Month: May 2021

You probably saw coverage of the launch for a digital newspaper archive for SDG (Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry to the uninitiated). Find a newspaper report here; go directly to the online archives here.

Over 200,000 pages of history in 15,634 editions of 13 newspapers is a laudable achievement. While of greatest interest to those with roots in the United Counties, it can also serve as a role model for other localities.

Taking a deeper dive into the newspapers here’s a listing of the title, number of pages and years with digitized content.

Winchester Press: (5467): 1895-1898, 1901, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1917-1958, 1960-1988, 1990-1991, 1993-1998, 2001-2020
The Glengarry News: (2477): 1961-2004
The Chesterville Record: (2391): 1902-1905, 1910-1913, 1915-1924, 1928, 1954-1963, 1965-2000
The Chieftain: (1442): 1982-2006
The Morrisburg Leader: (1342): 1907, 1911-1919, 1921-1929, 1934-1938, 1940, 1942, 1947-1949, 1952
The Iroquois Post: (739): 1956, 1964, 1968-1982
The Iroquois Post and Matilda Advocate: (549): 1931, 1936, 1943, 1945-1946, 1959, 1952-1963, 1965-1967
Dundas County Herald and St. Lawrence Reporter: (145): 1874-1877
The St. Lawrence News – Iroquois: (82): 1894, 1901, 1905-1906, 1908-1909. 1917-1920, 1922
Morrisburgh Courier: (32): 1865-1866, 1869, 1873, 1879, 1885-1987, 1892
The Williamsburg Times: (16): 1935, 1938
Morrisburg Banner: (7): 1977
The Mountain Herald: (1): 1905

No intense scrutiny is needed to see that the Winchester Press accounts for over one-third of the content. Add The Glengarry News and The Chesterfield Records and you have more than two-thirds of the content.

The table doesn’t tell the whole story.

The Winchester Press, an eight-page weekly, starts in 1895 but there are only one to two issues a year available until 1918.

The Glengarry News, also an eight-page weekly, has good coverage from 1961 to 2004. Much earlier editions (Feb 1892 – Dec 1960), as well as of The Glengarrian (Feb 1887 – Dec 1910), are available here. Hopefully, they’ll be added to the new site soon for simplicity of searching.

The Chesterville Record has good coverage for the years mentioned except for only a single issue in 1929 in the middle of a gap from 1925 to 1954.

The search is a two-step process. From the main page search your term. You can select a newspaper first. This will take you to an array of papers where after a click or two a pdf will download that can be searched with CTL-F. The page will show with the hit highlighted,

Congratulations to United Counties researchers who now have a very nice free resource at their fingertips and to the local people who made it happen.

 

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Thursday 6 May 2021 to contain 280,104,498 unique records (279,663,246 at the previous update.) Years with major additions, greater than 5,000 records are: for births 1986-90; for marriages 1969, 1986-90; for deaths 1986, 1988-90.

Today is the 80th anniversary of the death of Leading Aircraftman Douglas Mervyn Lord, age 22, of the Royal Australian Air Force. He is one of 146 Australian airmen commemorated in Canada.

The crash, which killed him while practising night flying out of No 2 Flying Training School, Uplands, Ottawa, occurred at 4 am about 2-1/2 miles south of the airport.  It also took the life of Flying Officer Bennett L. Duffey originally from Toronto.  

Douglas Mervyn Lord, born 17 July 1918 at Warrnambool, Victoria, the son of George Walter and Eliza Ellen Lord, is interred in Sec. 29. Lot 1. Grave 105 at Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery.

While he has a grave many don’t. The Ottawa Memorial “commemorates by name almost 800 men and women who lost their lives while serving or training with the Air Forces of the Commonwealth in Canada, the West Indies and the United States and who have no known grave.”

The June issue of Who Do You Think You Are Magazine appeared on 4 May. The three feature articles are:
Put your tree online
Chris Paton explores online free family tree builders from four major genealogy sites plus collaborative trees. 

Motor City
Steve Humphries tells the fascinating stories of those who made Coventry a driving force in car manufacturing. You’ll enjoy learning the history if you like old British cars by makers like Hillman, Jaguar, Riley, Sunbeam, Talbot, Triumph. 

Wedding Traditions
From wedding rings to white gowns, Carolyn Roope reveals the origins of our cherished marriage customs.

Also

Best websites
Track down records of police ancestors. There are local and national resources.

Around Britain
Everything you need to research your roots in Norfolk. Reports on the activity at the Norfolk Record Office during the pandemic, including indexing with a list of resources. If you’re looking for an image to illustrate a Norfolk ancestral location try Picture Norfolk.

As always, there much more. Check it out free on Press Reader through your local Canadian public library.

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure is seeking volunteers. They are crowd-sourcing the creation of a new open digital historic parish boundary resource. It will be based pre-1844 parish boundaries in The Parish Atlas of England (Barlaston, 2017). 

Find out more at https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/parishatlas/

Since last mentioned on 10 April, many more items are added to the Canadiana.ca Serials collection. This word cloud shows the range of topics, too many titles to list here. 

Find the start of the list of new items here. It has a link to the complete list for the last month and new items coming.

Browsing the titles I smiled at “Annual report of the Pomological and Fruit Growing Society of the Province of Quebec.” At first glance, I didn’t read it as pomological and it seemed like an unusual combination.

Add a new word to your vocabulary. Pomology is a branch of botany that studies fruit and its cultivation.

While Canadiana continues digitization nothing is being added to the Héritage collections as “digitization services at Library and Archives Canada remain suspended.”

