Choose from selected free online events in the next five days. All times are ET except as noted. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed. Find out about many more mainly US events at Conference Keeper at https://conferencekeeper.org

Wednesday, 1 May

10 am: Explore the written works of some remarkable women from our digitised collections in this online workshop, frp, the National Library of Scotland.
https://www.nls.uk/whats-on/women-s-lives-and-writings-online-resources-may-start/

2 pm: Strategies to Analyze Endogamous DNA, by Alec Ferretti for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/strategies-to-analyze-endogamous-dna/

The collection added 67 new or updated titles, in April compared to 89 last month. That includes 14 new titles

If your family history interest is in Orangeville, and wider Dufferin County, the two additions back to 1871 will be helpful. The remaining 68 Canadian newspapers added, for Alberta and BC,  are for the 21st century.

	Community	Title	Pages Digitized	Year Range
Ontario
	Orangeville	The Orangeville Banner	260,454	1898-2016.
		The Sun	17,023	1871-1933.
Alberta
	Lacombe	Lacombe Express	6,430	2015-2022.
	Ponoka	Ponoka News	15,874	2006-2022
	Princeton	Similkameen Spotlight	12,006	2005-2022
	Red Deer	Red Deer Express	6,450	2015-2019
	Rimbey	Rimbey Review	9,005	2006-2022
	Stettler	The Stettler Independent	12,191	2006-2022
	Wetaskiwin	The Pipestone Flyer	6,943	2015-2022
British Columbia
	Bella Coola	Coast Mountain News	2,516	2014-2022.
	Campbell River	Campbell River Mirror	51,048	2005-2022.
		Campbell River Mirror Daily	15,418	2005-2008.
		North Island Midweek	3,716	2006-2015.
	Castlegar	Castlegar News	14,152	2005-2022.
	Chilliwack	Chilliwack Progress Daily	16,580	2005-2008.
		Chilliwack Times	4,059	2014-2016.
	Cranbrook	Cranbrook Townsman	33,126	2014-2022.
	Creston	Creston Valley Advance	10,830	2014-2022.
	Courtenay	Comox Valley Echo	4,821	2015-2017.
	Duncan	Cowichan Valley Citizen	27,530	2015-2022.
		The Lake Cowichan Gazette	10,128	2005-2022.
	Fernie	The Free Press	13,643	2014-2022.
	Ganges	Gulf Island Driftwood	20,121	2008-2022.
	Goldstream	Goldstream News Gazette	30,806	2005-2022.
	Greenwood City	The Boundary Creek Times	5,482	2014-2022.
	Invermere	The Columbia Valley Pioneer	7,657	2016-2020.
		The Valley Echo	9,261	2005-2017.
	Kamloops	Capital News	17,416	2005-2008.
		Capital News Daily	17,416	2005-2008.
	Kimberley	Kimberley Bulletin	10,009	2017-2022.
	Langley	Langley Times	56,936	2005-2022.
		The Langley Times Daily	16,144	2005-2008.
	Mission	Mission Record	26,614	2005-2022.
	Maple Ridge	Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows Daily	1,395	2005-2006.
		Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows News	46,844	2005-2022.
		Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows Times	2,316	2015-2016.
	Nakusp	Arrow Lake News	8,615	2005-2022.
	Nanaimo	Nanaimo News Bulletin	60,453	2005-2022.
		Nanaimo News Bulletin Daily	16,408	2005-2014.
	Parksville	The News	56,875	2005-2022.
		The News Daily	15,308	2005-2008.
		Vancouver Island Free Daily	8,681	2016-2018.
	Penticton	Penticton Western News	48,988	2005-2022.
		Penticton Western News Daily	15,448	2005-2008.
	Port Hardy	North Island Gazette	14,692	2005-2022.
	Prince Rupert	Haida Gwaii Observer	4,076	2015-2020.
	Salmon Arm	Lakeshore News	10,213	2006-2018.
	Sidney	Peninsula News Review	25,607	2005-2022.
	Sooke	Sooke News Mirror	19,659	2005-2022.
	Smithers	The Northern Daily	12,640	2006-2008.
	Summerland	Summerland Review	12,433	2005-2022.
	Surrey	North Delta Reporter	7,644	2016-2022.
		The Leader	53,463	2005-2022.
		The Leader Daily	16,635	2005-2008.
		The Now	6,051	2015-2017.
	Sylvan Lake	Eckville Echo	2,538	2015-2020.
		Red Deer County News	547	2006-2008.
	Trail	Trail Daily Times	23,378	2014-2022.
		Trail Rossland News	8,247	2006-2022.
	Ucluelet	Westerly News	6,840	2015-2022.
	Vernon	The Morning Star Daily	9,342	2007-2014.
	Victoria	Oak Bay News	24,740	2005-2022.
		Saanich News	29,736	2005-2022.
		South Vancouver Island Media Guide	3,137	2005-2007.
		Victoria News	31,043	2005-2022.
		Victoria News Daily	15,150	2005-2008.
	White Rock	The Peace Arch News	55,488	2005-2022.
		The Peace Arch News Daily	17,149	2005-2014.
	Williams Lake	Tribune Weekend	1,049	2005-2006.
	Prince Rupert	The Northern View	14,836	2006-2022.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Latin Wind Directions

