Month: August 2023

This collection, new to Ancestry, for Britain’s second-largest city contains 1,394,768 records from 1836 to 2017.

Cemeteries included are Brandwood End, Handsworth, Key Hill, Kings Norton, Lodge Hill (and crematorium), Quinton, Sutton Coldfield, (and crematorium), Sutton New Hall, Warstone Lane, Witton, Yardley (and crematorium).

An Ancestry search returns index data: the deceased name, month of burial/cremation, year of burial/cremation, and cemetery. This is freely available from the Birmingham City Council at https://birminghamburialrecords.co.uk/ . There you have the option of paying £10 for a digital download of the following information which may (although not always) be shown on the image:

Number of Entry (Burial/Cremation Number)
Description of person buried/interred
Rank or profession (occupation)
Age
Sex
Marital Status
Late residence/place where death occurred
Date of burial/cremation
Date of death
By whom the ceremony/service was performed (Officiating Minister; Sometimes including Funeral Director)
Registrars signature
By whom the certificate was given (persons signing certificates)
Grant or reference number
Place of Burial/Cremation (Section/Class within the Cemetery)
Number of Grave (Plot number within the Section/Class within the Cemetery)
Whether the deceased is in consecrated or unconsecrated ground (occasionally including Special, Free Church and Roman Catholic ground)
Description of grave and charges (occasionally including grave depth)
If Pauper – The Union
Fees
Receipt Number
Parish/District
Method of disposal of ashes
Remarks

 

This collection includes 284,675 transcription records for the counties of Cheshire, Durham, Essex, Gloucestershire, Kent, Middlesex (including London), Norfolk, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Westmorland, Yorkshire, and Pembrokeshire between the years 1662 and 1674.

Records typically include the name of the head of the household and the date and place of residence.

The collection was made public by the Universities of Graz and Roehampton. Their website at https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:htx briefly introduces the Hearth Tax, project background, and complimentary access to the records.

You can explore over 400,000 digitized photos online from over 6 million aerial photographs preserved in the Historic England Archive.
The latest addition is a USAAF collection of over 20,000 photographs that record airfields, military bases, towns, and countryside in England between 1943 and 1944. An interactive map gives access to over 3,600 photographs from the USAAF Collection. These can also be viewed on the larger Historic England Aerial Photo Explorer map.

Canadian Press reports that Treasury Board President Anita Anand is tasking federal cabinet ministers with finding $15.4 billion in government spending cuts by a deadline of Oct. 2.

The focus would be reducing discretionary spending on government consulting, professional services and travel by 15 per cent or $7.1 billion over five years. That’s 3% per year.

How would you cut Library and Archives Canada’s expenditure by three per cent?

LAC’s planned expenditure for 2023/24 is $196,091,519, so in round figures, three per cent is a six million dollar cut.

According to the figures in the Departmental Plan, that reduction is more than half the increase in LAC’s budget over the previous year, mainly due to the following increases:

– an increase of $10.6 million for the access to information and litigation support function;
– an increase of $5.5 million for the implementation of the federal framework to address the legacy of residential schools, announced in Budget 2022;
– an increase of $1.3 million for the implementation of the Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, announced in Budget 2021; and
– an increase of $3.3 million mainly related to anticipated changes in non-budgetary expenditures, such as the value of services provided without charge by other government departments and amortization of tangible capital assets, as well as statutory adjustments.

Would you protect those clearly high-priority areas when the Estimates were approved?

If they were protected, the six million dollars is a 3.5 per cent cut for the rest.

In 2023/24, the split in expenditure between the budget lines was: Acquiring and preserving documentary heritage (39%), Providing access to documentary heritage (38%), and Internal services (23%). In previous years, while the absolute amount increased, the per cent spent on Acquiring and preserving documentary heritage was substantially greater.

Will every section be consulted on where cuts could be made to meet the target within their area? Given the emphasis on “consulting, professional services and travel,” Internal services would be an obvious place to scrutinize closely.