On 30 April LAC posted a notice Update – Delays in responding to Access to Information Act and Privacy Act requests

The notice explains that “ability to respond within legislatively prescribed timelines to requests made under the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act has been greatly affected by both a marked increase in volume and health and safety measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Translated “greatly affected by” means LAC has failed to meet “legislatively prescribed timelines.”

The notice continues:

“We understand that such delays are difficult for our clients, and we are doing everything we can to remediate this exceptional situation.

Rest assured that we are actively looking at innovative processes and human resource solutions to address these delays and meet our increasing demand.”

LAC wants our trust. What does “actively looking at” really mean?  How can we be confident this is not just bureaucratic verbiage, as in this line from Yes Minister?

“under consideration” means “we’ve lost the file”; “under active consideration” means “we’re trying to find it”.

When will LAC move beyond looking to action?

Ancestry dropped the other shoe, the baptismal records mentioned in a previous post last Saturday about London parish marriages and banns.

London, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1920 now has 22,108,614 records.

So far the “full list of the Church of England parishes in London can be found in the more help section” is not available.

Choose from free online events in the next five days. All times are ET except as noted. Those in red are Canadian, bolded if local to Ottawa. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed.

Tuesday 4 May, 2 pm:  Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, from Ottawa Branch of OGS and The Ottawa Public Library. https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/.

Tuesday 4 May, 7:30 pm: Tracing 20th-Century Ontarians, by Janice Nickerson for OGS Durham Region Branch. https://ogs.on.ca/events/tracing-20th-century-ontarians-with-janice-nickerson

Tuesday 4 May, 10 pm: Comparing Australian Content on the Giant Genealogy Websites, by Sunny Morton for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1601

Wednesday 5 May 11 am: House History (UK), by Ellie Jones and Melanie Backe-Hansen for Findmypast. https://www.facebook.com/findmypast

Wednesday 5 May, 2 pm: Solving a Brick Wall with DNA – A Case Study, by Larry W. Thomas for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1626

Wednesday 5 May, 7:30 pm: Unlocking Inmate Stories: Research & Interpretation at the Huron Historic Gaol, by Sinead Cox for OGS Huron County Branch. https://huron.ogs.on.ca/events/may-5-huron-co-jail-and-its-people-sinead-cox/

Thursday 6 May, 12 noon: Skimming the Surface: A Look into Ontario Land Records. From FamilySearch. https://churchofjesuschrist.zoom.us/webinar/register/7216142063477/WN_TCYwA9ihRYCOzvO9-gAmSw

Thursday 6 May, 8 pm: Discussion: Finding Your Ancestors on the Map, by Richard Ruggle for OGS.  https://ogs.on.ca/zoom-meetings/may-webinar-richard-ruggle/

Friday 7 May, 2 pm: Researching the Descendants and Ancestors of the Weeping Time People, by Brian Sheffey for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1676

Saturday 8 May, 10 am: A Russian Revelation: A Family Shaped by Significant Historical Events, by Marianne Rasmus for BIFHSGO. https://bifhsgo.ca/eventListings.php?nm=127#er566

LOOKING AHEAD

4 — 6 June 2021: OGS Conference. conference.ogs.on.ca 

19 – 26 September 2021: BIFHSGO Conference. Irish Lines and Female Finds: Exploring Irish records, female ancestors and genetic genealogy. www.bifhsgo2021.ca/.

An Index to surviving records of Wills, Grants and Administrations held by The National Archives of Ireland (NAI) for 1484-1858 is a recent addition to TheGenealogist. Records include the NAI reference, Use it to order a copy of the document. The Index of Irish Wills 1484-1858 features:

More than 100,000 names,
Easily Searchable by Name, County, Address and Keyword,
Can provide dates, occupation, status and place of abode.
Can provide a reference and link to order the document from the NAI.

If you have access to Ancestry see Dublin, Ireland, Probate Record and Marriage License Index, 1270-1858 with 115,989 records. On MyHeritage see Irish Wills, 1484 – 1858 with more than 70,000 wills available.

Based on Library and Archives Canada data for Canadian servicemen and servicewomen killed in action for which no exact birth date is known, their most likely year of birth was 1920.

The table below gives the birth dates for which more than 20 fatalities were recorded. They range from March 1920 to May 1921

Birth Date	Number of Deaths
05 Oct 1920	25
27 Apr 1921	24
02 Mar 1920	22
10 Jan 1921	22
19 Oct 1920	22
08 May 1921	21
11 May 1921	21
21 Aug 1920	21
21 Mar 1921	21

The data triggered in my mind my uncle Edward, who died in a flying accident serving with the RAF. I checked my database. Yes, he was born on 7 March 1921, within the range of those dates.

Today, 2 May, is the anniversary of the 1885 Battle of Cut Knife Hill.  Fatalities included volunteers William B Osgood(e) and John Rogers from the Ottawa Company of Sharpshooters.

Ottawa’s Cartier Square Drill Hall is the site of a statue in their honour, funded by public subscription.  The bas-relief portrait of Osgood(e) is on one side of the monument.

“To honour and remember the sacrifices of the more than 118,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders who, since Confederation, have given their lives serving in uniform.” Those are the words used to describe the Canadian Virtual War Memorial and Books of Remembrance. With the exception of NWMP the 1885 North-West Canada fatalities are missing, the only soldiers not memorialized in this way. That’s something Canada’s Department of Veteran’s Affairs acknowledges is deliberate.

While we speak and write about them they will be remembered.