The British Newspaper Archive now has a total of 53,950,371 pages online (53,458,903 last month).

This month 89 papers had pages added (206 in the previous month). There were 15 (21) new titles. Dates range from 1789 to 1998.

The 11 newspapers with more than 10,000 pages added are

TITLE	YEAR RANGE
Ottawa Free Press (Canada)	1904-1909, 1911-1915
Mirror (Trinidad & Tobago)	1898, 1901-1902, 1904-1911, 1914-1915
Stirling Observer	1991
Belper Express	1992
Birmingham Daily Post	1953
Ellesmere Port Pioneer	1986, 1990
Colonial Standard	1858, 1864, 1866, 1868-1869, 1871, 1873, 1875-1878, 1880-1895
Cork Weekly Examiner	1896-1912
Dominica Guardian	1893-1921
Dominica Chronicle	1910-1915
Irvine Herald	1989

The Summer issue has three feature articles.

FIND YOUR IRISH FAMILY In “Out of the Ashes,” Nicola Morris looks back at the fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922 and explains how a project is giving long-lost documents a new lease of digital life
23ANDME
Debbie Kennett reveals “How to use 23andMe” and make the most of the health and ancestry reports from this testing company.
HOP PICKING
Caroline Roope remembers “The Heyday of Hopping,” the era when many urban ancestors spent their holidays in the hop fields.

Ian Waller, a speaker at the September BIFHSGO conference, explains how to use “Manorial Documents” for English and Welsh research, and Jonathan Scott profiles websites for British Army research. In another article, Scott provides a focus on Aberdeenshire records.

There’s a short item responding to a query about military service in the 90th Winnipeg Battalion Rifles in 1885.

The Treasury re-imagines and reconstructs through digital technologies the Public Record Office of Ireland, a magnificent archive destroyed on June 30th, 1922, in the opening engagement of the Civil War.

For genealogy, the records profiled are the 13-15th century medieval Irish exchequer, 17th-century Cromwellian Surveys of land ownership in Ireland, and a religious census of 1766.

https://virtualtreasury.ie/

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.

At the conclusion of the OGS conference on Sunday, there was an announcement of a specialist conference next year. The Society has decided that a full conference will not be offered every year.
It was previously announced that the 2024 conference will be in Toronto.
Those of us in Ottawa can now will look forward the BIFHSGO conference online in September, and to a Gene-O-Rama next spring, circumstances permitting.

During the Second World War, 211 airmen training under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan enjoyed hospitality from an I. O. D. E. sponsored program in Grimsby, Ontario. That’s just one aspect of the way in which locals helped the war effort, as described in this November 2020 video by Dorothy Turcotte and Ev Page of The Grimsby Historical Society.

Do you know of any similar local archival resources naming BCATP airmen?

BTW, resources at the GHS website include a link to copies of the Grimsby Independent from 1885-1949 available through OurOntario at news.ourontario.ca/grimsby/search.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Glengarry County Archives opens its new home

The Groundhog Day Privacy Bill: The Government Waited Months to Bring Back Roughly the Same Privacy Plan?!

Ukraine war: all eyes on Lithuania as sanctions close Russian land access to Kaliningrad

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Anonymous, Gail, Glenn Wright, Gloria Tubman, Teresa, Unknown.

This index, initially for probates proved at Richmond, may include name, age, date of the will, date of probate, place of probate, place of death, date of death and case number.

Typically find a couple to a few hundred wills indexed each year.

The guide Wills and Probate at Lancashire Archives is a helpful reference.

An index for the Chester wills is pending.

Irish Newspaper BMD Notices
Find 42,605 birth, 68,760 marriage and 66,681 death notices from the Belfast Morning News, Champion or Sligo News and Cork Examiner in this collection. Publication dates range from 1836 to 1926.

British India births, baptisms and marriages
The British India Office Births and Baptisms collection and Marriages collection are augmented. There are now  735,503 birth results and 457,950 marriage results. Territories covered include India, Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, St Helena, Sumatra, Aden, Penang, Kuwait, and Macao.

Britain, Merchant Seamen, 1918-1941
An addition of some 5,000 records is profiled this week in an ongoing project. The total is now 1,229,063 results, sadly not my father yet.

Some give lots of detail, ranks, personal details including their address, next of kin, and physical descriptions, maybe even a photograph.

Not all are so informative like this for a seaman transcribed as name Olive, or is it Oliver? It could be a woman, there are 2,717 Marys in the collection.

Ancestry’s new Web: Scotland, High Court Criminal Indexes, 1790-1919 is an index-only collection made up of:

Records of criminal trials
Records of criminal appeals
Medical statements
Minute books
Paper evidence, such as shoe prints
Judicial opinions.

The original index data is from Scottish Indexes at  https://www.scottishindexes.com/ScotlandsCriminalDatabase.aspx.

Records in the collection may include the name of the accused, charges against the accused, any known aliases, age, occupation, birthplace, physical description, names of family members, names of witnesses and names of court officials.

Ancestry is adding more records to its UK death indexes.

For England and Wales, the coverage is now for 1989-2021 and a total of 5,812,402 records, an additional 325,553 since May last year,

For Scotland and Northern Ireland, the death Index for 1989-2021 now has 780,189 records, updated from 752,902 in May last year.

These are transcriptions typically giving name, gender, last residence, postal code district, and death date from civic records and funeral homes, published with data from GreyPower Deceased Data compiled by Wilmington Millennium.

Issues of the Ottawa Free Press from 2 January 1904 to 30 December 1915, 2,298 in all with 30,596 pages, are just added to the British Newspaper Archive.  At present, there are gaps — 1905, 1910, 1912, and 1914.

The paper was established in 1869 and amalgamated (taken over) in 1916 by the Ottawa Journal. The British Library holdings, the source for the BNA, date from 1903.

The Ottawa Public Library has earlier issues on microfilm and there are a few digitized by Google and available on MyHeritage. The catalog entry from Library and Archives Canada returns an error.  I enquired to LAC and the automated response was that “it can take up to 4 months to respond.”

A tip of the hat to Claire Santry from Irish Genealogy News who alerted me to the BNA addition.