Month: January 2024

This is a shoutout to John Grenham’s first blog post for 2024
Catholic Parish Map Confession in which he reveals what some would consider issues with parish boundaries.
Although no expert, I do wonder how significant the boundaries are. Was anyone turned away from a service because they lived in the wrong parish? Is it possible a priest would think a neighbouring parish was poaching their parishioners?

If two presentations in one week are anything to judge by, AI will be a major for genealogy this year.

Nicely complementing Steve Little’s “Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy: New Beginnings in 2024” mentioned previously, available for free at Legacy Family Tree Webinars until Tuesday, is this presentation by Senior Genealogist Melanie McComb from American Ancestors.

Melanie looks in some detail at using AI to support your research—including assistance with summarizing, report writing, digitally restoring family photos, and more. She reinforces Steve Little in addressing aspects of AI that genealogists should be cautious of, such as accuracy and copyright concerns.

I paused the playback of this video to try Free Online OCR – Image to text and PDF to Doc converter at https://www.onlineocr.net. It worked well.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Therefore Let Us Not Be Silly
Troll news and yellow journalism run amok. In 2024, we can change. By Justin Ling

Predictions for 2024
Bari Weiss interviews Niall Ferguson, John McWhorter, Tyler Cowen, Peter Attia, Nate Silver, and others about the year to come. Long. US-centric. If the link doesn’t work try this.

It is not given to human beings – happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable – to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.

                                   Winston Churchill

2023: MyHeritage Year in Review

Amateur Family Genealogists Researching Their Family History: A Scoping Review of Motivations and Psychosocial Impacts

What to expect at CES 2024
The Consumer Electronics Show starts in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Bidet with Alexa and Google anyone?

Sometimes the planets align to drag you down a rabbit hole.

I’ve recently been researching the ancestry of my niece’s husband in County Durham.

I’ve also been reading the book The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum. It includes a brief reference to murder by arsenic in the UK.

In fact, handled with skill by a calculating murderer, the poison seemed to engender a homicidal overconfidence. in 1872, one notorious British murderer, Mary Ann Cotton, killed 15 people (according to some sources it could be as many as 21) , including all the children of her five husbands, and several neighbours who irritated her, before she was caught in 1872, tried and hung.

They came in conjunction when I found the scene of Cotton’s crimes was County Durham. 

There’s a fascinating past episode on Cotton in the BBC Radio Four series Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley available on BBC Sounds. More episodes are coming.

I’ve not been able to link any of Cotton’s victims, all but six male, to the family I’m researching, except by geography. Maybe if I dig further I’ll be able to add the story to his family history.

There’s a mixed bag of military records this week. Should you be lucky enough to find a person of interest, the records are sufficiently obscure that you are likely to find new information about them.

British Army, Coldstream Guards 1800-1981
17,896 photo album records and 497 attestations are added between 1800 and 1981. The majority of these records comprise a digitized image and a transcript which serves as a finding aid for that image. There is one enlistment register for 1915, covering the regimental numbers 16055 to 18093, for which there are no images.

British Army, London Regiment, Surrey Battalions 1914-1940
3,517 new records spanning from 1914 to 1940.

British Army Service Records – South Wales Borderers
698 transcriptions are added to an existing service record collection from the South Wales Borderers regiment between 1890 and 1915.

A whole slew of digitized and searchable 19th-century British newspapers, 78 to be precise, which previously required a paid subscription, became available without charge through Findmypast in the New Year. Several major papers with over a 50-year run, including Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Reynold’s Newspaper, are included.

Here’s the complete list.

The National Archives, UK, offers five online presentations in January.

Family History: Using First World War Army Records
Saturday 13 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Will Butler, Head of Military Records at The National Archives,, explores key sources for researching those who served in the First World War.

Family History: Using Civilian Internee Records
Saturday 20 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Roger Kershaw, Collections Specialist at The National Archives, explains how to find records of civilian internment relating to individuals.

The Forgers: The Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation
Wednesday 24 January 2024, 19:30 (2:30 pm EST)
Roger Moorhouse in conversation about the forgotten story of the Holocaust’s most audacious rescue operation, saving thousands of Jewish lives in the Second World War.

Poverty, Language and the New Poor Law in Wales, 1834–1871
Friday 26 January 2024, 14:00 (9 am EST)
Records specialist Paul Carter delves into the difficulties faced by the poor in England and Wales when dealing with a central poor law authority, responsible for the high-level administration of poor relief for millions of poor people across a bilingual society.

Family History: Using Prisoner of War Records
Saturday 27 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Roger Kershaw is back to help get started researching ancestors who were taken as Prisoners of War during the Second World War. You’ll be introduced to Prisoners of War from across different theatres of war and some of the key records held by The National Archives.

Find out more and book at https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/visit-us/whats-on/online-events/

Library and Archives Canada has a database, linked from here, with 33,036 references to immigrants who stayed, were born/baptised, married or buried at the Grosse Île Quarantine Station between 1832 and 1937.

The records are particularly valuable for those of Irish origin for the period before 1865 after which passenger lists for incoming vessels to Quebec City/Montreal became available.

The database has transcribed all information contained in the various source documents. While it is possible to obtain copies of some of the original records, those in the custody of the Québec Service Centre of Parks Canada contained in oversized registers are too fragile to consult, or even for photocopying.

That’s unfortunate as the search capability at LAC is limited. You can search by surname, given name(s), and keyword. If you know the name of a ship of interest you can search for that in the keyword but results displayed don’t show the year. You have to click the item number for each hit to see that. It would be useful to have a tabulation of the ships by year, but you cannot keyword search by year.

You could get lucky and find information on a ship and voyage, but hardly any passenger names, at The Ships List.

In This Week’s Online Genealogy Events post, I highlighted (bolded) Wednesday afternoon’s Legacy Family Tree Webinar presentation, “Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy: New Beginnings in 2024” by Steve Little.

If you missed it, I recommend taking 90 minutes to view it in the next few days while it’s free if you’re not a LFTW subscriber. If you’ve some experience with AI, like ChatGPT, Bing or Bard, be patient with the first part. 

It will be interesting to see how his predictions for the year pan out when he reviews them at year’s end. Will handwriting recognition technology reach the stage where we can employ it ourselves on a document of our choice, which Little says is still beyond the boundary of practicality?

Webinar Library

The main cover story for the January 2024 issue is

Websites To Watch

Jonathan Scott previews resources coming
online in 2024 and identifies Second World War service records being digitized by Ancestry as the biggest highlight. He speculates that with the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings falling in June, that might be the focus for the initial release.
Library and Archives Canada gets a mention in the coverage of Findmypast, while the focus of their effort is expected to be extracting family notices from the newspaper collection.

In the other featured article, Felicity Day explores why our Georgian ancestors loved to dance.

That scratches the surface. Fire up your browser to read the rest of the magazine available online via your public library in much of Canada.

Catch up on what was new at FamilySearch in 2023 in this review of highlights. The article covers free records, family trees, digital books, libraries and centers, discovery experiences, help and support, and RootsTech 2023.

It also highlights the FamilySearch collaboration with Library and Archives Canada and Ancestry to make the 1931 Census freely available online.

I thought to add the Ottawa Public Library becoming a FamilySearch affiliate, but looking back, that was over a year ago, in December 2022.