Anglo-Celtic Connections

Like me, perhaps you don’t match a Professional Genealogist’s academic qualifications and credentials  That doesn’t mean you can’t be a good, proficient amateur. Here’s a list of skills and abilities needed.

• Research skills: The ability to find, analyze, and interpret historical records and documents.
• Organizational skills: A method to keep track of findings, sources, and family connections (e.g., software, filing systems).
• Ability to access records: Subscriptions or connections to genealogical databases, archives, and libraries.
• Patience and persistence: Genealogy often involves solving puzzles and overcoming research obstacles.
• Critical thinking: The capacity to evaluate conflicting information and draw reasonable conclusions.
• DNA testing and analysis skills: The ability to use and interpret genetic genealogy tests.
• Networking skills: The ability to connect with other researchers, distant relatives, and local historians who might share information or collaborate on research.
• Knowledge of historical context: Understanding the social, economic, and political conditions of the time periods and locations being researched.
• Technological proficiency: Familiarity with digital tools, online databases, and software programs used in modern genealogical research.
• Writing and documentation skills: The ability to record findings, cite sources properly, and potentially write family histories or research reports.

Walking on water capability is not required!

How can you build those skills?

1. Attend presentations, conferences and webinars offered by companies, societies, archives and libraries.
2. Read books and magazines.
3. Subscribe to social media by searching for genealogy or family history.
4. Take advantage of Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Each new presentation is free for a week, after which it goes behind a paywall. There’s a library of high-quality past presentations and syllabus material. At $50US, it’s a bargain. Wait for a periodic sale to get 50% off.
5. Consider educational opportunities such as those offered by the University of Strathclyde, Pharos Tutors, or the International Institute of Genealogical Studies.

 

On 5 July, MyHeritage added 2,597,134 new records from their Canadian OldNews collection. Name, gender, residence, death date, death place, relatives mentioned and relationship, date published, newspaper, abbreviated text.
Beware of errors in the OCR. I found a Montreal death listed as buried in Georgia, even though the burial place named in the text was Sorel.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

I love the gentle way British people completely change the country:

1. Have a cup of tea
2. Put on raincoat
3. Walk to a ramshackle area in a local hall and quietly pencil a cross into a box on a scrap of paper
4. Go back home and take off raincoat
5. Have another cup of tea (and a biscuit to reward yourself for doing something important) and wait.

via X

Don’t Think of an Elephant
How people think and vote. 120 page pdf.

Military Archives of Ireland – New Website

AI Genealogy Insights: Episode 5: From Global Classrooms to Game-Changing Tools

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Basil Adam, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Robert Halfyard, Teresa, Unknown

I am digging further into this unique collection made available by Ancestry from holdings at the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology and the Gjenvick-Gjønvik’s GG Archives.

The 213,190 records from 1955 to 1960 are the bulk and most detailed, mainly from westbound passenger lists. For ships leaving from the UK, they should duplicate the outgoing lists, also ending in 1960.

Some sources are printed passenger lists distributed onboard, which become less detailed, just names, in later years.

The remainder are from documents that survive, perhaps of historic interest, or relate to cruises.

Do you know of additional, perhaps printed lists that may have been kept as souvenirs?

Additions and updates this week are:

Women’s Land Army Service Cards, 1939-1950
This update has 36,438 records, images, and transcriptions. Adding records for those who have passed 100 years since birth brings the total to 133,365 records. Over 200,000 women served.

Expect to find in the transcription

First name
Surname(s) – maiden or married
Age on entry
Date of birth
Occupation prior to entry
County where enrolled
Date officially enrolled
WLA membership number
Address

Additional information to be found in the image may be

Reason for leaving (acceptable reasons included medical or compassionate grounds, marriage, pregnancy, transfer to another service, demobilization).
Date when officially leaving WLA (release).

Learn more about the work done by the WLA here.

Also released this week

Huguenot Society of Pennsylvania Application Papers (36,438 records).
New York Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms and Marriages (170,637 baptisms and 125,977 marriages).
Over 80 million newspaper pages.

Summer slows the world of family history. This year, this week, the US and UK are preoccupied. There is news for Irish genealogy.

Claire Santry posted Irish Registry of Deeds Index Project: July 2024 update and Irish Newspaper Archives offers up to 40% discounts (until 8 July).

John Grenham highlights Genealogical Office records, held in the National Library of Ireland manuscripts department, a collection now being digitized.

Here are the top-ranked YouTube videos based on views per day for the past week:

| 1 | “Palestine’s Family Tree”,  17,750 views per day
| 2 | Hugh Bonneville & John Bishop’s Surprising Family Ties (FULL EPISODE) \| Our DNA Journey \| Ancestry®\,  18,750 views per day.
| 3 | Honoring The Children of Henrietta St \| The Genealogy Roadshow \| Ancestry®, 12,000 views per day.
| 4 | Your ancestry 🦶  3,000 views per day.
| 5 | AMERICAN ANCESTRY 3,000 |views per day.
| 6 | Top 10 Genealogy Shows to Watch if You Can’t Get Enough of Finding Your Roots, 1,620 views per day.
| 7 | ✨ You are an ancestor ✨  1,600 views per day.
| 8 | Ed Balls’ uncovers dark family history! 🌳 1,240 views per day.

To watch any of these videos, enter the title on youtube.com

 

Delve into your US relative’s history with the MyHeritage U.S. City Directories collection. It incorporates 26,000 U.S. city directories published between 1860 and 1960.
The collection contains 561 million aggregated records consolidated from 1.3 billion records, so multiple records about the same person are listed together.

The “Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Burial Registers, 1769-1983” collection contains 370,539 records spanning over two centuries.

Information may include name, age, death date, spouse, parents, occupation, and address.  Find burial registers and lair (burial plot) sales papers.

The following places cemeteries and churchyards across Aberdeenshire are included:

Allenvale, Cairmie, Drumblade, Essie, Fettercairn , Fordoun, Forgue , Gartly, Glass, Grove, John Knox(?), Marykirk, Nellfield, Nigg, Old Machar (?), Rhynie , Ruthven, St Clement’s, St Nicholas, Sat Peter’s, Trinity, Ythanwells.

Original records are held by Aberdeen City Council.

DeceasedOnline has a selection of Aberdeenshire burials. Start at https://www.deceasedonline.com/servlet/GSDOSearch

“Check back regularly as new collections will be added.”

That’s the message you see on visiting the full text search experimental Labs product at FamilySearch.

Available are: US Land and Probate Records, Mexico Notary Records, Australia Land and Probate Records, New Zealand Land and Probate Records, and US Plantation Records.

That way for several months, it reminds me of the line from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “Godot will not come today but will surely come tomorrow.”

This new Ancestry transcription database has 7,076,289 20th-century records based on the Quebec government’s Registre de référence à l’état civil.
This image shows the transcript for my nearest relative. There are the usual inaccuracies one expects in a death record in another language. Christophe is Christopher. The birth year is off, and the mother is named Margaret, not Marie.

The same record at Généalogie Québec, free for Ottawa Public Library cardholders, does have the final r on Christopher.