Anglo-Celtic Connections

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit the ConferenceKeeper Virtual Calendar.

Tuesday, 20 October

2:30 PM: Beyond the Census: Uncovering Ancestor Stories, by Regan Richardson for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/17011957

8:00 PM: ¡Eureka! Confirmación del Lineaje Ancestral: DNA and Documents Prove a Mexican Ancestral Line (a 2026 Reisinger Lecture), by Karen Stanbary for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/eureka-confirmacion-del-lineaje-ancestral-dna-and-documents-prove-a-mexican-ancestral-line-a-2026-reisinger-lecture

Wednesday, 21 October (Trafalgar Day)

Thursday, 22 October

6:30 PM: Investigative Genetic Genealogy: What Genealogists Need to Understand, by Suzanne Harmon for the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. t
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/17012088

7:00 PM: Remembering The Canadian Army and World War Two’s Fallen Canadian Soldiers in The Netherlands, by Peter Holt for OGS Ottawa Branch
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/faces-of-liberation-the-groesbeek-canadian-war-cemetery-ottawa/

Friday, 23 October

2:00 PM: Essential Skills for New Genealogists 5 of 12: Let Your Fingers Do the Walking—Local Directories of All Sorts, by Dave Mc Donald for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/essential-skills-for-new-genealogists-5-of-12-let-your-fingers-do-the-walking-local-directories-of-all-sorts

7:00 PM: History and Reconstruction of the Morningstar Mill, by Carla Mackie for OGS Niagara Peninsula Branch
https://niagara.ogs.on.ca/events/history-and-reconstruction-of-the-morningstar-mill-with-carla-mackie-niagara-peninsula-branch-webinar-series/

Saturday, 24  October

New Ontario and New Brunswick titles are recently added to newspapers.com.

Leading the pack, with over 1.1 million pages, from 1913 to 2011 is Ottawa’s francophone Le Droit.

Another major addition is Maclean’s, the quintessanial Canadian weekly news magazine published in Toronto.  Added are 94,367 pages from 1944 to 1986. It became monthly in 2017.

Also from Toronto are 563,342 pages of the Sunday Sun from 1973 to 2015, and 166,224 pages from the Saturday Sun from 1986 to 2015.

For New Brunswick there are three 21st century publications.

Info Week-End, also known as Info Weekend, from Edmonston, NB has 15,169 pages from 2007 to 2026.
Journal La République, also from Edmundston has  1,808 pages from 2006–2010
L’Étoile, from  Caraquet,has 896 pages from 2024 to 2026
The Bargain Hunter,  St. Andrews, has just 389 pages for 2024 to 2025.

Updates, mainly for recent years, have been made for BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick newspapers.

TheGenealogist has released the next in its continuing project to digitize and make available the Lloyd George Domesday Survey records for England and Wales. Dating from around 1910–1915, these records give details of Edwardian properties, their owners and occupiers. Pinpoint the exact location on a map. View an image of the original document.

For Cornwall, find 214,488 records, 214,488 historic land and property records, alongside historic maps covering over 1,300 square miles.

Access requires a Diamond subscription to The Genealogist.

A second consecutive week of Leicestershire additions on Findmypast, sees two new collections covering poverty, parish life, and the commemoration of the dead — alongside a newspaper update with a Welsh flavour.

Leicestershire Poor Law Records, 1678–1921

This collection of 14,626 records is sourced from several distinct record types. The Order Books for Removals and Settlements (1678–1832) document Quarter Sessions cases where parishes disputed the removal of individuals — often revealing detailed information about where people came from and where they belonged.
The Leicester Division Bastardy Book (1844–1874) and Leicestershire Bastardy Order Books (1678–1832) together cover around 3,700 Petty Sessions cases, recording sentences imposed by the court.
The Leicester Union Emigrants Register (1905–1921) documents those whose passage to the colonies — mainly Canada — was funded by the Poor Law Union, recording names, ages, destinations, and sailing dates.

Records can include name, birth year and date, father’s and mother’s names, abode, appellant, respondent, date of order, decision, quarter session period, destination, and date sailed — making this a rich collection for understanding an ancestor’s circumstances in considerable depth.

Leicestershire Monumental Inscriptions, 1850–2022

Brought together by  the Nottinghamshire Family History Society, this collection covers burials in church graveyards, cemeteries, and war memorials across Leicestershire. Records include name, birth and death dates, age at death, place and cemetery of burial, memorial reference, and inscription details, with original images sometimes revealing additional family members buried together.

British Newspaper Archive: 259,548 New Pages

This week’s update adds 259,548 pages across five new titles and updates to 29 existing publications, with a notably Welsh flavour among the new additions.

New Titles

Updated Titles with Over 10,000 Pages Added

Miscellaneous items I found interesting this week.

WDYTYA: Barry Humphries
Posted from the Australian TV series of Who Do You Think You Are? He’s best known as Dame Edna Everage.

Is your name still common? What Canadian baby names reveal about how we’ve changed

Ancestry has updated Web: Ireland, Census, 1911, now with 4,537,587 entries.

The British Beehive
Mentioned by Graeme Morton during his opening presentation at the BIFHSGO conference.

Thanks to the following individuals for their comments and tips: Ann Burns, Anonymous,  Gail,  Helen Billing, Julia, Lolly Fullerton, Maria Laty, Teresa, Unknown.

There’s an interesting a new searchable collection for researchers with Scottish roots in London: the Caledonian Asylum Petitions Index, covering 1819 to 1924.

