Anglo-Celtic Connections

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.

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.T

Tuesday 05 Apr. 2 pm: Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, from Ottawa Branch of OGS and The Ottawa Public Library.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/

Tuesday 05 Apr. 2:30 pm: Exploring Patterns in Your Family History Research, by Melissa Tennant for The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library. https://acpl.libnet.info/event/6421742

Tuesday 05 Apr. 7:30 pm: Canadian Resource Review by Sher Leetooze for Durham Branch OGS. https://ogs.on.ca/events/online-free-resources-review-durham-branchs-april-meeting/

Tuesday 05 Apr. 10 pm: My Top 20 Free Australian Genealogy Websites, by Shauna Hicks for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/my-top-20-free-australian-genealogy-websites/

Wednesday 06 Apr. 2 pm: The Beginner’s Guide To DNA Testing For Genealogy, by Michelle Leonard for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/the-beginners-guide-to-dna-testing-for-genealogy/

Wednesday 6 Apr. 2:30 pm: The Decade of Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, by Chris Paton for the Guild of One-Name Studies. https://one-name.org/ireland1912-1923/

Wednesday 06 Apr. Making Use of All Your Census, by Ken McKinlay for Huron Branch OGS. https://huron.ogs.on.ca/events/huron-branch-making-use-of-all-your-census-ken-mckinley/

Thursday 07 Apr. 8:30 pm: DNA Chat with Sara: Ethnicity Results, with Sara Allen for The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library. https://acpl.libnet.info/event/6430342

Thursday 07 Apr. 5 pm: Start of Legacy Family Tree 24 hour marathon. See the program and register at https://familytreewebinars.com/24

Thursday 7 Apr. 7 pm: Think Like an Archivist: Finding Genealogy Records in Libraries and Archives Worldwide, by Nancy Loe for OGS. https://ogs.on.ca/zoom-meetings/nancy-loe-think-like-an-archivist-finding-genealogy-records-in-libraries-and-archives-worldwide/

Friday 08 Apr. 7 pm: Tweedsmuir Women’s Institute, by Irene Robillard for Kent Branch OGS. https://kent.ogs.on.ca/events/kent-branch-tweedsmuir-womens-institute/

Saturday 09 Apr. 9 am: Introducing the 1921 Census of England & Wales , by Mary McKee for BIFHSGO.  https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

Saturday 09 Apr. 10 am:  “Betty Jeans Story” Adoption, Forensic and Genetic DNA. by Mags Gaulden for BIFHSGO. ttps://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

Mostly derived from newspaper listings are the following updates.

Canada, Obituary Collection, 1898-Current now has 10,878,408 items, that’s up from 9,387,518 last June

U.S., Obituary Collection, 1930-Current has 198,633,254 items, updated from 191,120,426 last June.

UK and Ireland, Obituary Index, 2004-2019 now with 6,700,836 records, up from 6,470,815 last June.

Australia and New Zealand, Obituary Index, 2004-Current 2,093,598 records, up from 1,982,265  last June.

Caribbean, Obituary Index, 2003-2019 with 97,330 records.

Also updated, based on scouring web postings, is:

U.S., Cemetery and Funeral Home Collection, 1847-Current with 101,800,384 records.

According to this article from The Conversation the final 8% of our genome has now been sequenced thanks to long-read technology. Are there hidden properties in this formerly elusive part of our DNA that will be useful for genetic genealogy?