Month: July 2023

The total number of pages online is 68,822,392, an increase from 68,383,253 last month.

This month 72 papers had pages added (66 in the previous month). There were no new titles. Dates range from 1771 to 1988.

Papers with more than 10,000 pages added are:

Title	Years
The Scotsman	1953-1974, 1976-1977
London Daily Chronicle	1872-1873, 1878-1885, 1887, 1922, 1924-1925, 1927-1928, 1930
Newmarket Journal	1921-1942, 1945-1949, 1956-1959, 1961-1965, 1967-1975, 1979-1981
Stratford-upon-Avon Herald	1873, 1885, 1890, 1899-1910, 1912-1916, 1935, 1939, 1945, 1951-1962, 1964-1968, 1970, 1981-1983, 1987-1988
Bristol Evening Post	1989
Huddersfield Daily Examiner	1882, 1939, 1959, 1964, 1968, 1973
Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner	1861-1863, 1865-1868, 1870, 1872, 1939-1949, 1951, 1958, 1961, 1978-1980, 1982
Sheerness Times Guardian	1877, 1949-1974
Wiltshire County Mirror	1852-1874, 1876-1877, 1889, 1893
Haverhill Echo	1947-1970
Galway Observer	1882-1884, 1889-1911, 1928-1963
Suffolk and Essex Free Press	1959-1964, 1980

I’m happy to see East Anglia titles appearing in the list. The Yarmouth Gazette and North Norfolk Constitutionalist
added 3,728 pages for 1875, 1892-1895, 1898-1901.

As of 25 July, Fold3.com has these major UK military additions.

Here are the latest updates from Ancestry.

Scotland, Ireland and Wales, Militia Attestation Papers, 1800-1915
Sourced from WO 96: Militia Attestation Papers, The National Archives, Kew,  A search returns name, enlistment date, enlistment place, age, regiment and service number. An image of the original is linked at Fold3.com Now with 185,298 records.

UK, Military Records of Baptisms, Confirmations, Marriages and Burials, 1813-1957
Includes links to original register images. Sourced from WO 156: War Office: UK and overseas garrisons: Registers of Baptisms, Confirmations, Deaths/Burials, and Marriage. The National Archives, Kew. Now with 40,319 records.
This is not the only source. See Births, marriages and deaths in the armed forces.

UK, Royal Air Force Airmen Records, 1918-1940
Find name, gender, age, birth date,  birth place, service date: service number, spouse, next of kin, relation to airman. Images are at Fold3. Now with 626,862 records.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

A Journey through UK’s Workhouse History, a podcast, with Peter Higginbotham

“It Was as Much for Me As for Anybody Else”: The Creation of Self-Validating Records
The focus in this article is those who experienced “cleansing” from trauma, be it chronic or temporary, but applicable to everyone.

Digital Preservation at the Library of Birmingham: Digital Preservation and Access
Selected items online including Birmingham Rate Books – Digitised PDFs of Birmingham Rate Books 1901 to 1918, and Map Collections – Digitised maps of Birmingham and West Midlands.

Researchers have discovered exceptionally potent antibodies that can neutralize virtually all known variants of the COVID-19 virus—including Omicron, a new study shows.
Really good news, if the promise holds and “side effects” are not an issue.

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Kim Barnsdale, Nick Mcdonald, Steve Whitwill, Sunday Thompson, Teresa, Unknown.

Both Ancestry and TheGenealogist have added to their British collections of Jewish interest.

For Ancestry it’s additions to UK, British Jewry Roll of Honour, 1914-1918, now with 57,202 entries of those who served in the British and colonial forces during World War I. Compiled in 1922, it uses military and public sources it lists many, not all who served by regiment, with particular atterntion to those how died or received military honours.
A free source is https://www.jewsfww.uk/roll-of-honour.php /.

TheGenealogist has made available a “batch of The Jewish Chronicles from the First World War and The Jewish Echo (Scotland and Ireland’s only Jewish paper from the time) covering years during the build up to World War 2.”
These records augment the collection of The Jewish Year Books from 1896 to 1939 and, you guessed it, the Jewry Roll of Honour (1914-1918) available from TheGenealogist.

 

Ireland, Scotland and Canada have additions at FMP this week.

Ireland
Find additions for the parish of St Mary’s in Magheraculmoney, Fermanagh, a Church of Ireland denomination, from 1767 to 1918,

They are transcriptions of 7,731 baptisms, 2,864 marriages, 1,086 burials, and also 3,948 congregational transcriptions between 1763 and 1887.

