Ever hear that thing about how Angela Lansbury and Malcolm Turnbull are cousins? Through his mother Coral Lansbury? Well, here are all the ways in which they are NOT related to each other.

Coral & Angela are NOT first cousins as stated here in this 1951 newspaper article (Carol/Coral, same letters, newspapers don’t care):

*Side note – the articles from the 40s and 50s are so extra.

They are NOT 2nd cousins once removed as Angela’s explanation in this article in 2013 would mean (if she’s using cousin to mean first cousin):

Angela’s grandfather George was NOT Coral’s great uncle because they’re not 2nd cousins despite what Coral declares in this 1986 article:

Which means Coral’s obituary, and those sourcing it such as Wikipedia, is wrong:

No, Coral wasn’t George Lansbury’s great granddaughter (but yes, she did write an award-winning verse play in 1948 about an Aboriginal girl titled Krubi of the Illawarra…):

So, are they even related? Let’s look first at Ms Angela’s family. Behold, my hand drawn diagrams and as you can see from Angela’s grandparents’ wedding record, George’s father was also called George.

We can go back a further generation by looking at George Snr’s wedding and baptism records and see that his parents are James and Mary and he was born in 1833 in Harborough Magna, Warwickshire.

On Coral’s side, her father is Oscar Lansbury and isn’t this picture of him doing the sound effects on a radio show fantastic?

Oscar’s father is Arthur Thomas Lansbury as you can see from this index of Oscar’s birth in Queensland.

We can go back a further generation when we look at the 1871 English census and find Arthur living with his family in Bromley, London. His father is Thomas Lansbury born in 1831 in Newham, Warwickshire.

We’ve now gone back 4 generations on Angela’s side and 3 on Coral’s and there are still no common ancestors.

Shall we try one more?

You might have noticed that both ladies’ great grandfathers were born in Warwickshire in Harborough Magna and Newnham. Well, Newnham is actually “King’s Newnham” and looking at a map, they are right next door to each other! Bingo!

And whatdayaknow, looking at Thomas’ wedding and baptism records, they show that his parents were James and Mary the same names as George snr’s parents.

Here you can see the brothers Thomas and George in the 1841 census living in Harborough Magna with their parents James and Mary:

This makes Coral and Angela third cousins! Let’s see that gorgeous hand drawn diagram:

Third cousins…that’s not a super close connection, I mean, I certainly don’t know any of my third cousins personally. But both Angela and Coral’s parents moved in London theatre circles in the 1920s and Lansbury isn’t a very common name.

They knew they were family, alluding to it being closer than it was didn’t hurt anyone. Coral didn’t really need the connection to Angela to shine though. After all, she was dubbed the Dean of Dazzle when she worked at Rutgers University. https://newspapers.com/article/the-philadelphia-inquirer-the-dean-of-da/125121379/

If you enjoyed this post, are sufficiently cashed up and feel the spirit moving you, you can help me with my research by donating through this link.

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LINKS to the articles mentioned in this post:

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/230232283?searchTerm=%22carol%20lansbury%22

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/georgia-on-her-mind-20130218-2emlt.html

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-sydney-morning-herald/123599362/

https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/lansbury-coral-magnolia-17182

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/82389180?searchTerm=%22coral%20lansbury%22

The Daguerreotype was popular between 1839 and 1860. The equipment was heavy weighing 50kg, cost a year’s wages and involved posing for 5 minutes but it spread like wildfire. The first one to be brought to Australia arrived in 1841 by a Captain Lucas.

Do you have a Daguerreotype photo?

It’s a one-off image on a metal plate in black and white or coloured by hand. They were usually quite small, about 3 inches. The plates are heavy, fragile and tarnish if exposed to air so are mounted in a case or jewellery. Only the middle and upper classes would have been able to afford them. Their polished silver plates mean they look like a negative, a positive or a mirror depending on the angle you view them from.

Trove is a completely free Australian resource of digitised newspapers and more. Trove is every researcher’s best friend.

newspapers.com is not free but you can see some info without paying if you get your sneaky research skills on. It’s not complete and mostly has USA papers, some Canada and UK plus Aussie papers The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (which aren’t on Trove) but not every copy.

Papers Past is a free New Zealand government website with digitised newspapers and more.

British Newspaper Archive is a paid online resource. It kinda says everything about itself in the name!

For hundreds of years, scientists and artists all over the world had been playing around with the camera obscura to project images and understand the properties of light and colour but no one could work out how to fix the image.

Watch this to see the camera obscura in action:

Then in the early 1800s, a bunch of mostly rich white dudes including Nicéphore Niépce, Sir John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot took advantage of the recent advances in chemistry and experimented with exposing different chemicals to sunlight in order to get the image to stay permanently.

They started gaining success in the late 1830s. Then in 1839, Niépce’s partner Louis Daguerre announced the production of his new invention: the Daguerreotype camera!

Family History Takeaway: This means you won’t have any photos of members of your family from before 1839.

The next post in this series will be about the Daguerreotype.

To search for BDM records or Vital Records as they’re known in the US, Family Search, Ancestry and Find My Past are the places to go. Family Search is completely free, you just need to set up an account with them. Ancestry and Find My Past can be used for free at libraries.

See if you can find local government databases relevant to your ancestors. Hint: UK is country based, USA is state based. Sometimes these will only give you indexes with no new helpful information and other times you’ll have access to the digitised certificate for free!! It just varies so much from place to place.

Here’s a few to get you started:

New Zealand

19th century marriages in Poznan, Poland

USA:

Arizona

Minnesota

Missouri

Tune in next week for newspapers! Woo!

Most of us have old photos of strangely dressed people looking stern in a photo album or box somewhere. If you’re really lucky, they’ve been meticulously labeled with the names of the people in the photo and the date it was taken. Maybe even the place too! A lot of the time though, we’re left guessing but with a little learning we can start to fill in the blanks and find out what your old photos tell you about your ancestors.

Let’s begin with a little background.

Before photography, if you were wealthy you could get an artist to paint you but for something a little easier on the purse strings you had options too. Self-portrait (photo 1), miniatures (photo 2), silhouettes (photo 3) and my personal favourite for it’s ingenuity the physionotrace (photo 4) (take a look at the YouTube link below to see how it works) were all popular.

Many people also collected keepsakes to remind them of their friends and family like letters and diaries (those lucky literate people!), locks of hair (photo 5) or even jewelry crafted from a dead loved one’s hair (photo 6). It’s a little creepy to us these days but with no selfies to gaze upon, ya gotta get inventive!

Next week we’ll get into the early days of photography.

Check out this great video on the creative things people did before photography!

Australia has state based historical BDM records available online. These archives will generally give you births up to 100 years ago, marriages up to 50-75 years ago and deaths up to 30 years ago. Read each site’s search tips to get the most out of them.

You won’t want to buy every record unless you’re really rolling in the $$$. Personally, I’ve only bought a few to find out specific details like cause of death or day and month of marriage. The index gives you a lot to go on for free but sometimes, especially if your ancestor has a common name or you’re struggling to find details elsewhere, you might need to buy the full record to check you’ve found the right person.

Before you cough up the cash, head to Graham Jaunay’s website to check out what you should find on your historical Australian BDM certificate (e.g. parents names, occupations, siblings, cause of death etc.).

Tasmania, ACT and NT are a bit different. I’ll do a post on them in a few weeks time.

Links:

Victoria

NSW

Queensland

Western Australia

South Australia