Putting the history in family history…

Scottish Society for Northern Studies
Northern Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the Society. Like many organizations, back issues are freely available. A couple of articles of particular interest:
The Climatic Motive for Leaving Scotland, c. 1770 – c. 1890 in Northern Studies 53 (2022)
Vestur-Íslendingar: The Icelanders of Manitoba
Northern Studies 50 (2019)

The Biographical Dictionary of Nurses from Ireland in Service on the Home Front and on Allied Battle Fronts during the Second World War, 1939-1945
A free pdf from PRONI.

Fusion Energy
There’s recent progress. While growth of renewable energy generation (wind and solar) has gradually chipped away at fossil fuel market share, the successful commercialization of fusion energy is an existential risk for the fossil fuel industry.

TheGenealogist has released 225,395 heads of households and property owners from the 1910-1915 Lloyd George Domesday Survey,  extending Home Counties coverage to Surrey.
Availability of these IR 58 Landowner and Occupier records now total over 2.6 million — all the boroughs of Greater London plus Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Northamptonshire and with this release, Surrey.
The records give the names of owners and occupiers of each property and can provide detailed descriptions of the numbers and types of rooms in the house, plus what it was constructed of and the extent of its garden or grounds.

Enhanced Genealogical Data From Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography
This new collection contains 4,013 images and transcriptions supplementing the 32,866 of the Britain, Dictionary Of National Biography, 1885-1904.

It indexes the names of people mentioned who are not the primary subject of the biography. Every record will have a brief transcript and an image of the full entry. The transcript includes the name, birth year, status, and reference person.

This FMP content is historical. The current DNB, with an additional 120 years has over 65,000 biographies, and 12,000 portraits of significant, influential or notorious figures. It was recently updated with biographies of 276 men and women who died in the year 2020.

Lancashire Wills & Probate 1457-1858
This collection with 5,803 new records relating to ‘Infra Wills’, that is, estates valued at less than £40. If Lancashire ancestor passed down a small sum to their next of kin in the early 19th century, their name may just appear within this updated collection.

The collection now comprises 301,771 records. Original records are held at the Lancashire Record Office plus a small collection of records created by the Lancashire and Cheshire Records Society. These records include an image of the index books published by the society.

Most records contain: name, status or occupation, event date, place, Deanery, county, volume number, volume description, archive and reference, document ordering link.

Surrey Prerogative Court Will Abstracts, 1420-1857
This week’s biggest record update consists of 11,308 Surrey will abstracts, transcriptions and images, from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, spanning 1700 to 1858.

Each record contains a transcript of the index to the original wills. The information given varies but you can find out name, residence, names of beneficiaries, relationship to the testator (who wrote the will), and the date of the will.

 

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Thursday, 25 April 2024, to contain 290,683,241 unique entries, up from 290,487,882 on 26 March.

The years with more than 10,000 new entries are 1992, 1993, 1995 for births, 1992, 1994 for marriages, and 1993, 1995 for deaths.

 

A recent blog post from FamilyTreeDNA, the first in a five-part series, delves into the importance of mitochondrial DNA in genealogical research. The unique inheritance, only passed down from mother to child, aids genealogists to follow the maternal thread through generations.
The blog post covers the changes, including transitions, transversions, reversions, insertions, deletions, and heteroplasmies, that create distinct patterns that can be used to identify genetic connections.

https://blog.familytreedna.com/what-is-mtdna/

Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD’s) were formed in 1909 by the British Red Cross and the Order of St John at the request of the War Office. Both men and women provided humanitarian aid to naval and military forces at home and abroad during the war. They were trained in various roles, including nursing, transport duties, garment making, cookery, ambulance driving, and administrative work.

