Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.
Dave Obee Presentations
Today (Sunday) at 2 pm from Halton Peel Branch OGS, find out about Tracing Forward to Find Distant Cousins. Register here. There are also opportunities to learn about Changing Places, Changing Borders: Overcoming geographic challenges in Eastern Europe next Saturday, and A Fresh Light on Old Newspapers next Sunday at Dave’s OGS Conference presentations.
FamilyTreeDNA
Until 20 June find discounts on various of the company tests.
Saying NO to Facebook (Meta)
On Friday ResearchBuzz, one of my go-to sites, posted a Facebook Update. It included that Facebook failed again to detect hate speech in approving ads that used dehumanizing hate speech to call for the murder of people belonging to each of Ethiopia’s three main ethnic groups. Facebook prohibits gun sales on its service, but buyers and sellers can violate the rule 10 times before they are kicked off the social network. And, the majority of people encountering crypto scams on social media do so on Meta properties, including WhatsApp.
Not in Canada, Eh!
Another example of the sorry state of Canada’s declassification regime — Studying Canada’s Cold War? Go East, young scholar … and maybe skip Ottawa. That’s hot on the heels of Canada, a Country Without a History?
It’s part of a pattern. As family historians we know that post-1935 passenger arrival lists, and WW2 service files, and the 1940 national registration are all unavailable, or only available after jumping through bureaucratic hoops and tolerating long delays. Even then there can be exhorbant costs.
While LAC is focusing on its new palace at 555 Albert the access part of its mandate takes a back seat.
What’s New?
A blog post this week from UBC includes an explanation of how to use an advanced search query to compile a list of new items added this year. At LAC’s collection search you can also specify a year in the advanced search. Entering 2022 finds 11,401 items, 40 of which are archival. One of those is “Ministerial correspondence of the Office of the President [textual record]“, not so informative as it fails to mention the organization! Would that be President of Canada Post, the Museums Corporation? Turns out it’s CIDA. Why not give the organization name rather than just reference RG74? Could it be they want to preserve some of the mystique of the discipline — nothing new about that!
On a lighter note!
Thanks to this week’s contributors. Anonymous, Brenda Turner, Gail, Glenn Wright, Teresa, Unknown.