Month: December 2021

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Life in 1920s Ireland: Silent Films

http://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/11/world/europe/silent-film-ireland-discovery.html

From The Conversation Canada
This is one of the sources I regularly use in compiling Sunday Sundries. Some recent articles are:

Lab-grown meats and cow-free dairy can meet the demand for protein and help address climate change

If companies want net-zero carbon offices, they need to focus on building materials

Support and collaboration with health-care providers can help people make health decisions

How effective are vaccines against omicron? An epidemiologist answers 6 questions

Why we still fall for influencers, salesmen and politicians who lie

What else is on The Conversation? Find out at https://theconversation.com/ca and check out the other national editions.

Hampshire records coming to Ancestry

Multiculturalism @50 and the Promise of a Just Society
From the Association for Canadian Studies, a special issue of the series Canadian Issues.

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Anonymous., Brenda Turner, Chuck Buckley, Donna, Irene Robillard, gail benjafield, Glenn W., Unknown.

Once again, as every year since 2010, I’m taking a bit of a break. Expect to find daily scheduled Yuletide R&R posts with some new and many “classic” items for your amusement.

To review the posts from previous years go to anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.ca and search for Yuletide

In the January 2022  issue, the feature articles are

The 1921 census — Alex Cox from Findmypast answers your questions about the eagerly-anticipated release

Websites to watch— Jonathan Scott looks at what we can expect from the biggest family history websites in 2022

Women of the future — When women went wild — Julie Peakman on how the 1920s changed the lives of our female ancestors.

Also in this issue:

Family hero Martin Caldicott’s great uncle captained a daring sea rescue in 1951

Eureka moment An old family Bible helped Paul Cooper find his grandmother’s father

Plus: News of speciality websites you probably haven’t heard about, the best websites for RAF ancestors, finding Scottish school records, a focus on Ayrshire, how to use RootsMagic 8 and more

Another FMP exclusive — this week Coventry Workhouse Deaths and Baptisms.

The 8,292 deaths are from 1845 to 1943, surnames are Abbott to Youngham.

The transcripts include name, birth year, death year, death date, age, address and burial arrangements – usually “Buried by Friends or Family” with the occasional mention of Coventry Cemetery otherwise unspecified.

The 1,778 baptism transcriptions from 1853 to 1930 are for surnames Adams to Young. The information includes the name, year of birth and baptism, date of birth, mother’s name, whether legitimate or illegitimate. There is a space for the father’s name but none of the transcripts I viewed included that.

Also released this week by FMP are 66,304 United States, California Immigration Office Special Inquiry Records. The information is for Chinese immigrants arriving in San Francisco and very sparse – name, date and ship name.

The Ontario Ancestors  (OGS) Virtual Conference is to be held June 24- 26, 2022.

The conference theme, The Past, The Present, and The Future, provides plenty of scope for creativity.

Could you be a speaker for one or more 40 minute live presentations?

The deadline for the submission of lecture proposals is Sunday, 30 January 2022 at 11:59 PM EST.

Find out more and how to apply at https://conference2022.ogs.on.ca/

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Wednesday 15 December 2021 to contain 283,149,543 unique entries, increased from  282,788,464  at the previous update.

Years with changes of more than 10,000 records since the last update are: for births 1986-87, 1990-92; for marriages 1987, 1989-91; for deaths 1989-91.

Looking back over the past year, the net addition to the database is 5,168,186 records, most in the period 1986 to 1991.

The mandate letter for the Minister of Canadian Heritage dated 16 December 2021 has been posted. See if you can find anything relevant in the main section copied below to the services provided by Library and Archives Canada? LAC is not alone. The responsibilities of the Minister of Canadian Heritage extend to a variety of Portfolio organizations like the national museums. None are mentioned or even hinted at in the mandate letter.

Where’s the Heritage in Canadian Heritage?

I ask that you achieve results for Canadians by delivering the following commitments.

