Anglo-Celtic Connections

In the world of genealogical research, the costs of various databases and services can quickly add up. However, by strategically ‘churning’ your subscriptions, you can secure better deals and save money while furthering your research.

Churning refers to the practice of cancelling or allowing a subscription to lapse, with the intention of resubscribing later for a better deal. Genealogy database providers often offer promotions or special deals for new or returning subscribers. So much for being a loyal subscriber!  By taking advantage of these offers, you can continue accessing valuable resources without paying the full price.

Take a look at the genealogy databases you currently subscribe to. Is one coming to the end of a term? You can probably find that on the site’s “Your Account” or similarly named page. Consider if you can temporarily discontinue it without disrupting your ongoing research. That may mean retaining access to the data you entered as a non-paying subscriber. You will likely still have access to some of the common databases available for free, through other subscriptions, or through your local public library.

Contact the database provider to cancel your subscription. In most cases, you can do this online or by calling their customer support. You may immediately be offerred a discount, often not as good a deal as you can get if you wait a bit.

Then wait for the right offer. Businesses know that it costs them less to get a prior client to resubscribe than to attract an entirely new one.  The opportunity may come in the form of emails, newsletters, or even targeted advertisements. Once you find an offer that meets your needs, resubscribe using the promotion.

It is just possible you find you don’t really miss that site and can save 100% of the previous cost. If the renewal dates for your various subscriptions are staggered you may want to follow the same steps with other genealogical databases.

There’s nothing special about genealogy databases when it comes to the benefits of churning. Be careful to note the expiry date of your subscription in your calendar. Some sites will automatically resubscribe you at a higher rate at the end of the new subscriber period, so be proactive in cancelling your subscription before that happens.

 

This Week’s Online Genealogy Events
Choose from selected free online events in the next five days. All times are ET except as noted. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed. Find out about many more mainly US events at Conference Keeper at https://conferencekeeper.org

Tuesday, 7 May

2:30 pm: Question Everything: Breaking Through the Brick Walls We’ve Built, by Eilene Lyon for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/9991184

7:30 pm: Following the Trails of the Betts Bibles, by Beth Adams for OGS Durham County Branch.
https://ogs.on.ca/events/durhams-may-7th-hybrid-meeting-following-the-trails-of-the-betts-bibles-beth-adamsin-person/

8 pm: Finding the records for “impossible” genealogy – lessons learned from a Chinese genealogist, by Linda Yip for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/finding-the-records-for-impossible-genealogy-lessons-learned-from-a-chinese-genealogist/

Wednesday, 8 May

11 am: Researching gender and sexuality. From the National Library of Scotland.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/researching-gender-sexuality-tickets-857069466847

Thursday, 9 May

6:30 pm: Using Catholic Parish Records and Archives, by W. Becket Soule for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/9988883

Friday, 10 May

Saturday, 11 May

9 am: Back to Basics: Immigration and Emigration, by Ken McKinlay for BIFHSGO.
10 am: My Farrell Brick Wall and New Cousins: From Inchigeelagh, Cork to Holytown, Scotland and St Andrew’s West, Ontario, by Helen O’Farrell Sloan and Dena Palamedes for BIFHSGO.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events

 

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is organizing events at key sites in the UK and Normandy as part of the Lighting Their Legacy leading up to the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

The light is a torch produced by students from McMaster University in Hamilton.

In this interview, Canadian Remembrance Torch founder Karen Hunter discusses her inspiration, how the Lighting Their Legacy torch was created, and the importance of remembrance.

 

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Some useful examples of using AI in genealogy are in this video. You may want to skip the first five minutes or so.

Open Access Databases
From the Open University (UK), a wide range of freely available information sources, including ebooks, full-text journals, images, reports, statistics and source material.

How to use Transkribus in combination with ChatGPT 3.5 to transcribe a handwritten historical document.

Writers & Company Digital Archive

Family Tree Webinars Offer Ends Today
As promised, here’s a final reminder about the half-off offer. This is your last chance, for new memberships only, to get access to all 2,100+ webinars for just $25 US.
https://familytreewebinars.com/. It’s the best deal in commercial genealogy.

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Allen Grant, Anonymous,  Empty Branches on the Family Tree, Robert Halfyard, Teresa, Unknown.

 

How many Canadian-born people died in New York City?

Thanks to the advocacy of Reclaim the Records, MyHeritage has added birth, marriage and death information for New York City with linked images of the original. Others named in the record many be included separately in the count.

Births
MyHeritage lists 7,560,069 birth records between 1866 and 1909. The official birth certificate typically includes:

Full name of the child
Date and place of birth
Name, age, birthplace, and occupation of the parents
Parents’ marital status
Number of children previously born to the mother, including the number born alive and stillborn
Name and address of the attending physician or midwife
Signature of the person reporting the birth (usually a parent or the attending medical professional)

Over time, the information included on birth certificates expanded. For example, in the late 19th century, birth certificates often did not include the parents’ birthplaces or occupations. In the early 20th century, additional details such as the parents’ race, ethnicity, and religious affiliations were sometimes recorded.

I’d like to have reported on prental birthplace, but that field is not searchable.

Marriages
This collection contains 20,912,650 marriage records from New York City between the years 1866 and 1949. The official marriage certificate in New York City typically includes:

Full names of the bride and groom
Ages and birthplaces of the bride and groom
Marital status (single, widowed, or divorced) and occupations of the bride and groom
Names and birthplaces of the bride and groom’s parents
Date and place of the marriage ceremony
Name and title of the officiant who performed the ceremony
Signatures of the bride, groom, officiant, and witnesses

The format and information included on marriage records have remained relatively consistent over time, although more detailed information about the couple’s parents and occupations was sometimes recorded in earlier records.

