Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

The Nerd Urban Dictionary

Male occupational structure of England and Wales 1381-2011
The shift from the primary (agriculture, forestry and fishing) to secondary (mining, manufacturing and construction) sectors happened earlier than previously thought.

When Online Content Disappears
38% of webpages are no longer accessible a decade later. What do you do to retain access to the information?

Find A Grave
Ancestry just updated the UK and Ireland version to over 20 million records,  the Canada version is over 10 million.

Whose communities? Provincial funding support for community museums in Ontario

With its latest release of Army Lists from 1837 to 1959 there are 1.8 million new military records available to TheGenealogist subscribers.

The British Army Lists provide comprehensive details about officers and warrant officers, including their ranks, regiments, and service appointments. Find details of officers by regiment, rank and seniority, offering a detailed snapshot of the officer corps at any given time.

Here are this week’s additions which are for the county of Kent.

Baptisms are for the adjacent south of the Thames parishes of Greenwich, Charlton, and Woolwich and for Cliffe, Hadlow, and Ightham communities.

There are also additions for marriages in four unnamed parishes and burials in six, likely the same as for baptisms.

The following is fiction.

For over a century, he had lain in the soil of the Vimy battlefield in France. One of the many with no known grave from the horrific Battle of Vimy Ridge during World War I. That’s until last year when advances in DNA technology finally allowed his identity to be revealed.

Private Graham Thomas was just 19 years old when he enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916. From Cut Knife, Saskatchewan, he had rushed to join his older brother already fighting in Europe. Less than a year later, he found himself taking part in the battle to capture Vimy Ridge, a key strategic objective that saw over 10,000 Canadian casualties.

On April 9th, 1917, during the first waves of the assault, Thomas was struck and killed instantly. His mutilated body, rendered unidentifiable from the force of the blast, was  hastily buried by his comrades in a makeshift grave. Sadly, as the battle continued the grave was obliterated. His name found a place among the more than 10,000 on the Vimy Memorial.

In 2018 remains were discovered and retrieved.  Despite efforts by the Canadian authorities his identity could not be confirmed, including through comparisons of DNA samples to paternal Y-chromosome or maternal mitochondrial lineages. But last year, autosomal DNA analysis was attempted – examining the DNA across all of the chromosomes inherited from both parents. That’s the way so many cold cases are being solved today.

This turned up a match to DNA from Thomas’ great nephew who had taken a test on Ancestry out of casual interest in his ethnicity. After over a hundred years the genetic evidence conclusively identified the remains as those of Private Thomas.

In an emotional ceremony this past November, the soldier killed in the battle to take Vimy Ridge was finally laid to rest alongside his comrades with full military honours by members of the modern Canadian Armed Forces. 

While the years can never be returned to GrahamThomas, at last his sacrifice has been acknowledged, and he can take his rightful place of honour among the heroes of Vimy. Thanks to DNA technology, one family has brought their fallen soldier home.

What is not fictious is the Canadian authorities efforts to identify remains through Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA alongside physical evidence— too often insuffiicient. What is fiction is doing so through autosomal matching.

 

The 80th anniversary of D-Day features on the cover of the new issue. Gavin Mortimer pays tribute to the ordinary men who experienced an extraordinary event. There’s minimal reference to Canadian involvement.

Chloe O’Shea describes the main ways by which family names can change and how to identify variants.

I was interested in Laura Berry’s article on researching coalmining ancestors. My grandfather was a coal miner in South Wales in the early 1900s. In the 1921 census, he was an unemployed miner, very likely one of the strikers in the industrial action that delayed the census. I’ll add exploring The South Wales Coalfield Collection ( https://libguides.swansea.ac.uk/swml/collections ) and the Welsh Coal Mines website (https://welshcoalmines.co.uk/) Laura mentions to my to-do list.

Similarly, I’ll dip into Jonathan Scott’s article on blacksmiths and related occupations for background on my whitesmith great-grandfather.

As far as I know, I don’t need to explore Julie Peakman’s article that reveals the lives of London’s streetwalkers and other prostitutes in the 18th century for background on a family member.

