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.

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

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.

When searching for a contemporary cousin, rejoice when you find a voter’s list.

With the recent update, Ancestry’s database UK, Electoral Registers, 2011-2018 now contains  45,527,687 entries.

Records include the name, birth date (range), residence date (range), address, and residence place.

This database is based on the open version of the electoral register, which does not include all the information collected. Individuals can opt out of inclusion; in 2018, about 25 million did.

The new Cheshire, England, Roman Catholic Baptism, Marriage, and Burial Registers, 1644-1913 collection includes 403,929 records, with indexes, transcriptions, and images of original documents.  Derived from holdings of Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, the communities included are:

Altrincham
Birkenhead
Bollington
Chester
Congleton
Crewe
Hooton
Hyde
Knutsford
Liscard
Little Neston
Macclesfield
Middlewich
Nantwich
Northwich
Puddington Hall
Runcorn
Sale
Seacombe
Stalybridge
Stockport
Upton by Birkenhead
Wilmslow

This collection, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Poor Law Applications and Registers, 1818-1923, contains 81,707 records relating to the relief of people in the historic counties of Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Kincardineshire.

Most of the records for Aberdeen City were destroyed during the Second World War.

Communities included are: Aberdour, Aboyne, Auchindoir & Kearn, Auchterless, Banchory Devenick, Banchory Ternan, Belhelvie, Birse, Bourtie, Cairney, Chapel of Garioch, Cluny, Coull, Crathie and Braemar, Daviot, Drumblade, Drumoak, Dunnottar, Dyce, Echt, Ellon, Fetteresso, Fintray, Forglen, Forgue, Fraserburgh, Fyvie, Gartly, Glass, Glenbuchat, Glenmuick, Tullich and Glengairn, Huntly, Inverkeithny, Inverurie, Keig, Keithhall & Kinkell, Kemnay, Kildrummy, Kincardine O´Neil, Kinellar, King Edward, Kinneff, Kintore, Laurencekirk, Leochel Cushnie, Logie Buchan, Logie Coldstone, Longside, Lonmay, Lumphanan, Marnoch, Maryculter, Marykirk, Meldrum, Methlick, Monquhitter, Monymusk, New Deer, New Machar, Newhills, Nigg, Old Deer, Old Machar, Peterculter, Peterhead, Rathen, Rhynie, Skene, Slains, St Fergus, Strathdon, Tarland and Migvie, Tarves, Towie, Tullynessle and Forbes, Tyrie.

Ancestry provides this collection in association with Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen City Archives.

The latest addition to the National Library of Scotland’s online maps collection is Historic parks in England map viewer, 1890s-1900s.

This viewer allows you to explore the evolving boundaries of England’s ancient parks and designed landscapes.

What green space was near an ancestral home?

The OS Historic Parks Layer draws on analysis of over 10,000 maps and 1,701 map tiles from the OS 6-Inch 2nd Edition England Maps (1888-1915). Machine learning and deep learning technologies were used to identify and classify the historic symbology used for parks, gardens, and designed landscapes.