Month: September 2024

This is shameless self-promotion.
I don’t often give presentations. The last was a mini one at the OGS Conference AI Day in June. Starting at 1 pm on Saturday, I’ll make an online presentation for the OGS Ottawa Branch.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to speak on a topic that combines my professional background, meteorology, and family history.
Find out about our and our ancestors’ vulnerability to weather, some notable events in Ottawa area history with a weather connection, and how to find out about the weather on a special day in your family history. Finally, we’ll peek at Ottawa’s future weather by looking at trends over the past century.

Please attend—it’s free, you supply your refreshments. Register in the right-hand column at https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/, where you can also find out about other Ottawa Branch activities.

 

 

In Ottawa, the genealogy scene is quiet during the summer months. We’re into September, and the drought is over. Starting with a two-fer at the BIFHSGO monthly meeting — two feature presentations.

At 9 am Patricia Roberts-Pichette and Glenn Wright will give a revised version of Middlemore Children: In Their Own Words.

For many years, extensive research and writing have focused on home children in Canada, but we have rarely heard the children themselves. Drawing on the records of Middlemore‘s Children’s Emigration Homes, Patricia Roberts-Pichette and Glenn Wright let the children speak of their hopes, fears, and experiences in coming to Canada as young immigrants.

Patricia Roberts-Pichette and Glenn Wright are long-time BIFSHGO members and have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Patricia began her work on the Middlemore project in 2001, and Glenn Wright is looking forward to bringing to life the experiences of home children in their own words.

At 10:15 am, Laurie Fyffe recounts her journey in Exciting Cause: an investigation into women confined in the 1890s to the Kingston Asylum for the Insane (Rockwood) in Kingston, Ontario. Her great-great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Gerrard, died in that institution in 1901. How did Sarah Ann, a mother of four and a devout Anglican, come to spend the last eighteen months of her life in an asylum for the insane? Tracing Sarah’s surprising personal history led Laurie to the medical case history files of Rockwood’s female patients, where she found compelling stories and tragic outcomes for women who fell short of the ideal for female behaviour in late 19th-century Victorian Canada.

An Ottawa-based playwright and dramaturge, Laurie Fyffe has written and produced multiple theatrical presentations at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. In the spring of 2023, Laurie’s play Exciting Cause, created with choreographer Allison Burns, premiered at Arts Court Theatre, eventually receiving multiple Prix Rideau Award nominations. In the fall of 2022, Beowulf In Afghanistan was selected for development through the Great Canadian Theatre Company’s Tributary Project. A Playwrights Guild of Canada and the Canadian Authors Association member, Laurie was Artistic Manager of Ottawa StoryTellers from 2014 to 2017, and now teaches at the Algonquin College School of Media and Design. Laurie is the sister-in-law of a BIFHSGO Hall of Fame member.

Join the meeting in person or online. Details at https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

The Family History AI Show
In the latest episode of this podcast, co-hosts Steve Little and Mark Thompson discuss the latest AI advancements revolutionizing genealogy.

A highlight is a deep dive into the world of AI image generators, exploring tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly and discussing their potential to breathe new life into family history narratives. Find the complete content at https://blubrry.com/3738800/136034321/ep12-hollywood-ai-blunder-ai-image-generator-roundup-google-lens-saves-you-time-researching-use-ai-for-translation.

AI and Family History: Extending Beyond the Basics
On Wednesday evening, I caught this  Legacy Family Tree Webinars presentation by Andrew Redfern. It builds on his April presentation Artificial Intelligence & Family History: An Introduction still available to webinar subscribers.

I strongly recommend this new presentation if you are interested in using AI in family history. He shows various applications in a live demonstration. It should be available for free viewing at www.familytreewebinars.com starting sometime on Thursday morning.

It is the interaction between humans and the AI tools that makes a difference. Anyone can chat with a bot, but the true power is in refining what to say, how to say it, critically analysing output and reiterating details in a dance of manipulation.   
Andrew Redfern

FamilySearch
In just a few days, the number of British records full-text searchable through the Experimental Labs initiative has more than doubled. Most additions are for vital, religious, and government records.

