Author: John Reid

I’m saddened to pass along news of the passing of Dolly Allen (nee Wilson) on Friday, May 7, 2021.
Into her 90s, Dolly was the kind of member any society would wish for.  She excelled in transcribing and indexing materials for the Ottawa Branch of OGS. More than 100 items in the Ottawa Branch library catalogue dating from the 1980s to the 2000s have her name attached.  Dolly served on the Branch Council for many years as the librarian and volunteered for Gene-O-Rama and other genealogical events. Until recent years she was a frequent attendee at Ottawa Branch meetings.
She will be interred in the family plot at Ramsayville (Bethany United), a cemetery that has her name attached as a transcriber.

Ten Middlesex parishes and spanning 1699-1846 now have transcripts of settlement examinations to bastardy bonds searchable. The parishes covered are:

Chelsea, St Luke
Ealing, St Mary
Feltham, St Dunstan
Fulham, All Saints
Hammersmith, St Paul
New Brentford, St Laurence
Shepperton, St Nicholas
Staines, St Mary
Stanwell, St Mary
Uxbridge, St Margaret

It’s your lucky day if you find a relative as the transcripts can be very informative. For example, this settlement examination in July 1838 at
Chelsea, St Luke:

MARY ANN CLARK, wife of THOMAS CLARK of 7 Ellis Street. They married at St. Peter ad Vincular in the Tower of London on 4th July 1836 and have 2 children, WILLIAM HILL (born 7th August 1836) and MARY ANN MARTHA (born 15th April 1838). Her husband is a private soldier in the 2nd Battalion of 1st Grenadier Guards and is at present in Canada. Before going there he made a deposition on oath at the Public Office, Queens Square, Westminster. The following is a copy: The examination of THOMAS CLARK, a private in the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Regiment of Grenadier Guards, now living at 3 Earl Street, Chelsea, taken on 22nd March 1838. He says he has a wife and 1 child. He was born in Moreton by Sea in the parish of Hodent, Salop, and he has done no act to gain any subsequent settlement.

Available thanks to a partnership with West Middlesex Family History Society and the Family History Federation.

Human remains buried in the churchyard at St Lawrence, Brentford, are to be removed and re-interred at Brookwood Cemetery.

A pdf list of more than 900 burials at the church, which is at High Street, Brentford in the London Borough of Hounslow, with surname, first names, age, day/month of burial, year of burial is here. Burials are from 1843 to 1973. Appended are two lists of gravestones not in situ.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Love the reaction as well as the original.

Ads are everywhere. Turn on the TV and you’ll likely see one. You have to watch an ad or two before and sometimes during viewing a YouTube video – as with the one above. On Saturday BIFHSGO broke new ground by inserting an ad seeking volunteer Board members into a monthly meeting presentation. Your opinion please.

Additions to Findmypast on Friday included Australia, Inward, Outward & Coastal Passenger Lists 1826-1972. “We’ve merged our huge collection of Australian passenger lists into one searchable record set and added over 9 million new entries.”

Making it Count — Canada’s first census taken and revised.

Lost and Fonds: Our national archives’ poor record
An opinion piece by former LAC archivist Paul Marsden

Maths Challenges
Which is the better fit – a round peg in a square hole or a square peg in a round hole? In this question, “better fit” means filling more of the available space.
Want more maths challenges? Go to https://www.u3a.org.uk/learning/national-programmes/maths-challenge

For Mothers Day, celebrate “the biggest shake-up to the Marriage Act since 1837.” Mothers now to be listed on their children’s marriage certificates in England and Wales.

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous,  Cliff, Darrel. Dena, gail benjafield,  Glenn Wright, Ian, Nancy, Rod G., Susan, Unknown.

A couple of folks who use Chrome with gmail have let me know they found the daily email notifications for the blog diverted to a Promotions inbox category.

It’s easy to stop that from happening. How depends on whether you’re using Android, Computer or iPhone & iPad. Find the instructions at

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en&oco=0

Over 240,000 new baptism, marriage and burial records from Devon are ready to explore sourced from the Devon Family History Society and the Family History Federation.  Some are transcripts, many have images of the original record.

Over 122,000 baptism records (1538-1919 and 1921) are added for 46 parishes which now have a total of 200,361 entries. There are 2,553,052 baptismal records in the collection.

No new banns are added; the total remains 425,486.

Over 20,000 marriage records (1538-1799 and 1921) are added for 71 parishes. The total for those parishes is 733,270. The total for the collection is 1,944,242 marriages.

Over 104,000 burial records (1538-1917 and 1921) are added from 32 parishes which now have a total of 256,208 records. The whole collection has 2,133,751 burials.

Y-chromosome haplotyping and genealogical evidence were used to confirm the identity of the remain from HMS Erebus.

That’s all the DNA detail available in the abstract of the article DNA identification of a sailor from the 1845 Franklin northwest passage expedition by Douglas R. Stenton, Douglas R. Stenton, Stephen Fratpietro,
Anne Keenleyside and Robert W. Park in the 28 April issue of the journal Polar Report. I’m not about to lay out $25 US to read the full article.

