The collection added 75 new or updated titles in June compared to 101 last month. That includes 8 new titles.

This index provides the name, spouse name, marriage date (year), parish, and a link to the original paper slip image. Here’s Ancestry’s blurb about this collection which now contains 1,697,636 entries.

Pallot’s Index to Marriages is essential for researchers with London ancestry, as it covers all but two of the 103 parishes in the old City of London. The dates span the time from 1780 to the onset of General Registration in 1837. The more than 1.5 million marriage entries come mainly from London and Middlesex, but also include entries from 2500 parishes in 38 counties outside of London-many not available in other sources. Also included are several records from counties in Wales. With indexing begun in 1813, several of the registers transcribed in Pallot’s index no longer exist, having been destroyed or lost in the time since.

The index slips were handwritten on paper, and indexing continued regularly over a period of more than 150 years. Each slip identifies the church or chapel in which the marriage was celebrated, the names of bride and of groom, whether spinster, bachelor, widow or widower and sometimes other detail along with the date of the event.

The original paper slips of the Pallot Index are owned and held at The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Canterbury, England. The Institute may have access to fuller details that may have survived among the original parish records. (www.ihgs.ac.uk) The Institute is a not-for-profit educational organization and researches in the records themselves can be arranged. Please visit their website for additional information about the services they provide.

Artificial intelligence is fomenting a revolution. Are national archives taking advantage?

The National Archives (UK)

has just published its Annual report and accounts 23-24.  I counted ten mentions of artificial intelligence (AI).

The next few years will be pivotal for both new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and for the archival profession, which is handling ever-increasing amounts of digital records.

we will also be working on a project to explore the potential for using legislation in Artificial Intelligence large language models

There is a two-page case study on Artificial Intelligence
(AI).

In a section on risk

Failure to meet the challenges of digital: There is a risk that The National Archives fails .. (in) moving quickly enough to respond to or benefit from technological change, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

National Archives and Records Administration (US)
FY 2025 ANNUAL PERFORMANCE PLAN and
FY 2023 ANNUAL PERFORMANCE REPORT contains a single mention of AI.

NARA’s primary approach to modernizing the FOIA process is to digitize analog records to permit electronic search and processing and to explore, acquire, and apply modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), to expedite processing and response.

The National Archives of Australia

Annual Report 2022-23 also contains a single mention of AI.

The Advisory Council noted National Archives must explore opportunities for new ways of undertaking its business to keep pace with technological change, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
With this comes the need for National Archives to build the required workforce capability and technological infrastructure.

Library and Archives Canada‘s

latest annual report is for 2019–2020. In the more current documents the Departmental Plan 2024-2025, which has a single mention of AI.

LAC will work on topics such as artificial intelligence with academic partners or on genealogy services with companies working in that field.

The Library and Archives Canada: Departmental Results Report (DRR) 2022-2023 makes no mention of AI.

SUMMARY

The significant difference in AI mentions between the UK’s latest report and others reflects the acceleration in AI over just the past year or two.

IMPROVING THE CLIENT’S EXPERIENCE

While there is low-hanging fruit for AI to improve internal operations in archives, will it also be deployed to improve the client experience?

• If you’ve struggled to read handwritten and degraded documents, AI can restore and enhance them making historical texts legible, even if errors are made.
• Finding aids are often deficient. AI can generate detailed metadata for documents, enhancing search capabilities and making it easier to locate specific records.
• AI can provide summaries of large documents, enabling quicker understanding and analysis.

That all requires the original material to be digitized. It was encouraging to read about LAC partnering with the Internet Archive Canada on a digitization initiative. Although that appears to be digitization for publications, together with LAC’s experience with the 1931 census, it should motivate application to archival material.

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. 

Over 3.5 million entries in 29 directories are included in this release. They are:

• Kelly’s Directory of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, 1931
• Kelly’s Directory of Bournemouth, Poole, Parkstone, Christchurch &c., 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Brighton and Hove, 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Cambridgeshire, 1933
• Kelly’s Directory of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Devonshire and Cornwall, 1930
• Kelly’s Directory of Dorsetshire, 1931
• Kelly’s Directory of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 1931
• Kelly’s Directory of Hertfordshire, 1933
• Kelly’s Directory of Ipswich and Neighbourhood, 1930
• Kelly’s Directory of Kent, 1930
• Kelly’s Directory of Kent, 1934
• Kelly’s Directory of Kilburn Willesden, 1933
• Kelly’s Directory of Leicestershire & Rutland, 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Norfolk and Suffolk, 1933
• Kelly’s Directory of Putney & Roehampton, 1930
• Kelly’s Directory of Somersetshire, Gloucestershire & the City of Bristol, 1931
• Kelly’s Directory of Suffolk, 1933
• Kelly’s Directory of Sussex, Chichester, Selsey and Neighbourhood, 1934
• Kelly’s Directory of the Channel Islands, 1931
• Kelly’s Directory of Warwick, Leamington Spa, Stratford-On-Avon and Kenilworth, 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Warwickshire, 1932
• Kelly’s Directory of Westmorland, 1934
• Kelly’s Directory of Wiltshire, 1931
• Malta Telephone Directory, 1933
• New Zealand Post Office Directory, 1934
• Nottingham, Leicester and Derby Telephone Directory, 1934
• Nottingham, Lincoln, Peterborough and Districts Telephone Directory, 1933
• Ward’s Directory of Whitley Bay, Tynemouth, North and South Shields, Jarrow, Wallsend, Gosforth, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Adjacent Villages, 1934