 

This Friday evening at 6 pm Canadian author and Order of Canada recipient Ted Barris will be speaking about his new book Canadians in the Battle of Britian in the Vintage Wings hanger at the Gatineau Airport.

The event is being organized by Vintage Wings Canada, a not-for-profit organization that runs educational events, acquires, restores, maintains, and flies classic aircraft significant to the early history of powered flight in Canada.

The Gatineau Ottawa Executive Airport  is at 1699 rue Arthur Fecteau in Gatineau.

The event itself costs 15 dollars a person which includes beverages, pizza, an evening to hear Ted speak about his novel as well as being able to tour the hanger which includes various planes from the World War Two era. All welcome.

 

The October 2024 issue has four feature articles.

In I0 Easy Steps to Grow Your Own Family Tree, Laura Berry from Who Do You Think You Are? shares the elementary steps genealogy newbies need to follow to uncover ancestors’ stories,

Mike Esbester writes in Blood on the Tracks about the Railway Work, Life & Death project and explains how to find out if, like Rose Ayling-Ellis, you have a forebear who was injured on the railways.

Else Churchill previews the 27 September – 6 October online event All About That Place, and reveals why focusing on location can give family historians a different perspective. It’s a free event of short presentations. Find out more at subscribepage.com/allaboutthatplace

In Politics for the People Caroline Roope celebrates the Chartists’ hard-fought campaign to extend the vote in the 19th century. I’ve wondered if my 2xgreat-grandfather’s move from Cumberland to London around 1848, when the movement was at its height, was a coincidence.

Those are just the feature articles — a bit more than the tip of the iceberg.

While I usually read the magazine on PressReader through free Ottawa Public Library access, it misbehaved this month. OPL delivered a perfectly readable copy on Libby.

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.

Tuesday, 10 September

2:30 pm: A Case Study: Combining FAN Club Research and DNA to Break Through Brick Walls, by Alicia Lowry for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/11547682

7 pm: The Detroit Shoemaker, by Barbara Reaume Sandre for OGS Essex Branch.
https://essex.ogs.on.ca/meetings/essex-branch-september-webinar/

7 pm: Childhood Interrupted: A Child Migrant’s Journey, by her daughter Kathryn Adams for OGS Lambton County Branch
https://lambton.ogs.on.ca/events/lambton-county-my-moms-life-as-a-british-child-migrant-by-kathryn-adam/

Wednesday, 11 September

6:30 pm: AGM Annual General Meeting for the Lakeshore Genealogical Society followed by an open session for participants who would like to share their Discoveries and/or Challenges over the past year.

8 pm: AI and Family History: Extending Beyond the Basics, by Andrew Redfern for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

AI and Family History: Extending Beyond the Basics

Thursday, 12 September

6:30 pm: Hidden Treasures: Unleashing the Full Potential of
FamilySearch’s Catalog, by Jamie Lee McManus Mayhew for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/11548425

7 pm: Really and Truly The Father, by Linda Corupe for OGS Perth & Elgin Branches.
https://perth.ogs.on.ca/events/perth-elgin-branches-really-and-truly-the-father-linda-corupe/

Friday, 13 September

Webtember presentations from Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

10:15 am: Luff In The Devon Cottages: Exploring A One-Place Study, by Kirsty Gray
11:30 am: The Neighbors Knew: Strategies for Finding YOUR Ancestral Details in THEIR Records. by Paula Stuart-Warren
12:45 pm: Translating German Newspapers – As Easy as Eins, Zwei, Drei, by Mary Kircher Roddy,
2:00 pm: Finding John Lee: The Saga Continues, by Nicka Smith
3:30 pm: Explore Millions of Norwegian Historical Records, by Vidar Øverlie

Saturday, 14 September

9 am: Middlemore Children: In Their Own Words, by Patricia Roberts-Pichette and Glenn Wright for BIFHSGO.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

10:15 am: Exciting Cause: an investigation into women confined in the 1890s to the Kingston Asylum for the Insane (Rockwood) in Kingston, by Laurie Fyffe for BIFHSGO.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

1 pm: ‘Twas a Dark and Stormy Night: Connecting Weather and Personal Histories, by John D Reid for OGS Ottawa Branch.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/twas-a-dark-and-stormy-night-connecting-weather-and-personal-histories-ottawa

 

 

 

The following is a news release from Newspapers.com and Ancestry.