I shall be interested to find out if a formal analysis of location, carbon dating, physical information from the skeletal remains as well as the DNA and genealogical evidence were formally drawn together in forming the conclusion.

Genealogists can note with pleasure that two of the references are to the Lancashire Online Parish Clerk Project.

You probably saw coverage of the launch for a digital newspaper archive for SDG (Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry to the uninitiated). Find a newspaper report here; go directly to the online archives here.

Over 200,000 pages of history in 15,634 editions of 13 newspapers is a laudable achievement. While of greatest interest to those with roots in the United Counties, it can also serve as a role model for other localities.

Taking a deeper dive into the newspapers here’s a listing of the title, number of pages and years with digitized content.

Winchester Press: (5467): 1895-1898, 1901, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1917-1958, 1960-1988, 1990-1991, 1993-1998, 2001-2020
The Glengarry News: (2477): 1961-2004
The Chesterville Record: (2391): 1902-1905, 1910-1913, 1915-1924, 1928, 1954-1963, 1965-2000
The Chieftain: (1442): 1982-2006
The Morrisburg Leader: (1342): 1907, 1911-1919, 1921-1929, 1934-1938, 1940, 1942, 1947-1949, 1952
The Iroquois Post: (739): 1956, 1964, 1968-1982
The Iroquois Post and Matilda Advocate: (549): 1931, 1936, 1943, 1945-1946, 1959, 1952-1963, 1965-1967
Dundas County Herald and St. Lawrence Reporter: (145): 1874-1877
The St. Lawrence News – Iroquois: (82): 1894, 1901, 1905-1906, 1908-1909. 1917-1920, 1922
Morrisburgh Courier: (32): 1865-1866, 1869, 1873, 1879, 1885-1987, 1892
The Williamsburg Times: (16): 1935, 1938
Morrisburg Banner: (7): 1977
The Mountain Herald: (1): 1905

No intense scrutiny is needed to see that the Winchester Press accounts for over one-third of the content. Add The Glengarry News and The Chesterfield Records and you have more than two-thirds of the content.

The table doesn’t tell the whole story.

The Winchester Press, an eight-page weekly, starts in 1895 but there are only one to two issues a year available until 1918.

The Glengarry News, also an eight-page weekly, has good coverage from 1961 to 2004. Much earlier editions (Feb 1892 – Dec 1960), as well as of The Glengarrian (Feb 1887 – Dec 1910), are available here. Hopefully, they’ll be added to the new site soon for simplicity of searching.

The Chesterville Record has good coverage for the years mentioned except for only a single issue in 1929 in the middle of a gap from 1925 to 1954.

The search is a two-step process. From the main page search your term. You can select a newspaper first. This will take you to an array of papers where after a click or two a pdf will download that can be searched with CTL-F. The page will show with the hit highlighted,

Congratulations to United Counties researchers who now have a very nice free resource at their fingertips and to the local people who made it happen.

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Thursday 6 May 2021 to contain 280,104,498 unique records (279,663,246 at the previous update.) Years with major additions, greater than 5,000 records are: for births 1986-90; for marriages 1969, 1986-90; for deaths 1986, 1988-90.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the death of Leading Aircraftman Douglas Mervyn Lord, age 22, of the Royal Australian Air Force. He is one of 146 Australian airmen commemorated in Canada.

The crash, which killed him while practising night flying out of No 2 Flying Training School, Uplands, Ottawa, occurred at 4 am about 2-1/2 miles south of the airport.  It also took the life of Flying Officer Bennett L. Duffey originally from Toronto.  

Douglas Mervyn Lord, born 17 July 1918 at Warrnambool, Victoria, the son of George Walter and Eliza Ellen Lord, is interred in Sec. 29. Lot 1. Grave 105 at Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery.

While he has a grave many don’t. The Ottawa Memorial “commemorates by name almost 800 men and women who lost their lives while serving or training with the Air Forces of the Commonwealth in Canada, the West Indies and the United States and who have no known grave.”

The June issue of Who Do You Think You Are Magazine appeared on 4 May. The three feature articles are:
Put your tree online
Chris Paton explores online free family tree builders from four major genealogy sites plus collaborative trees. 

Motor City
Steve Humphries tells the fascinating stories of those who made Coventry a driving force in car manufacturing. You’ll enjoy learning the history if you like old British cars by makers like Hillman, Jaguar, Riley, Sunbeam, Talbot, Triumph. 

Wedding Traditions
From wedding rings to white gowns, Carolyn Roope reveals the origins of our cherished marriage customs.

Also

Best websites
Track down records of police ancestors. There are local and national resources.

Around Britain
Everything you need to research your roots in Norfolk. Reports on the activity at the Norfolk Record Office during the pandemic, including indexing with a list of resources. If you’re looking for an image to illustrate a Norfolk ancestral location try Picture Norfolk.

As always, there much more. Check it out free on Press Reader through your local Canadian public library.

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure is seeking volunteers. They are crowd-sourcing the creation of a new open digital historic parish boundary resource. It will be based pre-1844 parish boundaries in The Parish Atlas of England (Barlaston, 2017). 

Find out more at https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/parishatlas/