Month: January 2023

Here’s a look at the main contents for the February issue:

FAMILY HISTORY NEWS
Rachel Bellerby reports on the latest from the genealogy scene.

DEAR PAUL
Paul Chiddicks looks at wonderful family heirlooms and other family history miscellany,

THE FAMILY HISTORY REVOLUTION
Janet Few reflects on the past and the future of our favourite pursuit. Janet writes “… the opportunities to ‘do family history’ badly are legion. I could build a family tree of epic proportions in a few hours. It would be unsubstantiated, lacking in citations and inevitably incorrect, but I could claim it as mine and share it with the world for others to graft on to their own family trees in a similarly unthinking way.”

Janet objects to a person getting enjoyment out of the process and the result. Many of us enjoy doing things, and because of lack of expertize do them badly, including duffers on the golf course struggling to get their score lower than their 10-pin bowling score. There’s nothing new about bad family trees, back to the days when professionals made up ancestors to satisfy the egos of their clients, which it did. Even the most assiduously BCG-approved-researched ancestry may well have errors, as DNA matches can reveal.   As always — caveat emptor.

WHAT’S HERALDRY EVER DONE FOR US?
Chris Broom’s enthusiasm for this historic topic is more than a littie infectious!

SCOTLAND’S 1921 CENSUS NOW ONLINE FOR YOU
Chris Paton explores the latest census.

TRACING YOUR HOLOCAUST ANCESTORS
Simon Fowler looks at the resources to help trace family impacted.
Many more records than I knew exist.

YOUR 7 STEPS TO GETTING STARTED WITH FAMILY HISTORY
Discover your first steps, and learn how to begin an onine family tree.
A guide from Findmypast.

A GUIDE TO THE CENSUS
Family Tree Academy tutor David Annal gives a useful overview of this most useful of resources – with challenges to you to try at home!

DNA WORKSHOP
DNA Advisor Karen Evans reminds us that no question is too daft, and steps up once again to help a reader.

GENEALOGY GADGETS
Readers share their famiy history gadget favourties.
Most attention is paid to the free FTAnalyzer program which helps with an overview of a GEDCOM and finding possible errors.

LOVE TOKENS
Charlotte Soares indulges in romantic history

BOOKS
Latest history-inspired reads to enjoy.
“Gripping to the point of being un-put-downable, the core story is fascinating to anyone who enjoys crime novels, and particularly those with an interest in the use of DNA in genealogy research.” is the enthusiastic review of Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s The Sawtooth Slayer. https://www.nathandylangoodwin.com/

PHOTO CORNER
Photo-dating expert Jayne Shrimpton

THOUGHTS ON… ‘
Diane Lindsay’s genealogical ponderings.

Another date for your calendar. Heritage Day at Ottawa City Hall is back on Tuesday, 21 February.

Mark your calendar for Saturday, 25 March 2023 and Gene-O-Rama.

OGS has no annual conference planned this year. Instead, there’s a regional event focusing on the Grand River. So while Gene-O-Rama is the Ottawa Branch OGS annual mini-seminar, this year the program is of broader interest than the Ottawa area. It will be of Ontario-wide and even wider interest. Six sessions are scheduled from four top-rated speakers, all online, with the recorded sessions available until 30 April 2023.

Linda Corupe will educate us about the records of Rebellion and Discord.

Ken McKinlay will give A Beginners Guide to Searching Online Ontario Land Records.

Nancy E. Loe will present Organize Like an Archivist.

Following a lunch break and exhibitor chat

Nancy E. Loe returns with Ten Skills Every Genealogist Needs.

Jean Wilcox Hibben will warn BEWARE! The Enchanted Forest: Perils & Pitfalls of Online Trees.

Linda Corupe closes the day with Everything You Could Ever Want.

Details and Tickets at https://geneorama.ogs.on.ca/

 

Did COVID-19 challenge your organization?  In Ontario, there’s substantial community support provided by the Ontario Trillium Foundation through the component named the Resilient Communities Fund which supports “non-profit organizations recover and build capacity, resilience and sustainability.”

279 organizations received funding from the Resilient Communities Fund in 2022-23. None appear to be genealogical or family history societies. Numerous organizations in the cultural and heritage sector took advantage, including Museoparc Vanier Museopark, which was awarded $99,300 to “recover and build its resiliency from impacts of COVID-19 by undertaking a publicity campaign for two unveilings to reconnect with the community and promote Franco-Ontarian culture and heritage.”

In general, grants support organizations as they:

• develop new approaches to generate revenue
• start new activities to meet community need
• adjust strategies and plans
• plan for future challenges

There’s a 1 February deadline for the present round of applications. Another round opens in September.

Details on the fund and eligibility criteria are at https://www.otf.ca/our-grants/resilient-communities-fund

 

Goldie May provides research power tools for genealogy. The free version includes:  Automatic Research Log; Screenshots; Collaboration; Collection Hints; Export to CSV; and Subway Map timeline tool (5 ancestors per month). Additional functionality is available in paid versions.

