Anglo-Celtic Connections

London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) has officially donated 152 boxes of historical records to Western University, preserving 150 years of local healthcare history in a public archive.

The materials, which date back to the late 1800s, include handwritten letters, photographs, documents, and artifacts from the region’s earliest hospitals, such as South Street Hospital, the Beck Sanatorium, and the War Memorial Children’s Hospital. They also contain records from Victoria and University Hospitals, as well as one of the earliest nursing training schools.

Find out more at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/lhsc-donates-150-years-of-london-healthcare-history-to-western-archives-1.7602315

Kudos to LHSC for recognizing the significance of their historical records and taking steps to preserve and, with due regard for privacy, making them available.

The latest from Mark Thompson and Steve Little. They issue a caution about AI agents. If you’re new to AI, pay attention to the back-to-basics guide on what AI is and its four core strengths: summarization, extraction, generation, and translation.

Timestamps
05:20 ChatGPT Agent: Autonomous Research Assistant for Genealogists
22:49 Safe and Secure in the Age of AI
36:20 What is AI and What is it Good For? Back to Basics
50:57 OpenAI’s Office Suite Rumours
53:56 Microsoft and Google Bring AI to Their Office Suites
60:17 Big AI Infrastructure: Manhattan-Sized Data Centers

 

MyHeritage has discontinued DNA file uploads as a security enhancement. The company implemented this change to prevent unauthorized uploads, including those from law enforcement agencies and other non-consumer sources.

To access DNA matches and ethnicity reports on MyHeritage, customers must now purchase a MyHeritage DNA kit directly from the company. This policy aligns with AncestryDNA’s existing requirements.

MyHeritage DNA kits rank among the most competitively priced options available. Consider timing any purchase during one of the frequent sales events.

Be aware that AncestryDNA has the largest client database. Testing with MyHeritageDNA will be of particular interest for those with heritage outside America.

UPDATE

MyHeritage has just announced spectacular sale!

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit conferencekeeper.org.

Saturday 9 August

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Cloudy with a chance of worries
https://globe2go.pressreader.com/article/281612426463385

Ancestry updated England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2024, now with 7,674,312 entries, and Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2024
with 953,672 entries

MyHeritage updated the United Kingdom, Names & Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com on 25 July to contain 787,038,681 items.

The Family History AI Show: Episode 29
Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little explore Perplexity’s groundbreaking Comet browser. It brings AI directly to web pages and can autonomously navigate sites to collect genealogical data. Mark sees it as a significant (landmark) advance. However, Comet is currently available to Perplexity Max subscribers ($200 per month), select Perplexity Pro subscribers ($20 per month), and by invitation as the extensive waiting list is processed. There’s much more in this episode.

Folk Tales Books from the History Press
The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England’s 39 Historic Counties
The Anthology of Irish Folk Tales
Folklore of Wales
Folklore of the Scottish Highlands

The Old Farmer’s Almanac for July
This July, the mean temperature in Ottawa was 22.2 °C; the OFA prediction was 20°C, which is average.
FAIL

The OFA predicted 155 mm of total precipitation at Ottawa. The actual was 48.0 mm.
FAIL

I’ve thrown the whole thing in the garbage, despite there being some interesting reading in it.

Curious Cures
Hundreds of medieval medical manuscripts are now accessible from Cambridge University Libraries.

Looking for a diversion? MyHeritage has reset the free uses of its LiveMemory™ utility, so even those who have tried it out before can give it another go at no cost.

Eleven new effects are added to bring photos to life by transforming them into video clips. Check it out at this MyHeritage blog post.

Ireland, Memorials of the Dead (1888-1939)
This collection contains 42,328 gravestone transcriptions from volunteers who documented Irish memorials between 1892 and 1934.
Each record includes names, birth years, death dates, ages, and parish locations.

Scottish Gazetteers (1800)
These 13,088 records from the National Library of Scotland work like historical phone books for places. They tell you what Scottish towns and parishes were like in 1800, including population figures, local industries, religious institutions, and transport connections.

Newspaper Updates
There are 204,443 new pages, from 2 pages of Prescott’s Manchester Journal from 1771, to the largest addition, Public Opinion, with 76,156 pages from 1865-1911.
Other major updates include Leicester Catholic News (13,388 pages, 1915-1934) and Brett’s St. Leonards and Hastings Gazette (13,082 pages, 1857-1896).

Perhaps you’ve been to a talk on immigration that emphasized that every journey has two ends. True. It also has a middle, and the experience en route may be more memorable. The weather is part of that, especially if the journey was by ship.

