Anglo-Celtic Connections

The Library and Archives Canada Departmental Plan, the official basis on which Parliament votes funds for the fiscal year starting 1 April, is now online at https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/report-plans-priorities/departmental-plan-2022-2023/Pages/Departmental-plan-2022-2023.aspx 

Just as last year, the 2022–23 Departmental Plan is built around two strategic priorities: optimizing its digital capacity and transforming its services.

As researchers, we are most interested in LAC’s role in providing access to documentary heritage. The following is extracted from a table showing the planned results, the result indicators, the targets and the target dates for 2022–23, and the actual results for the three most recent fiscal years for which actual results are available.

The amount of new digitized holdings is planned to be returned to the 2019-20 level of 3.5 million after the pandemic decline of 2020-21. However,  3.5 million is a substantial decline from 4.8 million in 2018-19 and 10.2 million in 2017-18.

The plan also calls for a decline in unique visitors to LAC’s website, from 2.7 million in 2020-21 to 2 million. Planned service transactions also show a decline from pre-pandemic levels.

Experienced researchers already familiar with LAC collections may be uneasy when reading this paragraph on risk.

Following the construction of Ādisōke, LAC must fundamentally rethink its service offerings. When Ādisōke opens in 2026, it is anticipated that the vast majority of visitors will be unfamiliar with LAC’s collection and services. This will be an opportunity for LAC to connect with new audiences, provided that the institution plans for this shift now.

There’s a promise of “a new strategy to … fundamentally transform its services by focusing on users’ needs and the user experience, and by continuously improving them.” It’s essential that the strategy incorporates the needs of the academic and independent researcher communities, including genealogists.

Last year I looked at the number of mentions of some keywords giving insight into importance and trends. Here they are in this year’s plan with last year’s in parathesis: Digit* 66 (55), Continu* 33 (36), Indigenous 42 (10), * Innov 6 (5), Geneal* 2 (1), Ādisōke 23 (0), newspaper 1 (0), director* 0 (0), census 0 (0).

Remember Library and Archives Canada at 395 Wellington? Perhaps access restrictions have kept you away for months, or even a couple of years.

Now most of the research facilities are available for researchers Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. You are still required to make a reservation two weeks in advance with bookings opening each Monday at 10 am ET for an additional week of reservations.

You can now book up to eight reservations maximum per week, a great boon for those coming to Ottawa from away.

Check out the procedures and COVID protocol at Book your visit in Ottawa: Step 1. Overview.

The April/May issue of Internet Genealogy is now in the mail and at newsstands. It’s packed with interesting articles.

As usual, I turned first to the back page to read Dave Obee’s thought-provoking column. He bemoans the questions he did not ask relatives now gone, then muses “I still have time to tell the stories of my own generation – of my sisters and my cousins, and while I am thinking of it, of myself
as well.”  Will he? If you’re thinking of how best to spend your time for the edification of future generations, is it in researching your ancestors or documenting your own life story?

You’ve probably experienced already how the information you gleaned from hours of work with old documents, or microfilmed copies, now appears with a quick search online.  Is that trend going to continue? Yes. What won’t be retrievable is the stories stored in your memory. As a writer, Dave doesn’t appear to have the writer’s block excuse most of the rest of us do.  Or perhaps we could fess up that when we explore family history it’s not for future generations, along with the excitement of citing your sources (in ESM approved fashion) but as a pleasant challenge for ourselves.

What’s on the other 53 pages?

Sue Lisk always has well written creative articles. This issue she tells us about a lesser-known Ontario resource, the Tweedsmuir Community History Books, and finding insight into earlier generations through scrapbooks and their poetry.

The first article in the issue is English and Irish Nonconformist Records, by Michelle Dennis. Read it for the history and research resources available for those who did not follow the Established Church.

Genealogy technology enthusiast Liza Alzo also has two articles. In Genealogy NFTs she discusses transitioning from family heirlooms to NFTs. Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs remain rather beyond my grade level. In The Future of Genealogy Conferences she points out that the traditional conference 50 minute presentation plus ten for questions is too much of a meal, especially for younger people growing up with YouTube, Twitter and TikTok. Then she speculates on the role of AI. Food for thought, especially for those of us stuck in the rut.

There’s much more: articles by Robbie Goor, Diane L. Richard, Christine Woodcock, David Norris, Karen L. Newman, and the first article in a promised regular column by Rick Voight about telling your family stories.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Quick Draw
I went 0/5. Can you do better?

How to Copy and Paste on Sites that Won’t Let You

Irish Landed Estates
Back online, a database of landed estates and historic houses in Connacht and Munster, c. 1700 – 1914. (via Claire Santry’s Irish Genealogy News).

LAC Mailing Address
The address is changed from 395 Wellington to:
Library and Archives Canada
550 de la Cité Boulevard
Gatineau, Quebec
J8T 0A7

1950 United States Federal Census
Perhaps like me, you can’t get that excited about this new US census release. I only have one fairly distant line that I know of that would be in the US  at the time. The name is quite common, I can wait until the census is fully indexed.

