Month: March 2024

This year, the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, also marks the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force.  The Juno Beach Centre (JBC) is marking the occasion with a new exhibition “Rising to the Challenge: The Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War”.

If a trip to Juno Beach and other sites in the vicinity is on your bucket list, read the advice in 5 tips for travelling from Canada to the JBC in a more eco-friendly way. It mentions an Air Canada offer of a discount for travel to any destination in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain between 26 May and 15 June.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Tracing Your Marginalised Ancestors
By Janet Few.
New from Pen and Sword(Paperback)
This was also a talk at RootsTech on Day 2.

Toronto Public Library
The catalogue and search capabilities are restored.

Maps shape our lives – showing us not just where we are, but who we are
Don’t miss the comments.

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Just Do It

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No Leap of Faith
A timely LAC blog post

 

 

The Reverend Donald Alexander McKenzie passed away peacefully at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital on 24 February 2024 in his 91st year.

Don was ordained in the United Church of Canada in the 1950s and moved to Ottawa in 1975.  On retiring from the ministry Don worked as a consulting genealogical researcher especially interested in church and congregational histories.

The Ottawa Public Library catalogue lists 17 books he authored in its reference collections at the Main and Centepointe branches, many still available through Global Genealogy.

For years Don was a LAC regular at 395 Wellington Street, sometimes communting by bicycle, to abstract data in the microfilm room, and joining groups of fellow resarchers for lunch-time conversation in the firth floor cafeteria.

https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/donald-mckenzie-1089429407

This document, the official basis on which Parliament votes funds for the fiscal year starting 1 April, is now online here.

LAC’s upfront messages this year are:

Key priorities

• Deepening its commitment to reconciliation through the Indigenous Heritage Action Plan and continuing to build respectful relationships;
• Stabilizing its Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) function and improving access to government records;
• Transforming its services to attract new audiences and better serving existing users to meet or exceed their expectations;
• Improving access to collections by advancing our digitization efforts, deploying a robust metadata strategy and improving our systems; and
• Integrating equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility (EDIA) principles throughout its services, collection management and workforce to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment.

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Refocusing Government Spending

In Budget 2023, the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, starting in 2023–24, and by $4.1 billion annually after that.

As part of meeting the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, LAC is planning the following spending reductions.

• 2024-2025: $2,324,000
• 2025-2026: $3,610,000
• 2026-2027 and after: $5,368,000

LAC will achieve these reductions by doing the following:

• Reducing travel expenses compared to pre-pandemic expenditures;
• Reducing funding provided through the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP); and
• Primarily limiting annual investments in the development and modernization of the digital infrastructure and online access tools.
  

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  As in previous years, here is a look at the number of mentions of some keywords giving insight into importance and trends. Here they are in this year’s plan with last year’s in parathesis: Digit* 30 (66), Continu* 41 (33), Indigenous 27 (42),  Innov 3 (6), Geneal* 2 (2), Ādisōke 8 (23), newspaper 1 (1), director* 0 (0), census 0 (0).  There is one mention of artificial intelligence, the same as the previous year —”LAC will work on topics such as artificial intelligence with academic partners or on genealogy services with companies working in that field.”

The following is extracted from a table showing the planned results, the result indicators, the targets and the target dates for 2024–25, and the actual results for the three most recent fiscal years for which actual results are available.

The increase in the number of images digitized for access shows an increase to 6.5 million, up from 3.5 million in 2022-23, and 2.4 million in 2021-22.

Looking back this digitization falls far short of 2015-16 when it was 11 million files, not images! If a microfilm with 1,000 frames is scanned is that 1,000 images, but one file? Clarity please.

Where is the committment to making the content of the images digitally searchable? Is that meeting the priority  “to attract new audiences and better serving existing users to meet or exceed their expectations”? How does LAC know what the expectations are?

The impact of government-wide spending reductions on services to LAC clients is unclear. How much will DHCP funding be reduced? What will be the impact on clients of changes to digital infrastructure and online access tools?

Just announced at RootsTech, a new initiative from MyHeritage — digitized newspapers. Oldnews.com, a stand-alone subscription, just as newspapers.com is a separate subscription from Ancestry, is “the leading website for exploring historical newspapers from around the world.”

According to the company promo, the site gives:

Access millions of historical newspaper pages
A wide array of titles, from international newspapers to small-town gazettes
Historical newspapers from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Netherlands and many more countries
Extensive coverage of the 1800s and 1900s, from major world events to local news
Articles that were extracted and enhanced using AI technology
Millions of newspaper pages are added each month.

Available at launch, and for a 7-day free trial, are:

United States: 64,368,505 pages in 14,054 titles
Australia 24,430,061 pages in 1,705 titles
Austria: 13,545,808 pages in 627 titles
United Kingdom: 3,894,581 pages in 3 titles
Czechia: 1,796,938 pages in 81 titles
Germany Newspapers: 1,378,556 pages in 94 titles.
Netherlands: ?

I had early access and found:

There are many Canadian newspapers available, although it isn’t clear if they are in addition to those available through MyHeritage.

The London Gazette is the main UK newspaper available. It is also freely available at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/.

The Australian papers are a large set that includes various government gazettes, and much more. It looks like they derive from Trove?

The US, and perhaps other content may be derived from the now defunct Elephand.com/.

“Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd”

Although a medical appointment meant I missed a lot of the livestream, it didn’t concern me knowing that much would be available on replay.

I first tuned into the FamilySearch Tech Forum.

As anticipated, the focus was AI and the applications FamilySearch is making across various of its offerings. In particular, three sets of transcriptions of handwritten collections are now available, two US and one Mexican — US Land and Probate Records and Mexico Notary Records. We’re all hoping they get around to that handwritten record set we’ve been struggling with, the one we’re certain has elusive genealogy gold.

Go to familysearch.org and scroll down to FamilySearch Labs in the right-hand column.

There you’ll also find Family Group Trees, a way to “gather your family into a group, and see the same living tree and enrich your history with photos, stories, and sources.”

Mid-afternoon it was Ancestry’s turn with spokesperson Crista Cowan. She spoke about the Family Groups initiative, which appear to be quite similar to the FamilySearch Family Group Trees.

Crista also highlighted how Ancestry is scraping newspaper.com, initially for the US, to produce a Stories and Events Index. The files are huge, so there’s a seperate one for each state. The largest, Pennsylvania, U.S., Newspapers.com™ Stories and Events Index, 1800’s-current, has 1,768,049,707 entries. A search yields Name, Topic, Residence Date, Residence Place, Newspaper Title. You need a newspapers.com subscription to see the actual article.

Finally, Ancestry and partner sites have several specials available in connection with RootsTech. Check them out at https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/expohall/ancestry. You may need to be registered for RootsTech.