The “United Kingdom, Red Cross Volunteers During WWI, 1914-1918” collection is now available on Ancestry.com. It’s a resource for genealogists and family historians to delve into the lives of over 90,000 British Red Cross volunteers who served during the First World War.

The collection contains 244,156 records, handwritten on index cards, all in English. Each record may include the volunteer’s name, age at enrollment, address, county, date of enrollment, name of hospital, rank, date of discharge, honours, and a description of duties.

Registrars often added comments,  personal in nature and often containing anecdotes or details about personalityon the backs of the records. Click on the arrow to the right of the image to browse the entire record.

See the original at https://vad.redcross.org.uk/.

A fascinating education!

In Where Fact Meets Fiction: behind the scenes of a genealogical crime mystery for Legacy Family Tree Webinars, Goodwin went into the story of researching his favourite book The Sterling Affair. It’s the eighth novel in his Morton Farrier genealogical crime mystery series of ten stories that can be read as a stand-alone. Many of the genealogical resources mentioned are familiar, while others are obscure.

It’s accessible in free replay for a week at https://familytreewebinars.com/, where new subscribers can sign up for a half-price offer for the next few days.

 

Where did these originate? Likely not with Moses. He could count! This version is from 2000.

(1) Thou shalt name your male children: James, John, Joseph, Josiah, Abel, Richard, Thomas, William.
(2) Thou shalt name your female children: Elizabeth, Mary, Martha, Maria, Sarah, Ida, Virginia, May.
(3) Thou shalt leave NO trace of your female children.
(4) Thou shalt, after naming your children from the above lists, call them by strange nicknames such as: Ike, Eli, Polly, Dolly, Sukey.—making them difficult to trace.
(5) Thou shalt NOT use any middle names on any legal documents or census reports, and only where necessary, you may use only initials on legal documents.
(6)Thou shalt learn to sign all documents illegibly so that your surname can be spelled, or misspelled, in various ways: Hicks, Hickes, Hix, Hixe, Hucks, Kicks.
(7) Thou shalt, after no more then 3 generations, make sure that all family records are lost, misplaced, burned in a court house fire, or buried so that NO future trace of them can be found.
(8) Thou shalt propagate misleading legends, rumors, & vague innuendo regarding your place origination:

(A) you may have come from : England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales….or Iran.
(B) you may have American Indian ancestry of the______tribe……
(C) You may have descended from one of three brothers that came over from______.

(9) Thou shalt leave NO cemetery records, or headstones with legible names.
(10) Thou shalt leave NO family Bible with records of birth, marriages, or deaths.
(11) Thou shalt ALWAYS flip thy name around. If born James Albert, thou must make all the rest of thy records in the names of Albert, AJ, JA, AL, Bert, Bart, or Alfred.
(12) Thou must also flip thy parent’s names when making reference to them, although “Unknown” or a blank line is an acceptable alternative.

And personal additions from 2000:

(13) Thou shalt name at least 5 generations of males, and dozens of their cousins with identical names in order to totally confuse researchers:
(14) Thou shalt speak with an accent that census takers can’t understand.
(15) Thou must make sure at least one critical branch of thy family lives in the most most remote frontier regions of the country, and they must move to another area just before the census is taken.

If you’d like something more serious check out this from 2010.

Highlighted as Pick of the Month in the May issue is an online talk on 15 May from the Guild of One Name Studies. It will explain the value of solicitors’ records. Register for the free presentation Where There’s a Will, There’s a Lawyer: using solicitors records for family research at www one-name.org/solicitorrecords/

A reader panel tested Genealogy Websites Ancestry, Findmypast, MyHeritage, and TheGenealogist. Each has pros and cons. The bottom line, hardly surprising, is that Ancestry and Findmypast together lead the pack. MyHeritage, with strength outside Britain, and TheGenealogist trail in a statistical tie.

In his Best Websites column, Jonathan Scott reveals how to track down old photos of your street, your house and even your ancestors online. Lot’s of sites to explore including the London Picture Archive which has more than 250,000 images held by the London Metropolitan Archives and the Guildhall Art Gallery.

There’s lots more. Editor Sarah Williams wouldn’t want me to give too much away, but I’ll just mention another from Jonathan Scott in his Around Britain series, this issue on researching Shropshire forebears.

Does your Canadian public library provide free online access to WDYTYA magazine?