On release by the US National Archives and Records Administration on 1 April there were images of the original records and a name-only index compiled by handwriting recognition — much better than nothing.

Ancestry, in partnership with FamilySearch is working on more complete transcriptions to facilitate searches. As I write Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Oregon are completed. Images of the complete census are available free.

MyHeritage is also producing transcriptions with all records from Delaware, Vermont, Wyoming and American Samoa available. Images of the complete census are available free.

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Anonymous,  Brenda Turner, Gail B.,  Teresa, Toni, Unknown.

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Wednesday 6 April 2022 to contain 284,660,839 unique records, 284,334,041 at the previous update.

Years with changes of more than 10,000 records since the last update for each of births and marriages are 1990-92 and for deaths 1989-1992.

You can now access service files for the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers regiment transferred to the UK National Archives from the Ministery of Defence. They are individually catalogued online in WO 420.

For other ranks, the catalogue entry includes name, usually initials and surname, service number and date of birth. If the person was born more than 115 years ago the file may be viewed at Kew. Those for a date of birth more recent than 1906 (at present) will be made available over time year-by-year.

Information in the full file typically consists of personal information and interactions between the individual and the part of the armed forces they served with such as record of service, disciplinary and conduct sheets, service postings and information captured when they first signed up.

Find out more here.

UK Quaker Deaths entries in this collection document in more or less detail the lives of many Quaker members. Most have standard biographical information – name, age, death date, position within the Society. More notable people may rate obituaries, even two or three pages.

Covering the period 1810 – 1918, the 27,580 entries are taken from the Annual Monitor. Some entries are from outside the UK, 52 for Canada.

Dorset Memorial Inscriptions has more than 56,000 index entries added taken from gravestones, tombs, monuments and even stained glass windows. The collection now totals 140,864 with entries from the mid 17th century to 2007. There are many entries with no date information.

Home Children Canada became registered with the Canada Revenue Agency as a charity effective 17 March 2022.

Formerly known as British Home Children Advocacy & Research Association the CRA registration is for its educational endeavour.

The organization’s mission, from its website, is “to bring the true stories of the British Home Children to light, maintain their memory, and to reunite the families separated by the child migrant schemes.

While the advocacy role is no longer highlighted, advocacy remains in the background. Notice “true stories” as if false ones were prevalent! There’s mention of “reconnecting families unjustly torn apart by these migrant programs” ignoring the positive outcomes. While there was abuse many children benefitted by being removed from destitution and squalor in the UK.

This is a release from the NLS.

We are also pleased to add online over 200 maps of Great Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. These maps present an excellent overview of England, Scotland and Wales, and sometimes including Ireland, showing specific subjects such as roads, railways, air travel, population, power generation, rainfall and housing, as well as things like changing administrative divisions. Some of these expand our coverage of the Ordnance Survey’s Ten-mile to the Inch (1:625,000) Planning maps series, initiated in the 1940s, and intended to form a survey of national life and resources. Others include military maps showing barracks and military districts, as well as maps to illustrate specific historical time periods, such as Ancient Britain, Britain in the Dark Ages, Roman Britain, and Monastic Britain.

We have divided these maps into the Ordnance Survey “ten mile” Planning maps, other Ordnance Survey small-scale maps, and maps by other publishers:

• Ordnance Survey, “Ten Mile” Planning Maps of the United Kingdom, 1940s-1970s – 183 sheets
• Ordnance Survey, small-scale maps of Great Britain, 19th to 20th centuries – 35 sheets
• General maps of Great Britain and Ireland, 16th to 20th centuries – 41 maps

Perhaps your attention is immediately grabbed by MAPS on this magazine cover.
When I opened the cover and read in Editor Sarah Williams column that there was an article on weather and our ancestors all other priorities for a couple of hours went out the window.

The article, by Norfolk genealogist, writer and educator, Gill Blanchard is a comprehensive look at a myriad of types. There’s a panel with six essential maps for family historians, another on using the National Library of Scotland online map collection, and yet another on 10 useful map websites. Included is Faden’s Map of Norfolk, new to me, London Picture Archive, and Map History.

Ruth Symes article “Hurricanes and Heatwaves” is an overview of “how you can find out how the weather affected your ancestor’s lives.” Much of the article deals with efforts to digitize weather information from various historical sources. Missing is an explanation of how to get weather information for an event in your family history in the past 150 years or so from official records at the British Meteorological Office. A panel on how to do that, much as in the maps article for the National Library of Scotland maps collection, would have made the article more valuable.

There are lots more: street photos, First World War pension cards, Lost Cousins, postal workers, Rosemary Collins has an article on the pubs of coastal Lincolnshire refering to a project website www.letstalk.lincolnshire.gov.uk/inns-on-the-edge

As always, the issue is available through the PressReader subscription of many Canadian public libraries.

Find 55,894 entries in this Montreal collection for the years 1767 to 1899 now available through MyHeritage. The index transcriptions give the name of the deceased, the burial year, the name of the church, and the religious denomination.

You’ll likely find images of the original record via FamilySearch and the Montreal section of Canada, Quebec Non-Catholic Parish Registers – FamilySearch Historical Records. The records are also available on Ancestry.