One Billion Newspaper Pages: Infinite Family History Discoveries Newspapers.com™ reaches 1 billion pages of historical papers on its site

There are 542 papers and 50,125,521 pages for Canada, 805 papers and 50,696,355 pages for the UK, and 20 papers and 233,007 pages for Ireland.

 

MesAieux.com, a family history service that specializes in French Canadian genealogy, is now part of the MyHeritage family.

“Founded in 2004, MesAieux.com has grown to over one million users. The website offers an online family tree builder with automated features to add ancestors, and is also home to approximately 15 million historical records from Canada, primarily from Quebec, and several exclusive collections.”

“All historical record content from MesAieux.com will soon be published on MyHeritage, and its users will benefit from the capabilities of MyHeritage’s innovative tree-to-tree and tree-to-record matching technologies.”

They’ve done it again. FamilySearch stealthily added records to the experimental search using handwriting recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert an image of text into a machine-readable text format.

I searched for Smith and got 12,579,267 hits. Here’s the breakdown by place.

Asia & Middle East (2)
Australia & New Zealand (389,197)
Canada (1,080,751)
Continental Europe (56)
Mexico (91)
Other (822)
Pacific Islands (7)
South America (2)
United Kingdom and Ireland (316,133)
United States of America (10,787,306)

I don’t recall there being UK and Ireland hits previously. Subdividing those Smith hits:

England (271,646)
Scotland (36,316)
United Kingdom (3,690)
Wales (4,594)

Sorry Ireland! There are a few Irish records, but no Smiths.

There are Smith hits in 44 English counties and districts. Record types included are:

Legal Records (271,752)
Religious Records (24,920)
Genealogies (1,313)
Miscellaneous Records (3,333)
Military Records (3,143)
Periodicals (957)
School Records (1,856)
Vital Records (7,136)
Business Records (2,224)
Government Records (8,385)
Reference Materials (2,909)
Voting Records (2,715)
Migration Records (311)
Medical Records (3)

Filtering by year, most are in the 19th century.

Give it a try. Let us know if you break down any brick walls!

If you’re thinking of doing research at the Suffolk Archives, think again.

The new archives building in Ipswich is closing for three months starting in October.

Two archives branches have been closed for economic efficiency since the end of August. The journey by train from the previous branch location in Lowestoft to Ipswich takes no less than 80 minutes,

Find out more at https://www.suffolkarchives.co.uk/branch-closure-news/.

 

Dictionary of Selected Welsh Biographies, 1011-1969 has been added to Ancestry as a Web database.

The original, at the National Library of Wales (https://biography.wales/), has “over 5,000 concise biographies of individuals who made a significant contribution to national life, whether in Wales or more widely.”

Searching with Free Text at the NLW site for Canada surfaces 74 people, 63 males and 10 females. Canadian yields 15.

David Thompson (1770-1857) is the only one I immediately recognized.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

The Ten Most Famous Quotes of All Time
The following are from The 365 Most Famous Quotes of All Time published by The Medium Newsletter.

1. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” — Jesus Christ
2. “Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.” — Julius Caesar
3. “I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates
4. “Cogito ergo sum. I think; therefore I am.” — René Descartes
5. “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” — William Shakespeare
6. “Carpe diem — Seize the day.” — Horace
7. “With great power comes great responsibility.” — Stan Lee
8. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky
9. “Fortes Fortuna adiuvat — Fortune favors the bold.” — Virgil
10. “Knowledge is power.” — Sir Francis Bacon

Not included are:

There are two types of people in the world. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete information.

There are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those who can’t.

Gresham College
The new session starts on Wednesday, 11 September.

S -LL -OOO-WWWW
Has anyone else been having problems with the OGS website? Most of the genealogical society sites respond in 1 – 2 seconds, too fast to time on my stopwatch. The OGS site took at least 15 seconds, and in one trial more than 30 seconds.

LAC refuses to implement order from Information Commissioner