Sometimes it takes a person at a distance to give us perspective and really appreciate value.
The No. 1 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station project, covered in this blog post by Paul Chiddicks who writes regularly for the UK Family Tree magazine, is a case in point. Read it for yourself.
Paul has many more blog posts worth investigating at https://chiddicksfamilytree.com/
Thanks to Andrea Harding for bringing Paul’s blog post to my attention. Suggests like that are always welcome.
The British Newspaper Archive now has a total of 42,915,614 pages online (42,441,368 last month).
This month 65 papers had pages added (51 in the previous month). There were 29 (22) new titles. Dates range from 1802 to 1990.
Those with more than 10,000 pages added were:
| Title | Pages | Dates |
| London and China Express | 91,678 | 1858-1861, 1863-1905, 1907-1919, 1923-1931 |
| West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser | 78,714 | 1951-1956, 1959-1990 |
| Lynn Advertiser | 61,502 | 1926-1928, 1971-1977, 1980-1989 |
| London Daily News | 22,740 | 1912-1920 |
| Cycling | 22,076 | 1893, 1907-1912 |
| Galway Express | 16,428 | 1853-1920 |
| Inverness Advertiser and Ross-shire Chronicle | 15,382 | 1849-1885 |
| Blackpool Gazette & Herald | 15,326 | 1894-1896, 1899-1907, 1913-1919 |
| Northern Weekly Gazette | 13,608 | 1910, 1922-1931 |
| Torquay Times, and South Devon Advertiser | 13,076 | 1934-1949, 1951-1961 |
| Teviotdale Record and Jedburgh Advertiser | 12,050 | 1855-1872, 1874-1878, 1881, 1885-1910 |
| Kirriemuir Free Press and Angus Advertiser | 11,626 | 1915-1960 |
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just completed War Graves Week to “shine a light on our work.” Website visitors were invited to “discover your local connection” using a postcode link to “find out who lived in your area.”
While it does not work for Canadian postal codes you might want to check it out for UK addresses in your family’s past. Who from your ancestor’s neighbourhood lost their life? Was it someone they knew or from a family they knew? Can it give any insight into your ancestor’s wartime experience?
To find the present postcode, they didn’t exist until trialled in 1959, use the Royal Mail postcode finder.
Using my grandfather’s address in Edgeware the person found in the CWGC postcode search was Betty Mary Daphne Perrin, a civilian who died on 5 October 1944, age 17 years. She was the daughter of Henry and Evelyn Perrin and died at 5 Pembroke Place. That was 150 metres from my grandfather’s house. There were two other casualties buried in the same cemetery who died on that day who lived even closer!
A brief description of a bomb experience just 500m from my grandfather’s home, it could have been the same raid, is at http://bombsight.org/explore/greater-london/barnet/edgware/ starting at the 7th paragraph. I can now appreciate his wartime experience a bit more.
Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.
I’m sure I’ve seen that before, but worth repeating.
The Importance of Not Being Earnest
A panel discussion (audio mp3) from the LSE on what’s philosophically interesting about comedy. Both have a lot in common: showing up the ordinary as odd, critiquing the status quo, hecklers… But can humour be a source of knowledge?
Group-think: what it is and how to avoid it
Genealogical, family history, library and archive organizations aren’t exempt.
Royal archives that we pay for but aren’t allowed to read: a brief history
The examples are for Australia and the UK, but undoubtedly relevant for Canada.
TheGenealogist now has Image Archive pictures pinned to maps
See the video explanation and example at https://youtu.be/Mt5f-mAyJ5Q
Newspapers.com adds The Evening Standard and The Independent
Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Celia Lewis, Douglas Wallace, Jo Stanbridge, Judith H., Michael Harrison, Robert Halfyard, Roger Thomas, Unknown.
Starting on Monday there’s a gradual build-up to a full weekend of lectures during the annual OGS conference, this year all online.
Monday thru Thursday the single sessions start at 7 pm.
Thursday is the regular monthly OGS webinar open to the public with no fee.
Friday is Ancestry Day, a separate registration event.
Proceedings on Saturday and Sunday start at 9 am with two parallel sessions. On Saturday at 3 pm there’s an allowance for a 2-hour OGS Annual General Meeting. On Sunday session go until 5:40 pm.
All the details and registration are at https://conference.ogs.on.ca/schedule/
Ealing adds 1802-1812 to the collection which now covers 1717 to 1876 with 18,982 records.
Records for Harrow, All Saints are added which now covers 1838 to 1876 with 1,280 records. A larger Harrow collection is Harrow, St Mary with 9,775 baptismal records from 1653 to 1840.
The addition of Hayes records from 1557-1812 brings the parish total to 9,816 up to 1875.
FMP also adds baptismal records for Hillingdon from 1559-1876 although without including it in the parish list. Could it be listed as Uxbridge with 18,106 records from 1538 to 1876?
At Friday’s BIFHSGO social I was asked about the BIFHSGO logo, specifically the colour. I recalled it was originally black and white with a rustic hand-drawn appearance. Over the years it changed to a more uniform shape and the colour varied. I’ve forgotten the details.
After the social I realized that the Wayback Machine has an archive of www.bifhsgo.ca. It goes back to 2001 with 447 captures at various dates.
If interested to see how the website and logo have changed, see https://web.archive.org/web/20101201000000*/www.bifhsgo.ca/.
The Wayback Machine is a useful tool to have in your arsenal for those times when the website you remembered has vanished. Go to https://archive.org/ and click on Web, then enter the web address (URL) for the site you want.
Just a small addition to these parish records. 1,004 baptisms are added for 1921 and 558 marriages and banns for 1936. These are the most recent years available.
