Author: John Reid

This Thursday, 9 December at 2 pm, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, join artist/folklorist Michael Fortune for a special online presentation where he looks at Christmas from a uniquely Irish perspective. Michael has pioneered the use of digital media and has produced one of the most comprehensive collections of living folklore on film in Ireland to date.

The talk will introduce you to first-hand source customs and traditions found around the country from Christmas mumming plays and carols to the keeping of pieces of straw from the Christmas crib and or burning last year’s Christmas holly.

Book HERE

Project Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy, 1861-1865 will include the creation of newly digitized muster rolls – registers of the officers and men on Union Naval vessels.

118,000 or so common sailors served in the US Civil War for the Union; 30 percent were British or Irish, and 15 percent were African Americans.

https://newsroom.northumbria.ac.uk/pressreleases/research-on-us-civil-war-sailors-to-create-a-treasure-chest-for-genealogists-and-social-historians-3147983

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 or recommended

Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed.

Tuesday 7 Dec. 2 pm: Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, from Ottawa Branch of OGS and The Ottawa Public Library.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/.

Wednesday 8 Dec. 7 pm: Ottawa’s Power : An Energy History of the National Capital Region, by The Bytown Museum.
https://bytownmuseum.com/get-engaged/whats-happening/

Wednesday 8 Dec. 8 pm: Documenting Families or Communities Lost in the Holocaust by Bullets, by Ellen Kowitt for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/documenting-families-or-communities-lost-in-the-holocaust-by-bullets/

Thursday 9 Dec. 1 pm: Christmas Carols and Nostalgia, by Jeremy Summerly for Gresham College.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/carols-nostalgia

Saturday 11 Dec. 9 am: Holiday Social and Great Moments in Genealogy, by BIFHSGO members.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

Saturday 11 Dec. 1 pm: They Came on Ships ~ Plotting a Course to Publishing Genealogical Research, by David Walker for OGS Ottawa Branch.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/they-came-on-ships-ottawa/

 

Advance Notice
Monday 13 Dec. 7 pm: Ontario Records at Family Search, by Stephen Young​ for OGS Leeds and Grenville Branch.  

In his book Wings for Victory, the late Spencer Dunmore recounts the following.

Jake Gaudaur, a former football player and later Commissioner of the Canadian Football League, was a flying instructor at Number 2 SFTS, Ottawa (part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.) On night flying exercises, he was fond of zooming low over the southern part of the city, where his wife lived, to tell her that he would shortly be home. Approaching the apartment building, he would slip the propeller of the Harvard into fine pitch, producing an ear-splitting howl. When an editorial appeared in the local paper about the antics of the airmen from the Uplands airfield, he decided it might be more prudent to phone.

Gaudaur was at Uplands as a pilot instructor and is mentioned many times in the Citizen and Journal playing football. The newspapers have mentions of the noise of railcar shunting, car horns, frogs, milkman’s carts — and bagpipes, but no such editorial that I can find.

Is this a story too good to be questioning its veracity? Dunmore had a love of a good story, as well as aviation.

 

THE  Genealogy Show and The Scottish Indexes Conference are just ended, although you may still be able to view replays. That’s the end of the conference season for the year, one that saw everything online. Perhaps you attended The FHF Really Useful Family History Show, RootsTech, BIFHSGO, OGS or any another online genealogy conference in 2021. If you attended one or more please take this quick survey. 

Thank you for completing the survey.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Irish Folklore Collection

Church of Ireland Gazette
Claire Santry at IrishGenealogyNews reports that the Church of Ireland Gazette, 1856-2010, will remain free online until 2033.

Compare the Climate and Weather Between Two+ Cities Worldwide

Unboxing the Archives (of Ontario)

Simpson’s Paradox in vaccination data

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Anonymous, Gail B., Judith H., Mike More, Toni, Unknown.

 

The Bread and Butter of Genealogy and The Secret Button are two blog posts by Ph. D. professional genealogist Sadie McMullon.

Specializing in research for Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, she has a particular interest in placing ancestors in context. That’s illustrated by those blog posts linked from her Genealogy Lantern website. 

You may also be interested in reading her 2019 University of Leicester Ph.D. thesis Migration to Fletton, 1841-1911 : an exploration of family migration, the creation of community and social mobility through marriage

Following up on a previous post, the National Library of Scotland now has online old maps and town plans for more than 380 English and Welsh towns (all those with more than 4,000 people) at the highly detailed scale of 1:500.

NLS is georeferencing these maps so they can be easily compared to the present day, or to other historical dates (for example Leeds in 1840s compared to the 1880s).

Browse a list of all the towns with links to view maps
Browse a clickable map of England and Wales
OS Town Plans of England and Wales home page

This week the focus is on Kent, the Garden of England.

Kent electoral registers, 1570-1907
Documenting both parliamentary and local voters, the collection contains 4,678,563 transcripts with the name, address, nature of the qualification to vote, and the period during which each individual is entitled to vote.  The record types transcribed include oath rolls, burgess rolls, freeman certificates, and jury service lists as well as voters registers

The original registers are held at the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone and have been available at FamilySearch for some years.

Kent Burials
The additions to this expansive Kent Burials collection, now 3,032,823 records, are information on 16,013 burials that took place in Watling Street Cemetery in Dartford. They cover the period 1855 to 1934.

Sadly none of the three Reids included are in the branch of my Reid family that lived in the area.

The transcriptions were by the North West Kent Family History Society.

Findmypast has nearly 15 million Kent records in 16 titles, plus over 16 million articles in Kent newspapers. Ancestry has 6.6 million Kent records.

A 30-minute Q/A session at https://www.agra.org.uk/podcasts#202112

Registration for the 2022 edition of RootsTech, the largest family history event in the world,  is now open. RootsTech 2022 will be a virtual-only experience, 3 – 5 March 2022, with some enhancements and improvements.

Find out more and register for free at www.rootstech.org. 

Don’t plan on doing research at Library and Archives Canada over the Christmas – New Year period. Here’s the notice.

Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) public service points located in Ottawa, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Halifax will be closed to the public from December 24, 2021 to January 3, 2022, inclusive. Remote reference and genealogy services remain available during this period, Monday to Friday except for December 27 and 28, and January 3.

Contact us by using our Ask Us a Question or Ask Us a Genealogy Question forms, or by calling 1-866-578-7777 (option 8; toll-free in Canada and the United States).

Please note that after the holidays, a gradual increase in our services is planned. Visit our Reopening Library and Archives Canada web page for an overview of services available and region-specific details.