Lest We Forget: Canadian Olympians who made the greatest sacrifice.

Ancestry’s free version of Find a Grave is updated every 3 – 4 months. Below are the stats from 25 July and two previous updates. In the most recent period, Canada Find a Grave had more than a quarter million additions, the UK and Ireland over half a million, well over a million for the US, and over four million for Global.

Country/Area	December 2023	March 2024	July 2024
Canada	10,080,603	10,248,891	10,499,793
Australia & New Zealand	11,436,526	11,538,007	11,668,793
Mexico	69,789	76,162	79,062
Germany	3,017,935	3,086,376	3,302,357
Italy	343,946	353,025	365,803
Brazil	189,211	190,802	200,621
Global	15,649,165	16,204,539	20,274,519
U.S.	175,802,716	176,906,048	178,291,843
UK & Ireland	19,341,965	19,905,080	20,440,222
Sweden	1,116,071	1,118,394	1,122,825
Norway	223,985	225,419	227,719

For a more refined search capability, go to findagrave.com, where you can find over 238 million memorials created by the community since 1995.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Here’s another episode of the Our DNA Journey series with UK sports figures Freddie Flintoff and Jamie Redknapp.

Episode Seven of the Family History AI Show podcast is now available (you may have to download iTunes).
https://podcasts.apple.com/…/the-family…/id1749873836

Creating a Genealogy Word Cloud: Visualizing Your Family Tree

Ancestry makes further updates to Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968 (from the Drouin Collection). Now with 34,257,211 records.

Everyday-Carry Artificial Intelligence for Genealogists
From Steve Little.

That Brat Thing

Each year, organizations federally registered as charities in Canada for tax purposes must file returns with the Canada Revenue Agency. Financial and other information is available on the Revenue Canada website. Search for individual society reports at https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/dsplyBscSrch?request_locale=en.

Find 39,181 burial record additions updating two existing indexes – the National Burial Index for England & Wales and the Greater London Burial Index. They are for Herefordshire, London and the Welsh county of Powys.

National Burial Index For England & Wales – Herefordshire
Covering 230 years, between 1582 and 1812 find 17,656 additions.

National Burial Index For England & Wales – Powys
Find 21,174 burial record index additions from 1513 to 1851.

Greater London Burial Index
From the Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, these 351 additions cover the war years 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. 

Newspapers
This week the 366,562 pages added are post-1990, except as bolded below.

New titles:
Banbridge Leader, 1995-1999, 2001
Shropshire Star, 1993-1995, 1997-1998, 2002-2003

Updated titles:
Aberdeen Evening Express, 2000-2003
Aberdeen Press and Journal, 2000-2001
Banbury Guardian, 2003
Barnoldswick & Earby Times, 1983, 1990, 1998
Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 1998, 2003
Chorley Guardian, 1990, 1992
Crawley and District Observer, 1993, 2002
Derbyshire Times, 1990
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 1997-1998, 2002
Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 1990
Sheffield Independent, 1924-1925, 1932
Shields Daily Gazette, 1998, 2001
St. Andrews Citizen, 1997
Sussex Express, 1990
Worthing Herald, 1975-1977, 1996-1997, 2000-2001, 2003

 

OldNews is the MyHeritage standalone website that first made digitized newspapers available earlier this year.

The Canada Newspapers from OldNews.com™  index has 385,439 pages in 101 Canadian newspaper titles. It was created using MyHeritage’s optical character recognition (OCR). Articles date back to 1871. Search results are the paper and issue, a 20-30 word text snippet and a link to the original page image on OldNews($).

The coverage is for the Prairie Provinces. There are newspapers from Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg, as well as numerous smaller Prairie communities. Except for Invermere in British Columbia, coverage for the rest of the country is yet to come. 

MyHeritage has broader coverage through Canada Newspapers, 1752-2007 — 6,960,992 pages in 345 newspaper titles. It’s part of a MyHeritage subscription, including through a group subscription like the Ottawa Public Library. There’s also Canada, French Newspapers 1807-2007 with over three million pages.