Goldie May is accessed through a Chrome browser extension with data stored in the cloud.

See the 3-minute demo here

There’s also a free presentation being given online for the Coastal Georgia Genealogical Society at 7 pm on Wednesday, 18 January. Register at https://coastalgagensociety.org/events/

There are lots of online choices this week, too many to include. Additional mainly US events are listed at https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual.

All times are ET except as noted. Those in red are Canadian, bolded if local to Ottawa or recommended. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed.

TUESDAY 17 JANUARY

2:30 pm: Reaching Local Youth by Raising the Dead, by Mona Vance-Ali for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/7693505

8 pm: Document Analysis: Digging into Details, by Angela Packer McGhie for Legacy Family Tree Webinars and BCG.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/document-analysis-digging-into-details/

WEDNESDAY 18 JANUARY

2 pm: Exploring the Records in a Slave Owning Community, by Bernice Alexander Bennett for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/exploring-the-records-in-a-slave-owning-community/

7 pm: Thinking Outside the “Strawberry Box”: exploring New Heritage Conservation Tools in Carlington, by Avery Marshall and Greg MacPherson for Heritage Ottawa.
https://heritageottawa.org/events/strawberry-box-new-heritage-conservation-tools-carlington

7 pm: The Black Swamp Gang, by Dave Town for Orillia Museum of Art & History.
https://www.orilliamuseum.org/project/1-23/

THURSDAY 19 JANUARY

7 am (sic): Comment retrouver ses cousins d’Amérique du Nord grâce aux collections MyHeritage, avec Marie Cappart pour Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/comment-retrouver-ses-cousins-damerique-du-nord-grace-aux-collections-myheritage/

2:30 pm: UK Records of Education – from ragged school to university, by Else Churchill for Glamorgan Family History Society. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/records-of-education-from-ragged-school-to-university-tickets-436102513357

6:30 pm: Introduction to New Hampshire Genealogy, by Robert Cameron Weir for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/7693506

FRIDAY 20 JANUARY

2 pm: Foundational Concepts & Reference Tools for Mexican Genealogy, by Colleen Robledo Greene for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/foundational-concepts-reference-tools-for-mexican-genealogy/

7 pm: Navigating FultonHistory.com, by ? for Niagara Peninsula Branch OGS.
https://niagara.ogs.on.ca/events/niagara-peninsula-branch-monthly-webinar-series-2023-01-20/

SATURDAY 21 JANUARY

10 am: Unusual Family History – What lies beneath, by SheriLyn Bell for Kingston Branch OGS.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAucOmqpjsiHdTG7aSbDtL-4m5_hARJLVQx

1 pm: Transcribing Goulbourn Project (Ottawa), by Sarah Holla, for Ottawa Branch OGS.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/transcribing-goulbourn-project-ottawa/

1 pm: OnLand for Genealogists, by Ken McKinlay for Quinte Branch OGS. 
https://quinte.ogs.on.ca/2023/01/16/onland-for-genealogists/

This updated collection contains 570 records, sourced from TNA ADM 318, for those who served as Officers in the Women’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS) from 1917-1919.
Most records are handwritten in English on pre-printed forms. Records may include application forms, enrollment forms, certificates of identification, and officer’s forms.

Information from the sometimes over 100 imaged pages per record may include:

An episode of Active History podcast, hosted by Sean Graham.

https://activehistory.ca/2023/01/nazi-prisoners-of-war-in-canada-whats-old-is-news/

Nathan M. Greenfield, author of Hanged in Medicine Hat: Murder in a Nazi Prisoner-of-War Camp and the Disturbing True Story of Canada’s Last Mass Execution, talks about POW camp 132 in Medicine Hat. The podcast discussed how the camp came to be, the prisoners’ relationship with the local community, the internal culture that developed at the site, the Nazi influence in the camp, and the murder of two prisoners, and the resulting trial and execution.

For more, you can read Nathan’s editorial “When was it Unjust to Kill Seven Nazi Soldiers? When it Happened in Canada”

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

The Welsh National Book of Remembrance
A decorative book recording the name, rank, service/regiment and residence community of Welsh servicemen and women, who died in the First World War. It is now available through Ancestry with 36,835 records.

Fathers Have Been Older Than Mothers For 250,000 Years

Libraries and Virtual Reality

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, You Can Now Chat with Historical Figures: Shakespeare, Einstein, Austen, Socrates & More
Beware the rabbit holes under “Related content”

AI Isn’t Inevitable, by Dan Gardner

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Glenn Wright, Kim, Nick Mcdonald, Teresa, Unknown.

The following is a press release from TheGenealogist.

TheGenealogist adds 1831 Irish Tithe Defaulters and
more Irish Parish Registers

TheGenealogist has today released 371,400 Kildare Catholic Parish Registers covering 323,923 records of baptisms, 46,914 marriages and 563 burials to make it easier for its Diamond subscribers to discover their Irish ancestors from this eastern part of Ireland.