The Archives annual report, available at the time of writing as Document 1 at https://app05.ottawa.ca/sirepub/mtgviewer.aspx?meetid=8216&doctype=AGENDA was received by Ottawa City Council at its meeting on 26 May as part of the City Clerk’s 2020 annual report.
The 27-page report is substantive and detailed. In summary:
With 2020 being an abnormal year, Archives activity dropped in aggregate, especially relating to its corporate mandate. Yet the benchmark statistics below nevertheless also show that, over this year despite the pandemic and its effects and restrictions (including redeployed staff), the Archives did not lag very far behind overall expected results, with its community work holding steady and its public engagement through reference and outreach being significantly more than ever.
There’s a quantitative annual summary and statistics section on various aspects of the Archives activity. For instance, a four-year month-by-month bar chart showing search totals for the Ottawa Museums and Archives Collections (OMAC) online catalogue. That’s in contrast to the annual report of the Ottawa Public Library which fails to report on the operation in anything like that detail.
On Friday 4 June 2021, from 9 am to 7 pm Ancestry.ca in conjunction with the Ontario Genealogical Society is offering a full day of mostly 30-minute expert talks.
Full details and registration ($25) at https://ogs.on.ca/shop/conference-2021-ancestry-day/
Here’s the program.
ANCESTRY DAY – Sessions 9:00 am to 7:00 pm
| Time | Subject | Speaker | |
| 9:00 AM | Opening of Ancestry Day – Prizes, Discounts | Lesley Anderson | Ancestry | 5 min |
| 9:05 AM | Getting the most out of Ancestry – Searching Records & Online Trees | Lesley Anderson | Ancestry | 30 min |
| 9:35 AM | Make Discoveries with Ancestry Hints | Karen Joyce Lowe | Ancestry | 15 min |
| 9:50 AM | Boots on the ground – Land/Census records | Advisory Board Member Ken McKinley |
30 min |
| 10:20 AM | Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/BREAK | 20 min | |
| 10:40 AM | Find a Grave: What You Can Do and What’s New | Peter Drinkwater | Ancestry | 20 min |
| 11:00 AM | Challenges of Jewish Research: Names, Dates and Places | ProGenealogist Janette Silverman | 30 min |
| 11:30 AM | ASK AN EXPERT – Irish Research | ProGenealogist Joe Buggy | 30 min |
| 12:00 PM | ASK AN EXPERT – Military Research – 1st and 2nd WW | ProGenealogist Simon Pearce | 1 hour |
| 1:00 PM | BREAK/Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts | 15 min | |
| 1:15 PM | AncestryDNA 101: A Beginner’s Guide to DNA Discovery | Lisa Elzey | Ancestry | 30 min |
| 1:45 PM | AncestryDNA 102: AncestryDNA Matches for Family History Discoveries | Kelly Becker | Ancestry | 30 min |
| 2:15 PM | AncestryDNA 103: ThruLines & Custom Groups | Brooke Alius & Randon Morford | Ancestry | 30 min |
| 2:45 PM | AncestryDNA Communities: Bringing New Discoveries to Your Research | Lisa Elzey | Ancestry | 30 min |
| 3:15 PM | Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/Break | 30 min | |
| 3:45 PM | Marriage and Obituary Records: Indexes on Ancestry®—Images on Newspapers.com | Crista Cowan | Ancestry | 20 min |
| 4:10 PM | Five Things to Do with Newspapers.com | Anne Mitchell | Ancestry | 20 min |
| 4:30 PM | Quebec Genealogical Records | Advisory Board Member Gary Schroeder |
1 hour |
| 5:30 PM | Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/BREAK | 30 min | |
| 6:00 PM | Ancestry at Sea – Researching Passenger Lists | Advisory Board Member Glenn Wright | 30 min |
| 6:30 PM | Adding Sources, Using hints and Merge feature | Advisory Board Member Lianne Kruger | 30 min |
| 7:00 PM | CLOSING | ||
Every article like
Major project to allow digital access to 130 years of The Press archives
is rubbing salt in the wounds of the damage to Canada’s heritage inflicted by years of deliberate neglect of our newspaper heritage by Library and Archives Canada.
The article announces a major addition to New Zealand digitized newspaper content to be made freely available for searching online under a landmark agreement with the National Library of New Zealand.
Now approaching its 20th birthday, the New Zealand Papers Past site has about 30 million page views a year from about two million visitors.
Along with New Zealand, Australia and the US have active free newspaper digitization from the central government. In the UK the British Library has a free legacy newspaper digitization project and has announced some new free content will become available in a new round of digitization in partnership with Findmypast.
As President of the Ontario Library Association in December 2017 Leslie Weir, now Librarian and Archivist of Canada, wrote:
“Newspapers represent the most extensive documentation of a community’s activities. The small weekly rural publication or the long-running daily newspaper in larger urban centres bring forward a community’s priorities and perspectives in a way that no other material can. Local newspapers document the extraordinary stories that define and shape our communities and are, for all intents, historical record.”
What has LAC done on newspapers? No dedicated newspaper specialist! No current newspaper strategy! No mention in organization plans! A small collection of indigenous newspapers digitized funded by external sources.
Shame!
This database now has 320,053 records, up from 160,030 when I looked in March last year.
A search gives a list of hits with name, event type, marriage date and spouse name. Clicking on View Record adds published date, father and father-in-law information.
The majority of the entries are engagement announcements with the “marriage” date and published date the same. For those, it’s not the marriage date. Not all engagements, even those announced in The Times, lead to marriage.
Check the published announcement, not available through Ancestry. for additional information. One I examined. less than 40 words, added the bride’s mother’s first name and that she was deceased.
