10 am: “We Will Remember Them” (Family stories from times of war), by Susan Davis, Sue Lambeth, Linda Reid, Mary-Lou Simac and Barbara Tose.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

OGS Ottawa Branch

Online and at the City of Ottawa Archives, 100 Tallwood.

1 pm: Rural Diary Archive, by Catharine A. Wilson.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/rural-diary-archive-ottawa/

BIGWILL

In casse neither of those appeal, an additional Saturday morning opportunity, online at 11 am EST, is Ye Olde Genealogie: Medieval English Research

The British Interest Group of Wisconsin and Illinois invites you to attend our November meeting with guest speaker, Dr. Daniel Hubbard, with the topic being “Ye Olde Genealogie: Medieval English Research.” In this presentation Dr. Hubbard will look at the transition from “modern” genealogy to researching in the middle ages, what you can do to research your ancestors among the “common folk” when there are no more parish registers to follow back in time. Then, browse through some of the vast amount of documentation for the gentry and nobility. Some of those documents, like wills, should feel familiar. Others will bear little resemblance to what we normally think of when we think of genealogy-heraldic visitations, inquisitions post-mortem, pipe rolls, etc., and we will know that we have entered the genealogical mists of time.

Via Zoom, please register in advance: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYucO-srD0jHtafxgl_64C0T0nmbCKWkx7t

 After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about linking to the meeting.

Kingston and District Branch, United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada will meet on Saturday, 25 November at 1:00 p.m. at St. Paul’s Anglican Church Hall, 137 Queen Street or, if you prefer, on Zoom. Award-winning author Jean Rae Baxter UE will discuss her 2023 book, Battle on the Ice. Most Canadians have never heard of the Battle of Point Pelee in 1838. Why did the grandchildren of Loyalists, who had fought hard and had given up land and lifestyle to support the British Crown, rebel against the government in 1837? For the Zoom link for the meeting, visit the website www.uelac.org/Kingston-Branch. All with an interest in Canadian history are welcome. Copies of Jean’s book will be available for purchase.

I’d barely posted on the November issue when the December issue came out on 7 November.

Feature articles are by two of my favourite British genealogist/writers.

Debbie Kennett explains how to solve your family mysteries using the latest online tools and patient building out of DNA matches trees.

In Documenting Disaster, Chris Paton reveals how records of misfortune and crisis can tell us a great deal about our ancestors’ lives.  In a second article Chris examines the causes and effects of the tragic Highland Clearances in 18th- and 19th-century Scotland.

In the Research Advice section Simon Fowler shares his advice on the records available to research any publicans in your tree, and their pubs. Jonathan Scott rounds up the essential online resources for tracing your musical forebears, and Nicola Morris explains how to use digitised Valuation Office Revision Books to locate Northern Irish kin.

New to me was the free software Ancestris reviewed by Nick Peers. The majority of its user base is in France. It looks interesting with some unique features, but one does get concerned about the longevity of free software.

The issue also includes a five-page guide to Staffordshire.

Let’s qualify that!

It’s for those of us researching people who died in England and Wales from the start of civil registration of deaths in 1837 until 1957.

On Wednesday, 70 years of the later death registrations became available as jpg digital image scans of the original GRO death registers. That extends the period previously available.

First, find the GRO reference coordinates from https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp. You will need a free registration.

Then, for the cost of £2.50, you can order and should receive a jpg image of the original almost instantaneously.

Need more Scotland? Then mark 25 November on your calendar for the next online conference from Scottish Indexes.

We will be most interested in the Eastern Time Zone Second Session in North America.

10:00 am Introduction
10:15 am ‘Edinburgh City Archives’ by Ashleigh Thompson
11:15 am ‘Medical Matters: discover the wealth of information that hospital and asylum records hold’ by Caroline Brown
12:15 pm ‘Discover Scottish Civil Registration Records’ by Chris Paton
1:30 pm ‘Getting the best from the NLS maps website for family history research’ by Chris Fleet
2:30 pm ‘Placenames’ by Lorna Steele-McGinn
3:30 pm Genealogy Q & A hosted by Graham and Emma Maxwell
4:30 pm ‘The ‘peculiar position’ of housing the farm worker (1900-25)’ by Kay Williams
5:40 pm ‘What’s New at Scottish Indexes’ by Graham & Emma Maxwell

Find out more at https://www.scottishindexes.com/default.aspx

A sunny Sunday morning tempted me to downtown Ottawa to pay my respects at the National War Memorial. Skirting fleets of fire and police vehicles to the west, the tomb of the unknown soldier was laden with poppies. People approached in a trickle, respectfully,  to add their tribute.

A few steps down Elgin Street the National Aboriginal Veterans Memorial retained four wreaths, many at the National War Memorial had been removed, and a few poppies.

I was reminded of the group exercizes where everyone is given a few sticky coloured paper dots and you are asked to add yours to various action item options. I visited other nearby memorials.

In Confederation park no poppies had been left on the South African War Memorial. Nearby, three poppies and two carnations graced the plaque to Canadian airmen who lost their lives over Poland in WW2.

Tucked away where it’s easy to overlook, the memorial to the over five hundred Canadians killed between 1950 and 1953 in Korea attracted eight poppies.