The Caledonian Asylum supported the children of Scottish soldiers, sailors and marines. Families applied by petition, and those records, held at The London Archives, often contain far more than a census or certificate. The index grew out of research by Lorna Kinnaird, working with the OGS Scottish SIG and a team of volunteer transcribers.

The Asylum admitted its first cohort of boys at a temporary home in Hatton Garden in December 1819. In 1828, it moved to a large purpose-built institution in Copenhagen Fields, Islington. In 1902–1903, the school relocated out of urban London to Bushey, Hertfordshire, and evolved into an educational charitable trust supporting the children of Scots in the armed forces.

The index is available publicly, but details included in the petitions are
only available to OGS members. I tried “Canada” which returned six index entries. They included one for Robert Brydon, born Nov 11 1915. OGS members can click down for more detail. He was born in West Ham, Essex, his father in Scotland and “Served 12 years in 1st Life Guards; later went to Canada.”

To obtain the full petition, you need to email Lorna Kinnaird at dunedingenie@gmail.com with the name, year and reference number.

On this date in 1346 the battle of Neville’s Cross was fought outside Durham in the north-east of England. It was a decisive moment in Anglo-Scottish history that led to the capture of King David II of Scotland.

Here’s the story from The Conversation.

Here are the 12 additions to the Heritage collection so far this month. Find a clickable link here.

Yesterday’s Images: “Original” or “New and Improved”? post attracted more views than normal. However, there was one particular oddity in the third image, the one processed by Gemini using Andrew Redfern’s prompt, that troubled me.
I asked Gemini to “Please produce an image with a numbered outline for each person in the restored photograph.” The initial attempt produced 15 outlines, and a table with columns Number, Row & Position, Attire & Identifying Details, and Pose / Expression for each. But the outlines were misaligned, so I prompted “There is a problem of alignment of the outlines with the photo. They appear to be shifted to the left. Please review and realign.” Here’s the result.

Person 9, dressed in a uniform and wearing a tie, seemed out of place. I asked Gemini “Please provide a detailed description of person 9.” Here’s the full response.

• A Quiet Week
  For the week including Thanksgiving, LAC has been mentioned as a source for historical images and in news summaries regarding the attempted hack. It has and is hosting a variety of public lectures, workshops, and book launches.
• What’s in Collection Search?
  As of 13 October, there are 7,954,212 ( 7,952,178 on 6 October) items in the Archives section of Collection Search, 8,227,688  (no change) in the Genealogy section,  4,441,736 (4,440,715) in Library including 54,334 (no change) in Theses, and 353,363 (353,360 ) in Images.

Browsing the supermarket shelves, you’ll find an array of flavour variations. Do you prefer the original, or one of the new and improved varieties? Choosing images to accompany a family history article is much the same. Let me illustrate.

This photograph from my family collection was taken on Christmas Day 1940 on an island in the Bismarck Archipelago. It is showing its age, well past its best-before date.

Here are some “new and improved” versions. The first was produced with ChatGPT, using the detailed prompt given by Andrew Redfern here, modified to produce a black-and-white monotone image.
 

The second used the same prompt with Gemini, which Andrew Redfern prefers.

Look at them carefully. Are there three people in the front row, or four? Are they wearing tops or not? What happened to the hats? The hallucinations are obvious.

Suppose you wanted an image to accompany your text, and you were happy to label any AI-enhanced images as such. Which of the three, the original or one of the two AI versions, would you choose, and why?

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual/

Tuesday, 13 October

2:00 PM: Ottawa Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, by OGS Ottawa Branch. https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/virtual-genealogy-drop-in-2-2026-10-13/

2:30 PM: Maps and Trails: Common Migration Paths from the 17th Through 19th Centuries, by Tina Beaird for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/17011687

7:00 PM: Canadian Her-Story, by Amber Godfrey for OGS Lambton County Branch (Zoom). https://lambton.ogs.on.ca/

Wednesday, 14 October

2:00 PM: Scottish Genealogy: Finding and Understanding Civil Registration Records, by Alison Spring for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/upcoming-webinars/

7:00 PM: Lest We Forget? An exploration of the Valour and Unequal Treatment of Algonquin who have served in Canada’s Armed Forces, byLynn Gehl and Wendy Jocko for The Historical Society of Ottawa.
https://www.historicalsocietyottawa.ca/activities/events/eventdetail/205/16,17,18,19,20,21,22/lest-we-forget-an-exploration-of-the-valour-and-unequal-treatment-of-algonquin-who-have-served-in-canada-s-armed-forces

8:00 PM: From Data to Dialogue with AI 1 of 5: Turning Data into Stories, by Andrew Redfern and Fiona Brooker for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/from-data-to-dialogue-with-ai-1-of-5-turning-data-into-stories

Thursday, 15 October,

6:30 PM: Was My William Smith in the Civil War? by Brian Rhinehart for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/17011763

Friday, 16 October

2:00 PM: Fleet Marriages: Tracing Clandestine Weddings in the UK, by Sarah Pettyfer, for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/upcoming-webinars/

Saturday, 17 October

9:00 AM: Start of the BIFHSGO Conference
For registrants.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/2026-conference

10:00 AM: Three Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence in Your Genealogy Research, byDavid Woodcock for  OGS Kingston Branch.
https://kingston.ogs.on.ca/events/kingston-branch-ogs-meeting-2026-10-17-3-ways-to-use-artificial-intelligence-in-your-genealogy-research/