Warning:  This post may get further into the meteorological weeds than you care to venture. It does demonstrate some of the resources helpful in determining the comfort, or lack of it, your ancestor had in travelling to Canada across the Atlantic.

The White Star Line’s S.S. Doric left Liverpool on 6 December 1924 via Cobh (Cork) bound for Halifax and New York. Matilda, among 120 passengers who arrived to disembark in Halifax early on Sunday, 14 December, recalled.

“We were not allowed on deck for the entire voyage due to weather conditions.”

Rough December seas are no surprise in the North Atlantic. How typical would no access at all to the deck be at that time of year?

The red lines on this December pilot chart of the North Atlantic indicate the percentage of time a vessel would encounter waves equal to or greater than 12 feet. It’s for perhaps 30 percent of the Doric’s Atlantic crossing if following a Great Circle route. Waves of 12 feet are typical of Beaufort Force 6.

Many ships kept meteorological logs. I checked with the British Meteorological Office, where ships with British registration would have returned a meteorological log. 

They had nothing for that voyage of the Doric. 

They did have logs for three ships, the Brecon, the Bolingbroke and the Digby that appeared to partially overlap the assumed route and time. The Brecon seems to be the best fit, but we don’t know how far the Doric might have deviated from the Brecon’s route. Here’s an extract from the SS Brecon meteorological log.

The column Force, under Wind, shows a period on the 7th and 8th when the Beaufort Wind Force was 6 or greater. One report, at the end of the day on the 7th, had Force 10, “characterized by very high waves with long overhanging crests, large patches of foam blown along the wind direction, and significant sea spray, leading to reduced visibility. Winds at this level typically range from 48 to 55 knots (55-63 mph, 88-101 km/h). At sea, the sea surface appears white due to the abundance of foam and spray, and the tumbling of the sea becomes heavy and impactful.”

The Course at the time was “various”; likely attempting to adjust to changing conditions.

Another perspective on conditions is from a collection of Northern Hemisphere weather maps from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The extract below is for 10 December 2024 at 13 GMT. From personal experience, don’t put a lot of faith in the details. The ship reports are scattered. There’s room for imaginative interpolation in between the ship reports.

The area to the south and east of a low-pressure system generally has the strongest winds, which, combined with the long fetch, the length of water over which a given wind has blown without obstruction, builds wave heights.

A succession of low-pressure systems moving from the west suggests the pause between systems would only be brief. 

In summary, the great circle route from near Ireland (at 53.4°N, 7.5°W ) to Halifax, Nova Scotia (44.65°N, 63.59°W ), overlaps the region south of Iceland and between Newfoundland and the British Isles, explicitly identified as having the greatest frequencies of high waves. Ships traversing the area would spend a considerable portion of their voyage with problematic average conditions, maintained by successive storm systems. The Brecon’s log shows that severe conditions were occurring at the time.

Given the evidence available, a prudent captain like Samuel Bolton, who had recently assumed the role for the Doric, might well close the deck to passengers, even between storms.

This updated dataset, of 6,883 records, documents removals of impoverished individuals from English and Welsh Poor Law Unions to Irish destinations between 1857 and 1879. The entries vary in completeness. In some cases, only basic personal information is recorded, for example:

Name: Catharine Burns
Age: 6
Departure Union: Liverpool
Arrival Union: Carlow
Arrival Date: Estimated between 1875 and 1878
Length of Residence in England: 11 months

Other entries are more comprehensive and linked to original printed registers, which include data such as the authority issuing the removal, names of family members, and destination ports. In some cases, there are financial details.

As is to be expected, a large segment of removals is from Liverpool.

A new Ancestry index documents over 14,000 infants associated with Irish workhouses between 1872 and 1874. For children who were born in the workhouse or admitted before the age of one, each entry may include the scant information: name, poor law union, inferred birth year, and health status as of 1879.
This data was compiled as part of a government-ordered survey. The original is in the UK Parliamentary Archives, but it is unavailable because of ongoing archives relocation.

 

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) conducted a comprehensive user survey from November 2023 to June 2024, as mentioned on the blog, receiving a total of 13,230 responses. Results are reported here.

Genealogical researchers were identified as the largest user category, followed by members of the general public and students. It demonstrates the platform’s broad public appeal beyond traditional CRKN-focused academic constituencies.

Open-text responses from genealogical researchers revealed that they engaged with a diverse range of content types; family history research benefits from digital access to documentary resources beyond traditional genealogical records.

CRKN is following up with group interviews to gain deeper insights into user behaviours, research methodologies, and platform improvement opportunities. Planned technical upgrades in 2025 will enhance search functionality and website navigation.