Last, not least, I wandered over to the Cartier Square Drill Hall and the nearby statue to John Rogers and William Osgood(e) of the Ottawa Company of Sharpshooters, who died in 1885 as part of the Northwest Field Force. It attracted 16 poppies.

Location, location, location.

The Library and Archives Canada annual Departmental Results Report, tabled in the Commons, is available here.

Included were four mentions of genealog*, eight for census, and one for newspaper.

Good things are happening at LAC, like new physical facilities and much-renewed efforts to catch up on the ATIP backlog.

Five performance indicators were exceeded for the core responsibility of acquiring and preserving documentary heritage; one was met, and two were missed.

For the core responsibility of providing access to documentary heritage, all seven performance targets were met; three were exceeded. That’s a welcome improvement over four of six in the previous year.

LAC reported digitizing  a total of 3,480,613 images in 2022–23, including the digitization of the 1931 Census. That’s more then in the previous two years, still far short of the times when ten million images were digitized for titles like First World War personnel files, and passenger lists.

The digitization included 234,678 images (187 microfilm reels) from the 1931 census of Canada. Digitization from microfilm is much simpler than from hardcopy, and was performed by FamilySearch under an MOU. 

A further 284,101 Indigenous-related images in LAC collections were digitized as part of the We Are Here: Sharing Stories initiative. More are planned with earmarked funding of $25 million in the 2022 federal budget to support the identification, description and digitization of six million pages of records related to the federal Indian day school system.

What about the other 2,961,834 images digitized? Were they for public release, digitized in reponse to ATIP or other individual information requests, or something else? I’ve asked LAC Communications.

But more important, why is LAC’s baseline “digitization” goal so lacking in ambition when it’s the only affordable way to access LAC records for many of us across our enormous country?

This collection of 680,094 items, new to Ancestry, contains images of records from the Royal Hospital Chelsea dated between 1702 and 1933.

On Saturday, I watched the Remembrance ceremonies on TV instead of travelling to the National War Memorial.  The time saved I used to compose an entry in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s new For Evermore facility, sharing the story of my great uncle Edward Cohen. The process went smoothly.

The acknowledgement received immediately after sending mentioned taking up to 10 working days to review and post. It was done by the next morning. Good job CWGC.

You can view the story and tribute at https://www.cwgc.org/stories/stories/second-lieutenant-edward-cohen-mc-12th-battalion-royal-fusiliers/

I recommend For Evermore.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Cheese-rolling, straw bears and weird rituals galore: one man’s mission to record all of British folklore

There are now 25 million people in the AncestryDNA database.

On Monday evening at 7 pm OGS Oxford Branch welcomes Glenn Wright presenting “Proudly She Served – Canadian Women at War – 1885-1945.” Registration for Zoom attendance at https://oxford.ogs.on.ca/

U of S restoration helps honour memory of those who served in First World War.

AN ARMISTICE DAY THOUGHT
(from the Ottawa Citizen, 11 November 1919)

The German warlords submitted to the Armistice terms of the Allies one year ago today. They submitted while their armies were still in invaded territory, though they were hastening back to Cermany as fast as transportation facilities could carry them. The supreme warlord hid himself in Holland. The militarist dictator, Ludendorff, retired as far as Norway

Ludendorff’s memoirs seem to confirm the opinion held by some Canadian soldiers that the German people never actually rose to the same height of sacrifice as the English people. At the end of the war, the people at home in the British Isles were facing the winter practically without domestic coal to carry them through. They had rationed themselves to the bone on food supplies. They did this to keep their allies from suffering any worse plight and to spare all the ships needed to bring American troops over. When the Canadian troops entered Germany, they were often surprised to see how well-fed the people looked. The world had been led to regard the German nation as starving, but the British nation starved itself to win the war.

Earlier in the same memorable year, 1918, when the British armies, including the Canadian Army Corps, were being driven back on the Channel Ports, Sir Douglas Haig gave the order to the men not to give way another yard but rather to give their lives where they stood. Does anyone doubt that the British would have fought on to the last against whatever careening force the Germans had come on with? Can anyone imagine Sir Douglas Haig taking refuge across the channel? There would have been no armistice day dictated by Germany as long as the man at the head of the British army remained alive.

This is a good day to remember, with gratitude, the spirit of the men of the British Isles—where the Military Service Act applied to men up to the age of 55, married and single alike—and of the men of Canada, who served overseas for years without the remote possibility of seeing home even for one week’s leave. There is no warmer admirer of the British “Tommy” than the Canadian-born soldier, and nowhere is the Canadian more highly regarded than in the Motherland.

On Thursday, November 2, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) tabled its 2023–2027 Departmental Sustainable Development Strategy (DSDS) to Parliament.

LAC is committed to the following goals:

• Advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and take action on inequality
• Reduce waste and transition to zero-emission vehicles
• Take action on climate change and its impacts

  I  expected hoped to see digitization initiatives that would mean clients would have less need to travel to an LAC site for research. Sadly, there’s no large-scale digitization initiative. No digitization on demand initiative. The closest it gets is:

  “While documents pertaining to residential schools have already been digitized, the current initiative concentrates on digitizing and creating culturally appropriate descriptions of millions of pages of documents pertaining to day schools.”

Opportunity lost.