Is it salt air or sea sickness that the cover illustration of the new issue of Internet Genealogy brings to mind?
In Researching Your Mariner Ancestors Diane L. Richard looks at early 19th century, mostly US port records that document mariners.
In Their Words: “Memoires and
Autobiographies”: Sue Lisk shows you how to locate valuable information to help you better understand your ancestors’ lives.
1931 Canadian Census: Dave Obee searches for his grandparents in the newly-released 1931 Canadian Census emphasizing the insights of looking beyond your immediate family.
Ancestral Movements in Britain and Beyond: Michelle Dennis examines the many reasons for our ancestors to relocate.
Must-See Genealogy TV — For Free!: Robbie Gorr goes on a genealogy TV channel surfing safari. Includes many I didn’t know about and where to find them.
Colonial and Early Wills: David A. Norris looks at Colonial and 19th century wills and estate papers.
Online British Newspapers: Ed Storey looks at what you can find in online British newspapers. Surprisingly there’s no mention of newspapers.com/.
One Photograph: The Value of Paying Close Attention: Meredith Young Renard reveals how looking carefully at a photo can pay off.
Review: Take Better Notes with FreeForm: Lisa A. Alzo reviews a powerful Mac-based note-taking app.
In Tribute: Paths of Remembrance: Sue Lisk looks at the some of the ways ancestors might be memorialized.
Vacation Commonalities of Our Ancestors: Lynn Cassity looks at why our ancestors needed to document their time away
Answering the “Where Do I Go From Here?” Question:
The Allen County Public Library offers some good website suggestions to assist you.
Connecting the Threads: from Generation to Generation: Karen L. Newman looks at the enduring popularity of quilting
NetNotes: Diane L. Richard looks at websites and related
news that are sure to be of interest.
A Peek Behind the Scenes at Who Do You Think You Are? (U.K. edition): Dave Obee.

Choose from selected free online events in the next five days. All times are ET except as noted. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed. Looking for more options? Additional mainly US events are listed at https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual.

Tuesday 15 August

This is a free app, available from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Among other things, it has an augmented reality capability providing a tour of various Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites.

The augmented reality system is initially available for these cemeteries in England, Scotland and Wales — Brookwood Military Cemetery, Cambridge City Cemetery, Cannock Chase War Cemetery, Cardiff (Cathays) Cemetery, Edinburgh (Comely Bank) Cemetery, Harrogate (Stonefall) Cemetery, Manchester Southern Cemetery, Seaford Cemetery, Plymouth Naval Memorial and Tower Hill Memorial. More are to come. For aumented reality to operate you have to be there!

https://www.cwgc.org/our-work/news/explore-our-sites-through-augmented-reality/

The app, which is not a CWGC product, also provides information on other sites, in Ottawa, the Korean memorial (not CWGC) and Beechwood Cemetery. Below is a short video explaining Memory Anchor, directed more at providers than those seeking information.

MyHeritage just released this feature that uses AI technology to estimate the year a photo was taken.

It looks at nuances such as clothing, hairstyles, facial hair, and other objects characteristic of a particular decade. After a few seconds an estimated year the photo was taken appears. There’s also a confidence level and average error range. Now available for desktop and laptops, a phone app is promised, 

There’s detailed information in the blog post Introducing PhotoDater™, an Exclusive, Free New Feature to Estimate When Old Photos Were Taken.

Sometimes a year estimate cannot be displayed. MyHeritage will not display estimates that lack confidence, I’d rather have no estimate than a poor one.

 

With this latest Ancestry update, England and Wales Death Index, 1989-2022, has 6,947,083 entries.

Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2022
now has 897,449 entries.

A search provides name, gender, age, birth date, last residence (town), postal code district and death date. The source is not specified but appears to be compilations from unofficial records, such as funeral homes and newspapers,  from GreyPower Deceased Data and Wilmington Millennium, West Yorkshire. I estimate it covers about half the deaths occurring.

A digital humanities project that “models existing data into life events and then digitally links all these related events to reconstruct a searchable prosopography or biographical map of the entire settler cohort.”

Prosopography is a description of a person’s social and family connections, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions.

Scroll down at https://ulster-settlers.clericus.ie/ for a video on Navigating the Database.

 

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

A J Casson Jigsaw
https://jigex.com/uXTH

Doug Ford’s Greenbelt mess is just the latest example of his disdain for rules

Rigorous Science – Wilfrid Derome
Forensics pioneer. Canada’s History magazine on the life and work of Dr Wilfrid Derome (1877-1931). Interred in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.

New London Quakers: A Coda
The latest blog post from The Canadian Friends Historical Association. The Assocation website includes a mass of open access publications and documents relating to Canadian Quaker history, including transcriptions of handwritten meeting books going back to 1798.

TheGenealogist adds Lloyd George Land Tax Records for Oxfordshire

Sad to note the passing of BIFHSGO member Chuck Taylor

Five little-known inventors of the Victorian era

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Ann Burns, Anonymous, Brenda Turner, Daniel Horowitz, gail benjafield, Glenn Wright, Ken McKinlay, Nick McDonald, Nick Thorne, Patricia McGregor, Teresa, Susan Courage, Unknown.

 

 

These are the annual update as records come out of the embargo period.

Birmingham, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1922, now with 2,943,642 records.

Birmingham, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1939, now with 1,740,297 records.

Birmingham, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1964, now with 536,245 records.