There’s a list of 108 townlands in the parish of Magheraculmoney here.

Scotland
For Inverness, 2,554 records are added to the Scotland, Poor Law & Poor Lists collection this week. The records, from 1846 to 1920, include considerable detail.

Canada
FMP now incorporates the 1.8 million transcription records of the Canadian Headstones record set. Over 1 million are for Ontario, and half a million for Quebec. A link takes you to the OGS Canadian Headstones site where you can see a photo of the headstone.

I was delighted to learn by email that Kim Barnsdale is back as Webinar Coordinator for OGS/Ontario Ancestors. She’s seeking our help on the topics you want to hear in the 2024 OGS webinar series.

Members and non-members can answer a survey which closes on Tuesday, 1 August, at 9 am. That’s soon so please do it now!  Here’s the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YQVSSNH

This Ancestry database is an index of approximately 3.3 million marriages.  The card catalogue indicates 9,749,829 entries so must have more names indexed than the marriage partners, but fewer than the parents and witnesses.

A search found no 1939 marriages, there are many for 1938 which is the latest date mentioned as available from Ancestry by the Archives of Ontario. The AO holds later marriage registrations and the indexes (where they exist) to 1941, but availability is questionable!

From James Powell’s Today in Ottawa’s History website the story of Charles Lindbergh’s second trip to Ottawa accompanied by his equally intrepid wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. https://todayinottawashistory.wordpress.com/2023/07/22/anne-lindbergh-and-north-to-the-orient/

This article appeared in the Ottawa Citizen of 27 July 1923.
Were your ancestors on one of the voyages identified?
Melita leaving Southampton on 2 August.
Montclare leaving Liverpool on 3 August.
Marburn leaving Glasgow, via Belfast on 3 August.
All passengers were supposedly destined to Winnipeg and paid a 12 pounds harvest fare. Most indicated they wanted to remain in Canada.

A gap in Canada’s incoming ship passenger lists, for 1923 and 1924, means their arrival isn’t recorded.  The ship arrivals can be confirmed in newspaper reports, the Melita arrived in Montreal on 10 August.

Fortunately there are outgoing passenger lists from the UK for all three vessels that give a contact address in the UK, something that did not appear in Canadian lists.

I wonder, did they thrive and enjoy the harvest experience?

As part of the Heritage portfolio, Library and Archives Canada now has new political leadership in the Cabinet shuffle, Heritage Minister Pascal St-Onge.

Who is she?

MP for Brome—Missisquoi, Quebec, Pascal St-Onge previously had the roles of Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec.

From https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet/honourable-pascale-st-onge
Over the past decade, Minister St-Onge served as Secretary General then President of the Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture, where she worked to address the challenges facing the media, newspapers, and the cultural sector. In this role, she oversaw expert studies aimed at developing public policies, participated in the creation and adoption of programs to support the print media, and contributed to the implementation of policies and programs designed to help the media and cultural sectors adapt to shifts brought about by digital platforms. In addition, she was instrumental in the purchase of the Groupe Capitales Médias and its transformation into a cooperative that allowed its daily newspapers to survive and continue their mission.

Minister St-Onge holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal and a certificate in journalism from the Université de Montréal. She also enjoyed a career as a musician for many years.

Minister St-Onge has lived in Orford, Quebec, since 2018.

Ms St-Onge is another in a long line of Ministers whose primary interest is culture.

 

Back in October 2021 I blogged this chart showing the number of theses in LAC’s Theses Canada collection. Note the decline in the number of theses captured since 2012. I wondered if the situation has changed.

This updated chart, produced on 25 July 2023, shows the number of theses in the collection still peaking in 2012, the number crept above 30,000. Until 2016 there were above 10,000 theses collected annually.

As shown by this data from Statistica, it’s not that the number of graduates is declining. More likely, with the passage of time since Theses Canada started in 1965, universities see less value in this LAC service.

Even with the decrease in numbers, the collection is worth searching for any light it could throw on an aspect of your family history.

The UK Community Archives and Heritage awards for 2023 were announced on 19 July.

• Overall winner and winner of Gathering and Preserving Heritage category: Dream Time Creative (Wakefield)
• Wellbeing Category: Glenside Hospital Museum (Bristol)
• Community Engagement: Remembering the Past (North Tyneside)

These are standouts among the hundreds of UK archives, from Shetland to the Channel Islands, and some in the Republic of Ireland, in the Community Archives and Heritage Group.
Check out the map and zoom in on an area of your interest—a fantastic variety of resources to explore once you decide to jump down the rabbit hole.