Anglo-Celtic Connections

Just slightly late in covering a recent release byTheGenealogist of fully searchable RAF Operations Record Books (ORBs) on the anniversary of the famous No 617 Squadron Dambusters raid on the Ruhr Valley dams on 16-17 May 1943. 

According to the press release from TheGenealogist,  the latest release of 1,550,018 records brings the total to 6,748,021 of these new diary-like RAF documents,  They are uniquely fully searchable by:-
● Forename and Surname
● Squadron
● Date Range
Using keywords users can also search for Service Number, Rank, and Duty, Aircraft type and location where the fields appear in the record. This makes it possible to easily find Royal Air Force personnel and discover more about their wartime activities on the base and in the air. giving an insight into their lives

Highlights of the June issue available free online through many Canadian public libraries.
Baby Boomers: now it’s up to us
Keith Gregson issues a rallying cry: it’s time to tell your stories and add to your chapter to the Family History annals

Rationed Fashion
Dress historian Jayne Shrimpton looks at clothes rationing introduced in Britain 80 years ago this June and its impacts. An annual ration of 66 coupons per year, reduced in later years, didn’t go far. See the allocation here. 

Ships Doctors and Their Patients
From surgery on the high seas, to births and simple old seasickness, Simon Wills looks at maritime maladies and the role of the ship’s doctor, both military and merchant, in treating them. 

Shipwrecked in WW1
5,000 vessels were sunk by U-boats alone. In a two-page article Simon Wills details how to research the ships sunk and, sometimes, the crew.

He served with the Canadian Army and died on 3 November 1945. His headstone at Beechwood Cemetery is in the military section but not a CWGC stone. The date of death is within the range where Second World War servicemen were entitled to a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone and to be included in the CWGC database. 

No CWGC headstone! Is this an oversight?

The results are in.  After an ad was inserted in the BIFHSGO monthly meeting presentation earlier this month I asked about the acceptability.
Nearly half the votes recorded found it acceptable.  Surprising to me was that another two in ten would accept a broader range of ads.
I’m told the ad was successful in recruiting a couple of volunteers for BIFHSGO. Information is there is no intention of continuing ads on a regular basis.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Short and Cute Poems

Colonel Blood and the Theft of the Crown Jewels

Findmypast says “timelines will be met” on England and Wales 1921 census despite covid impact

Ottawa Public Library Annual Report
Despite a reduction in revenue from the city of $4million, a saving owing to the pandemic, mainly salary and benefits, meant there was a considerable surplus for the year. $5million of the surplus was allocated in 2021 to help fund the new LAC-OPL building. Read the report and believe nobody ever had anything negative to say about OPL services!

Poland, Gravestones, 1800-2020. MyHeritage made available for free over 4 million cemetery records from gravestones throughout Poland. Records may include the full name of the deceased, date of birth, date of death, place of burial, and more.

The wealth of unattached men and women aged 50 and older.
From 1999 to 2016, unattached women aged 50 and older saw their median wealth holdings grow almost twice as fast as those of unattached men aged 50 and older. The median wealth of couples with no children headed by a man aged 50 or older amounted to $801,500 in 2016, four times the median wealth of $195,000 observed for unattached men aged 50 and older.

The Streets of London
Let’s count our blessings.

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Barbara, Celia Lewis, Judith H, Roberta, Ken Hanson, Unknown.

The Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP) grants for 41 projects in local archival and library communities all across Canada are announced. The range of projects funded is a tribute to diversity. Listed below, alphabetically by province and city are the projects funded.

Footnotes
Note 1
Multi-year projects starting in 2019/2020
Note 2
Multi-year projects starting in 2020/2021

This first tranche of grave and memorial photographs from churchyards in Norfolk consists of 47,278 images from 290 cemeteries. They are the work of Norfolk resident Louise Cocker.

This is a browse collection so not searchable by personal name. With just 3 images from Appleton and Southrepps Burial Ground that’s not much of an issue. The media number of images per cemetery is 140 and you need to read the names of the monument, frequently weathered. The largest number of images is 1,497 from Aylsham Cemetery.

Here’s the complete list

With 540 parishes and more cemeteries in Norfolk, there are plenty more to come!

Most people who research UK ancestry find unique databases on findmypast.com/. It has all the same databases as findmypast.co.uk, ones you won’t find elsewhere. A FMP subscription also gives access to the complete collection of British newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive.

If you’d like to try it there’s an opportunity to save 20% on subscriptions to findmypast.com ending on Saturday 15 May. 

The discount is for new and returning (lapsed) subscribers only. 

findmypast.com

For Wednesday’s BIFHSGO London SIG meeting on Zoom we had suggested searching a topic of interest on London Remembers.  The aim of the website is to document all the memorials in London. That’s the plaques, monuments, statues, fountains, etc, that commemorate a person, an event, a building.
It has 210 mentions for Canada, 109 for Canadian, 122 Montreal, 13 Ottawa, 183 Toronto, 7 Winnipeg, 2 Saskatoon, 0 Calgary, 41 Vancouver – most related to the sinking of the SS Vancouver. 

Does your community have a website that aims to capture all memorials? If so please post a link in the comments.

As mentioned on 2 April, Ancestry was getting behind Findmypast and MyHeritage in their modern UK death indexes. As of 10 May Ancestry has:

England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2019  with 5,486,849 records. That’s an update from 191,625 to 337,640 index records for 2019 and from 184,548  to 267,155 records for 2018.

Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2020 now has 752,902 records.

These are transcriptions typically giving name, gender, age, birth date, last residence, postal code district, and death date from civic records and funeral homes, published with data from GreyPower Deceased Data compiled by Wilmington Millennium.