Author: John Reid

Starting on Monday there’s a gradual build-up to a full weekend of lectures during the annual OGS conference, this year all online.

Monday thru Thursday the single sessions start at 7 pm.

Thursday is the regular monthly OGS webinar open to the public with no fee.

Friday is Ancestry Day, a separate registration event.

Proceedings on Saturday and Sunday start at 9 am with two parallel sessions. On Saturday at 3 pm there’s an allowance for a 2-hour OGS Annual General Meeting. On Sunday session go until 5:40 pm.

All the details and registration are at https://conference.ogs.on.ca/schedule/

Ealing adds 1802-1812 to the collection which now covers 1717 to 1876 with 18,982 records.
Records for  Harrow, All Saints are added which now covers 1838 to 1876 with 1,280 records. A larger Harrow collection is Harrow, St Mary with 9,775 baptismal records from 1653 to 1840.
The addition of Hayes records from 1557-1812 brings the parish total to 9,816 up to 1875.
FMP also adds baptismal records for Hillingdon from 1559-1876 although without including it in the parish list. Could it be listed as Uxbridge with 18,106 records from 1538 to 1876? 

At Friday’s BIFHSGO social I was asked about the BIFHSGO logo, specifically the colour. I recalled it was originally black and white with a rustic hand-drawn appearance. Over the years it changed to a more uniform shape and the colour varied. I’ve forgotten the details.
After the social I realized that the Wayback Machine has an archive of www.bifhsgo.ca. It goes back to 2001 with 447 captures at various dates.

If interested to see how the website and logo have changed, see https://web.archive.org/web/20101201000000*/www.bifhsgo.ca/.

The Wayback Machine is a useful tool to have in your arsenal for those times when the website you remembered has vanished. Go to https://archive.org/ and click on Web, then enter the web address (URL) for the site you want.

Just a small addition to these parish records. 1,004 baptisms are added for 1921 and 558 marriages and banns for 1936. These are the most recent years available.

The Archives annual report, available at the time of writing as Document 1 at https://app05.ottawa.ca/sirepub/mtgviewer.aspx?meetid=8216&doctype=AGENDA was received by Ottawa City Council at its meeting on 26 May as part of the City Clerk’s 2020 annual report.

The 27-page report is substantive and detailed. In summary:

With 2020 being an abnormal year, Archives activity dropped in aggregate, especially relating to its corporate mandate. Yet the benchmark statistics below nevertheless also show that, over this year despite the pandemic and its effects and restrictions (including redeployed staff), the Archives did not lag very far behind overall expected results, with its community work holding steady and its public engagement through reference and outreach being significantly more than ever.

There’s a quantitative annual summary and statistics section on various aspects of the Archives activity. For instance, a four-year month-by-month bar chart showing search totals for the Ottawa Museums and Archives Collections (OMAC) online catalogue. That’s in contrast to the annual report of the Ottawa Public Library which fails to report on the operation in anything like that detail.

 

On Friday 4 June 2021, from 9 am to 7 pm Ancestry.ca in conjunction with the Ontario Genealogical Society is offering a full day of mostly 30-minute expert talks.
Full details and registration ($25) at https://ogs.on.ca/shop/conference-2021-ancestry-day/

Here’s the program.

ANCESTRY DAY – Sessions 9:00 am to 7:00 pm

Time	Subject	Speaker
9:00 AM	Opening of Ancestry Day – Prizes, Discounts	Lesley Anderson | Ancestry	5 min
9:05 AM	Getting the most out of Ancestry – Searching Records & Online Trees	Lesley Anderson | Ancestry	30 min
9:35 AM	Make Discoveries with Ancestry Hints	Karen Joyce Lowe | Ancestry	15 min
9:50 AM	Boots on the ground – Land/Census records	Advisory Board Member Ken McKinley	30 min
10:20 AM	Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/BREAK		20 min
10:40 AM	Find a Grave: What You Can Do and What’s New	Peter Drinkwater | Ancestry	20 min
11:00 AM	Challenges of Jewish Research: Names, Dates and Places	ProGenealogist Janette Silverman	30 min
11:30 AM	ASK AN EXPERT – Irish Research	ProGenealogist Joe Buggy	30 min
12:00 PM	ASK AN EXPERT – Military Research – 1st and 2nd WW	ProGenealogist Simon Pearce	1 hour
1:00 PM	BREAK/Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts		15 min
1:15 PM	AncestryDNA 101: A Beginner’s Guide to DNA Discovery	Lisa Elzey | Ancestry	30 min
1:45 PM	AncestryDNA  102: AncestryDNA Matches for Family History Discoveries	Kelly Becker | Ancestry	30 min
2:15 PM	AncestryDNA 103: ThruLines  & Custom Groups	Brooke Alius & Randon Morford | Ancestry	30 min
2:45 PM	AncestryDNA Communities: Bringing New Discoveries to Your Research	Lisa Elzey | Ancestry	30 min
3:15 PM	Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/Break		30 min
3:45 PM	Marriage and Obituary Records: Indexes on Ancestry®—Images on Newspapers.com	Crista Cowan | Ancestry	20 min
4:10 PM	Five Things to Do with Newspapers.com	Anne Mitchell | Ancestry	20 min
4:30 PM	Quebec Genealogical Records	Advisory Board Member Gary Schroeder	1 hour
5:30 PM	Q & A with Customer service reps and Genealogy Experts/BREAK		30 min
6:00 PM	Ancestry at Sea – Researching Passenger Lists	Advisory Board Member Glenn Wright	30 min
6:30 PM	Adding Sources, Using hints and Merge feature	Advisory Board Member Lianne Kruger	30 min
7:00 PM	CLOSING

Every article like

Major project to allow digital access to 130 years of The Press archives

is rubbing salt in the wounds of the damage to Canada’s heritage inflicted by years of deliberate neglect of our newspaper heritage by Library and Archives Canada.