Support artists and the cultural sector to recover from the impacts of the pandemic by:
Holding a national summit on plans to restart and position the arts, culture and heritage sectors for the future;
Ensuring sufficient compensation is available for media production stoppages related to COVID-19;
Launching an Arts and Culture Recovery Program to mitigate the impacts of reduced capacity in cultural venues; and
Implementing a COVID-19 transitional support program to provide emergency relief to artists and cultural workers.
To honour residential school Survivors and all the children who were taken from their families and communities, work with Indigenous leadership, Survivors, families, communities and experts on the planning, design and construction of a national monument in Ottawa.
Work with First Nations, Inuit and the Métis Nation to ensure that the Indigenous Languages Act continues to be fully implemented and is supported by long-term, predictable and sustainable funding in order to preserve, promote and revitalize Indigenous languages in Canada.
As our Government’s Quebec Lieutenant, you will work to ensure the needs and aspirations of all Quebecers are reflected in our agenda and act as a key interlocutor between our Government and Quebecers.
Work with the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry to amend the Copyright Act to further protect artists, creators and copyright holders, including to allow resale rights for artists.
Reintroduce legislation to reform the Broadcasting Act to ensure foreign web giants contribute to the creation and promotion of Canadian stories and music.
Swiftly introduce legislation to require digital platforms that generate revenues from the publication of news content to share a portion of their revenues with Canadian news outlets to level the playing field between global platforms and Canadian outlets. This legislation should be modelled on the Australian approach and introduced in early 2022.
Continue efforts with the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada to develop and introduce legislation as soon as possible to combat serious forms of harmful online content to protect Canadians and hold social media platforms and other online services accountable for the content they host. This legislation should be reflective of the feedback received during the recent consultations.
Support Canadian music, film and television by:
Increasing funding to Telefilm Canada and the Canada Media Fund to support Canadian feature films and television productions;
Increasing the proportion of funding for French audiovisual content at Telefilm Canada and the Canada Media Fund from 33 per cent to 40 per cent to increase the presence of French-language productions;
Providing the Indigenous Screen Office with additional ongoing funding so more Indigenous stories can be told and seen; and
Increasing annual contributions to the Canada Music Fund to ensure better and more stable funding for the music sector.
Work with the Minister of Foreign Affairs to launch a new cultural diplomacy strategy and ensure Canadian artists realize benefits from this initiative.
Support the Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development to help Canadian cultural industries succeed at home and abroad by issuing a mandate to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Export Development Canada (EDC) to support the growth of creative industries in existing and new markets.
Support Canadian authors and book publishers by increasing funding for the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Public Lending Right Program.
Empower racialized artists and journalists by:
Supporting productions led by people from equity-deserving groups in the Canadian audiovisual industry;
Investing in the Local Journalism Initiative to support the production of news in underserved communities; and
Developing a new Changing Narratives Fund to provide diverse communities with the tools to tell their own stories and to promote diverse voices in arts, culture and media.
You will be supported in this work by the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion.

Modernize CBC/Radio-Canada, proceeding in a manner that respects the public broadcaster’s independence, by:
Updating CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate to ensure that it meets the needs and expectations of Canadian audiences, with unique programming that distinguishes it from private broadcasters;
Reaffirming its role as public broadcaster in protecting and promoting the French language and francophone cultures in Quebec and across the country;
Increasing the production of national, regional and local news;
Strengthening Radio Canada International, so that it can continue to advocate for peace, democracy and universal values on the world stage;
Ensuring that Indigenous voices and cultures are present on our screens and radios;
Bringing Canada’s television and film productions to the world stage; and
Providing additional funding to make it less reliant on private advertising, with a goal of eliminating advertising during news and other public affairs shows.
Modernize the institutions and funding tools that support Canada’s audiovisual sector, including video games, to make funding platform-agnostic and open to more traditionally under-represented storytellers, while promoting Canadian productions and ensuring that Canadians are better equipped to own, and benefit from, the content that they produce.
Increase the funding for the Court Challenges Program, which supports Canadians in legal cases of national significance that clarify official language rights and human rights.
Working with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, take steps to build an international coalition to develop a new UNESCO convention on the diversity of content online.
Continue to contribute to the funding of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations in Quebec and across the country, while also supporting other important celebrations for French language communities in Canada.