Among the ads in the issue was one for the Fourth edition of Evidence Explained, promoted as “the go-to guide for history researchers since 2007 because it guides us through a maze of historical resources not covered by other citation manuals—all kinds of primary-source materials, accessed through all kinds of media. More than a thousand examples for U.S. and international documents demonstrate how to handle the quirks that stump users of these materials.” It should be available, if previous glitches have been resolved, as an eBook at $47.50 US via https://vitalsource.com

 

The Archives of Ontario is getting a new website and they are asking for our help. Before launching the new site they are asking users to test the main design to see if it’s easy to navigate. Click on this link to access the short survey with about 20 questions, which will take about 10 minutes to complete: i951gwfm.optimalworkshop.com/treejack/aowebsite.

You can provide the Archives with your email address to be notified of any further studies. Feel free to share with others to help them make their website easier to use. The more testers the better!

via OGS Toronto Branch Toronto Tree.

This new Ancestry collection contains 51,000 burial records based on original data from Tower Museum at https://towermuseumcollections.com/cemetery-records/.
The Ancestry sample shown has information, notably parents’ names, not online from the Tower Museum.

The vast majority of burials occurred no later than two days after death.

 

This collection contains 447,396 records. It includes images of the original and a browse capability, with the following details for some Lancashire adherents to Protestant churches who didn’t follow the practices of the Church of England:

Name
Event type
Parish name
Event date
Date and place of birth
Sex assigned at birth
Marital status at event
Occupation
Age at event
Names of family members.

Sourced from the Lancashire Archives, the collection has records from 335 churches and chapels. Curiously, none are from Liverpool or Manchester. Ancestry already has non-conformist records for Manchester. Liverpool is likely to come as the source for this collection; the Lancashire Archives has holdings. 

The National Archives holds a variety of non-conformist registers in series RG 4, RG 5, RG 6, and RG 8. All are available ($) on The Genealogist website.

This collection shows non-conformism found in fertile ground in Burnley, Preston, and Blackburn. These towns underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization during the 18th and 19th centuries, attracting many working-class labourers to the cotton mills and factories. There was a perception that the Church of England catered more to the interests of the landed gentry and aristocracy whereas dissenting churches and chapels appealed to the social and economic circumstances of the emerging industrial working class.

Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues aren’t considered non-conformist, therefore their records aren’t found in this collection.

 

How can you find out about the natural landscape of the area your English ancestors came from?

One way is reading about the 159 National Character Areas (NCAs), each an area of distinct and recognizable character at the national scale. Their boundaries follow natural lines in the landscape, not county or district boundaries.  The profiles can be accessed through a search function, via a map of England, or through a list organized by region at
https://nationalcharacterareas.co.uk/.

You can also find links to the Landscape Institute’s Landscape Character Assessment Database for the UK and Ireland for a comprehensive understanding of the natural landscape.

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. Find out about many more mainly US events at Conference Keeper at https://conferencekeeper.org

There are currently 3,841 items in Collection Search identified as Co-Lab-only contributions, up from 3,797 last month!

One of Library and Archives Canada’s Co-Lab Challenges reported progress.

Treaty 9 now has 27 images, 2.7% complete.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary is 48% complete, increased from 47% last month.

Expo67 remains 7% complete.

Summiting Mount Logan in 1925: Fred Lambart’s personal account of the treacherous climb and descent of the highest peak in Canada remains 13% complete.

Women in the War remains 1% complete.

Arthur Lismer’s Children’s Art Classes remains 1% complete.

John Freemont Smith remains 93% complete.

Canadian National Land Settlement Association remains 98% complete.

Molly Lamb Bobak remains 95% complete.

Diary of François-Hyacinthe Séguin remains 99% complete.

George Mully: moments in Indigenous communities remains 0% complete.

Correspondence regarding First Nations veterans returning after the First World War remains 99% complete.

Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 remains 95% complete.

Legendary Train Robber and Prison Escapee Bill Miner remains 99% complete.

Japanese-Canadians: Second World War remains 3% complete.

The Call to Duty: Canada’s Nursing Sisters remains 94% compete.

Projects that remain 100% complete are no longer reported here.

During the Second World War, over 45,000 Canadian servicemen and women made the ultimate sacrifice. They aren’t just numbers. To truly comprehend the enormity of this loss, examine the impact at a local level.

Shown is an excerpt from a detailed map of Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood, a visual representation of the fallen. It’s hard to believe when you see it in the context of a neighbourhood you know! The map uses red to highlight Air Force deaths, black for Army, and blue for Navy. Find more detailed information in an article from the Glebe Report.

Credit to the research of Glebe resident Dave O’Malley.