Also released at this time are more than 29,000 individuals recorded as Irish Tithe Defaulters. These records from 1831 can be a useful stand-in for the 1831 Irish census which was almost completely destroyed in 1922.

Tithes were levied on all occupiers of agricultural land, no matter their religion, and the Roman Catholic population of Ireland resented paying these tithes to the Church of Ireland (the Established Church) on top of often supporting their own priests.

Refusal to pay the tithes came to a head in the years 1831 to 1832, beginning what is known as the ‘Tithe War’ in Ireland. To alleviate the Church of Ireland’s shortfall The Clergy Relief Fund was established in 1832 by the Recovery of Tithes (Ireland) Act 1832. This provided the affected clergy compensation in return for providing the government with the names of the defaulters.

Many of the non-payers named were ordinary folk such as labourers, farmers and widows who would most likely have been Roman Catholics and so not part of the congregation at their local Church of Ireland parish church, but surprisingly there are also Magistrates, Peers of the Realm and even Knights.

These new releases, now available to all Gold and Diamond subscribers of TheGenealogist will be a welcome resource for those family historians wanting to research their Irish ancestry.

Read TheGenealogist’s featured article: Can’t Pay or Won’t Pay – The Tithe Defaulters

The Globe and Mail is running a series on Canada’s broken freedom-of-information regimes. The latest is Thanks to Canada’s broken access-to-information system, we have to look abroad to understand our own history, by respected historians Robert Bothwell and John English.

Genealogists and family historians should stand up and make our dissatisfaction known, alongside our historian colleagues. They’re the ones who compile the social history we use to help us understand our ancestor’s life and times. Together with historians and social scientists of all stripes who also need archival and library records, we must advocate for changes for the benefit of all.

What are the concerns I hear from our communities?

There are the same concerns about the closure of records. You have to weave a tortuous way to being granted access to a World War II service file. Let’s not even dwell on the 1950 US census being released in 2022 while we wait for the 1931 census of Canada until later this year.

Where records are available the archives should have flexible opening hours beyond 9-4 on weekdays. Some people have day jobs meaning that, in practice, there is no access for them. Limited hours can mean overnight stays or multiple trips for others who must travel to access records.

Our community has a direct interest in the digitization of the 95% (+/-) of archival records not already online. Facilitating access to records in this way would benefit those who cannot visit an archives of interest. Could further digitization, with adequate finding aids, not be promoted by the OGS and peer organizations?

In addition, the community might usefully advocate for making records full-text searchable. Although far from perfect, OCR technology continues to improve. Some organizations are demonstrating workable hand-writing recognition technology which can only improve.  Ancestry did that for the 1950 US census.

Government organizations may not be funded for that, but it shouldn’t stop them from seeking out partnerships to make searchable records available on a commercial basis as long as free access to the original is not compromised.

As illustrated by the Bothwell/English article, Canada has overly restrictive regulations for access compared to other countries. Access to information legislation, especially at the
federal level, seems to be more of a hindrance than a help. Government records, some created much more than fifty years ago, are not being released in a timely manner. Legislated time limits for formal requests are too often meaningless.

As the largest genealogical/family history society in Canada, OGS is well placed to speak for our community interests, if not lead.

Anticipating adverse weather, the BIFHSGO meeting on Saturday, 14 January, is online only, free and open to all.

Register HERE

9:00 am – 10:00 am:  Education Talk
Scotland’s Places for Family Historians – Presenter:  Robert Urquhart
The ScotlandsPlaces website (www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk) combines data and historical records from National Records of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.  As well as providing key information on specific places and administrative units (like parishes, counties and burghs), it allows free access to 17th and 18th century tax rolls.  Robert will give practical examples of how genealogists can get the best out of the site.

Robert Urquhart first worked as an archivist in the west of Scotland.  He joined the National Archives of Scotland in 1999, where he was part of the project team which created the ScotlandsPlaces website.  Later, he became Head of Digitisation at National Records of Scotland.  Today, he runs a palaeography transcription and teaching business (www.abbotshall.net).  His research interests include early modern Scottish-Dutch connections and Scottish parish boundary revisions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

10:00 am – 11:30 am:  Feature Talk
Untangling Family Thickets:  Cornwall to Canada – Presenter:  Wesley Johnston
Families in a locality can be like thickets, full of intermarriages over multiple generations, making for a complex familial landscape.  Wesley will show how putting these families back together yields deep insight into their lives and the choices they made – and doing it successfully requires a solid research method.  He will present case studies of St. Blazey in Cornwall, Columbus in Ontario, and the voyages that connected them.

Wesley Johnston began family history when he inherited the Johnston Family Bible (dating to 1861 in Pickering Township, Canada West).  He is historian and webmaster of the U.S. 7th Armored Division Association and founding president of the American WWII Association Historians Consortium.  His books are available on Amazon.  His website is www.wwjohnston.net.