 

 

Thanks to entrepreneurial leadership, the Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives, an independent non-profit corporation established in 1993 to acquire, preserve and make important historical documents available, has once again expanded the local resources available online.

The details on the additions are in this press release.

Thanks to generous funding received from the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors Program, some 2,000 newspaper issues – from 1938 to 1975 – have been digitized and are now available on the Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives’ website. As a result, the Arnprior Chronicle is now available online from 1885 through 1966, although there are many missing editions, including full years, in the earliest years. This is followed by the Arnprior Guide from mid-1966 to December 1975, thus providing nearly 100 years of local history online.

Offering a new gateway to local history, everyone with internet access can freely read these newspapers from their home, regardless of where they live or their mobility. Researchers no longer need to travel to view these newspapers, which is especially important for those self-isolating and during the Archives continued limited in-person access.
The digitized newspapers can be searched, using a word or phrase, or they can be browsed using the finding aid. The newest additions cover nearly 40 years, from near the end of the Great Depression, through World War II, and the subsequent three decades of growth and change in the Arnprior and surrounding area. Issues beyond these digitized dates are still available to view at the Archives on microfilm.
Besides the expanded online newspaper collection, there have been a number of enhancements to make the newspapers more discoverable and to improve the user experience. Much of this work was funded by the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society.
The related birth, marriage, and death indexes, abstracted from the newspapers, have been expanded online to include 1935 and most of 1936. The individual names are linked back to the related newspaper page and now the search results are highlighted rather than hunting for the name within the page. With the additional 2,500 names, there are now more than 17,000 abstracts available for viewing. Thanks to volunteers, Arnold McIntyre and Debbie Miller, for their hard work in scouring the newspapers to create these latest abstracts.
Two other noteworthy enhancements have been made. In addition to the ability to search across all the holdings described online, there is now a search box in the newspaper finding aid to allow a search within just the newspaper collection. As well, the list of issues within each newspaper title is now divided by decade to minimize scrolling for those titles containing many issues, such as the Arnprior Chronicle.
To access the search function on the Archives’ website and the finding aids, visit https://search.adarchives.org/.

COMMENT: Who is theABMA entrepreneurial leadership referred to?
Past President: Irene Robillard
Past Archivist: Laurie Dougherty
Archivist: Kristen Mercier

My apologies to anyone missed.

Here are stats for deaths in England and Wales from the ONS, week by week since the start of the pandemic.

If you’d like to compare this state with where you live try the Johns Hopkin’s Dashboard at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

For a longer-term perspective check out https://anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.com/2020/08/death-trends-in-uk.html

To find the new issue, available as a pdf online for BIFHSGO members, I had to clear the cache (Press the keys [Ctrl], [Shift] and [Del]. … then in the new window find “Clear Browser cache”.

The contents are:

Primary or Secondary: Struggling with Sources, by Adrienne Stevenson

Hunting Gathering, by Anne Renwick

We Shall Remember Them: Corporal Johnson MM and Sapper Feathers, by Sheila Dohoo Faure

The Cream of the Crop, by John D Reid

In addition, there are the Editor’s and President’s columns and the membership report, which spills over to a second page.

At 1 pm ET today, 16 December, Friends of Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives present a free online talk ‘She is capable but sullen and troublesome’. Analysis of the Muller Orphan Homes’ Dismissal Books, 1850-1900.

New as of 13 December are transcriptions of parish records of England’s 11th most populous of the original ceremonial counties. They were created from Anglican Parish Registers held at the South West Heritage Trust.

Ancestry’s collections are:

Devon, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812  — 5,701,864 records.

Devon, England, Church of England Births and Baptisms, 1813-1920  — 2,450,290 records.

Devon, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1920 — 1,080,999 records.

Devon, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813-1920 — 536,763 records.

Ancestry has no images of the original records. They are available at Findmypast and in a somewhat limited collection at FamilySearch.