resulted in my shortening of some chapters while expanding others. Since the first edition went into print I have been heartened by the number of readers who have taken the trouble to tell me how much they enjoyed the book and the extraordinary story it revealed about Florence "Florrie" Cox, who was a missionary and my great aunt. I was particularly thrilled yesterday to get this message unprompted from Jennifer Chamberlain in Auckland, New Zealand:

      A great read. Very compelling with good build-up to the high drama of Mr Justice Beach’s back down and the author finally getting to open those divorce files after a determined 18-month battle.

      The story has all the elements of a great movie: modern-day journalist sleuth who won’t be thwarted -- not even by Melbourne’s Supreme Court; the love triangle in its exotic setting; the objectionable Olga and her hapless target; the interesting syndrome (which I had never heard of before) and the poignancy of what poor Florrie endured; the missionary/religious/Masonic themes and the details and colour -- which help conjure the settings. It’s a real journey towards enlightenment narrative and all the more fascinating because we live in an age where nothing is secret any more and yet this potent secret was so well kept by generations of very determined people … and it all happened not so very long ago.

      I also liked the way Ian put himself right into the tale and offered his personal thoughts and reflections. That always helps people clarify their own thinking. It’s going to make a great Aussie film. 

Thank you, Jennifer. It has lifted my spirits.