The article announces a major addition to New Zealand digitized newspaper content to be made freely available for searching online under a landmark agreement with the National Library of New Zealand.

Now approaching its 20th birthday, the New Zealand Papers Past site has about 30 million page views a year from about two million visitors.

Along with New Zealand, Australia and the US have active free newspaper digitization from the central government. In the UK the British Library has a free legacy newspaper digitization project and has announced some new free content will become available in a new round of digitization in partnership with Findmypast.

As President of the Ontario Library Association in December 2017 Leslie Weir, now Librarian and Archivist of Canada, wrote:

“Newspapers represent the most extensive documentation of a community’s activities. The small weekly rural publication or the long-running daily newspaper in larger urban centres bring forward a community’s priorities and perspectives in a way that no other material can. Local newspapers document the extraordinary stories that define and shape our communities and are, for all intents, historical record.”

What has LAC done on newspapers? No dedicated newspaper specialist! No current newspaper strategy! No mention in organization plans! A small collection of indigenous newspapers digitized funded by external sources.

Shame!

This database now has 320,053 records, up from 160,030 when I looked in March last year.

A search gives a list of hits with name, event type, marriage date and spouse name. Clicking on View Record adds published date, father and father-in-law information.

The majority of the entries are engagement announcements with the “marriage” date and published date the same. For those, it’s not the marriage date. Not all engagements, even those announced in The Times, lead to marriage.

Check the published announcement, not available through Ancestry. for additional information. One I examined. less than 40 words, added the bride’s mother’s first name and that she was deceased.

Many of us are chomping at the bit to get back into a library or archives to research. Sometimes you know exactly where to find what you need but there’s no access. An example might be finding an address from a city directory. Or you might want a copy of a couple of pages from an in-copyright book that mentions an ancestor and from an online index you know the pages.

Will your library provide that lookup service?

I’ve been fortunate to find kindly reference librarians to do a look up as time permits. With reductions in library hours during COVID time may not permit or delays may be long.

Recognizing the problem the Family History Library in Salt Lake City is now offering a look up service, one that will continue after the pandemic as part of the FamilySearch global outreach.

Find out more at https://www.familysearch.org/family-history-library/family-history-library-records-look-up-service.

I wonder if LAC has considered such a service.

Expect a new capability to appear at MyHeritage today. As I write it’s embargoed. Watch the space below for an update or go to MyHeritage as they will no doubt feature it when it goes live … first on desktops with a slight delay for smartphones and tablets.

UPDATE

The capability, to automatically repair photos, is now live on my MyHeritage subscription.

Click on Photos under Family Tree or Photos, select an existing photo or add a new one.

Click on repair, or if it doesn’t appear try clicking the three vertical dots or the gear on the left-hand side. You should get options for a gentle repair or extensive repair. If not try later as the capability gets further embedded.

See the press release with linked video.

A blog post from FMP announces that the British Newspaper Archive will add a further 14 million pages by 2023 to the 42 million already available under an agreement with the British Library.
Over 5 million pages were made available to search online in the past 12 months
Under the agreement, 1 million new free-to-access pages will be added each year.
Until the end of May, a 30% discount is available for 3 and 12-month subscriptions to the British Newspaper Archive.

Are there newspapers you hope will be added? I’d like more content from Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.

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 25 May, 11 am: Devon Brick Walls, with Janet Few and Alex Cox for Findmypast. https://www.facebook.com/findmypast

Tuesday 25 May, 2 pm:  Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, from Ottawa Branch of OGS and The Ottawa Public Library. https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/.

Tuesday 25 May 2 pm: Advanced DNA Features on MyHeritage, by Ofer Karp from MyHeritage Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1693

Tuesday 25 May, 2:30 pm: Researching Your Quaker Roots in Ireland, by Elizabeth Hodges for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. https://acpl.libnet.info/event/5086479

Tuesday 25 May, 7 pm: Family Research in Wellington County, by Sharie Aspden for OGS Wellington County Branch. 
https://wellington.ogs.on.ca/events/wellington-county-branch-family-research-in-wellington-county-with-sharie-aspden/

Wednesday 26 May, 11 am: Missing of the First World War, by Paul Nixon for Findmypast. https://www.facebook.com/findmypast

Wednesday 26 May 2 pm: How Testing Multiple Relatives Can Turbocharge Your DNA Research, by Michelle Leonard for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1629

Wednesday 26 May 3 pm: Navigating the Scotlands People Website, by Christine Woodcock for OGS Simcoe County Branch.
https://simcoe.ogs.on.ca/events/simcoe-county-branch-navigating-the-scotlands-people-website-with-christine-woodcock/

Wednesday 26 May 7 pm: Beyond Bytown: The History of Public Transit in Ottawa, by Paul Henry for the Bytown Museum.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/beyond-bytown-the-history-of-public-transit-in-ottawa-tickets-153335419367

Thursday 27 May, 6:30 pm: Michigan Digital Collections at the Archives of Michigan, by Kris Rzepczynski for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. https://acpl.libnet.info/event/5087329

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/.