Deaths
MyHeritage makes available New York City 8,893,688 death records from 1866 to 1948. The official death certificate in typically includes:

Full name of the deceased
Date and place of death
Cause of death
Age, birthplace, and occupation of the deceased
Marital status and spouse’s name (if applicable)
Names and birthplaces of the deceased’s parents
Place of burial or disposition of the remains
Name and address of the attending physician or other medical professional
Signature of the person reporting the death (often a family member or the attending medical professional)

Over time, additional details have been included on death certificates, such as the deceased’s race, ethnicity, and social security number. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, death certificates sometimes provided more detailed information about the cause of death and the circumstances surrounding the death.

Birthplace of the deceased is available and searchable. 54,235 Canadian-born persons, including 43 identified as born in Ottawa, died in NYC during the period.

On Friday Family Tree Webinars featured another in its series on English counties. I highly recommend the presentation on Kent by Australian genealogist Helen V Smith. Clearly and well presented, unsurprising given her Kent ancestry, it’s available free for a week at https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/researching-in-kent/. 

Not free is the extensive handout. For that, you need to be a subscriber. Take advantage of the half-off offer, $25US instead of $50, using the code SPRING24. I’ll only remind you once more!

British India
2,051 birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial records from British India, all from the year 1872.

New Zealand
Almost 26,000 birth, marriage and death indexes additions from 1924, 1944 and 1974. 

Ireland
2,548 new Limerick City & County Electoral Register transcriptions for 1760 to 1766.Plus, 304,139 newspaper pages from across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here are the top ten by number of pages.

Newspaper Title	Number of Pages	Years
Peterborough Evening Telegraph	81594	1949-1965, 1967, 1987
Northampton Chronicle and Echo	65458	1996-1999
Banbridge Chronicle	25840	1980-1984, 1986-1991, 1996-1998
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail	19510	1988-1989
Littlehampton Gazette	15018	1982-1984, 1986, 1988-1989
Scarborough Evening News	11438	2001
Halifax Evening Courier	12694	1966-1967, 1986
Halifax Daily Guardian	9592	1910, 1913-1914, 1918-1921
Blyth News	8424	1974-1981
Bridlington Free Press	8278	1987-1989

Do you have Glasgow ancestry? The Glasgow Digital Library, based at the University of Strathclyde, includes the following digitized books.

Who’s Who in Glasgow in 1909
Author: George Eyre-Todd
Published: 1909

Glimpses of old Glasgow
Author: Andrew Aird
Published: 1894

Memoirs and portraits of one hundred Glasgow men
Author: James Maclehose
Published: 1886

Curiosities of Glasgow citizenship
Author: George Stewart
Published: 1881

The old country houses of the old Glasgow gentry.
Author: John Guthrie Smith and John Oswald Mitchell
Published: 1878

The origin and history_of Glasgow streets
Author: Hugh Macintosh
Published: 1902

The same site has a linked list of Ebooks about Scotland

Thursday saw me working on my Cream of the Crop column for the Spring issue of Anglo-Celtic Roots. Looking back through the past three months of the blog I found a post about a video on probate from BYU had been popular.  It was the second of three. Now all three are available.

The third, about records of Ecclesiastical Probate Courts pre-1858, is just as good. If you’ve previously been frustrated trying to find wills that were dealt with by local courts prior to 1858, you’ll come away with the message that the situation continues to improve, even for the local Ecclesiastical Courts.

I recommend all three.  The first two cover the Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York pre-1858, and the Principal Probate Registry Wills, post 1857.

They are also linked, along with a ton of others, at https://fh.lib.byu.edu/classes-and-webinars/youtube-videos/

Starting today through May 10 for Mother’s Day, AncestryDNA + Traits is available on Amazon or Ancestry for $39 ($60 off), and with 3 months of the World Explorer membership for $1 more. Those appear to be US prices so I’m unsure about availability in Canada.

On 17 April Statistics Canada released 2026 Census of Population Content Consultation Results: What we heard from Canadians. The report makes clear up front Stats Can’s view of the census.

Data from the Census of Population are important for all communities and are vital for planning services that support employment, education and health care. Governments, businesses, associations, organizations and many others use these data to make important decisions.

Genealogy interests are mentioned twice. The most significant is —

The write-in field was analyzed to better understand the other reported purposes respondents had for using census data. Responses most frequently related to uses for genealogy (38%) or general interest, general information, learning, teaching or training (10%), among other general trends. Note that more than 30% of the responses were deemed to fall within the existing purposes and were recoded as such.

Statistics Canada evaluates importance according to a content determination framework. Statutory and regulatory uses tied to a law and information needs that serve a purpose that is national in scope are given the highest priority. Demographic and language questions were the most highly rated in the consultation.

Although research was the most frequently reported purpose of use overall, uses such as academic and policy research are assigned a lower priority by the content determination framework. As with the previous data use purposes, all census topics were reportedly used for research purposes fairly consistently. However, questions related to demography (9%) were reportedly the most used for research, followed by place of birth (8%), and immigration and citizenship (8%).

There is a history with the census in balancing privacy concerns with data quality. StatsCan worries, with little evidence, about the potential of compromising data quality if respondants feel their privacy is being compromised.

 As genealogists we look for detailed information (e.g., full birthdates, maiden names) that would enhance our research. We look for data spanning multiple decades to understand migration patterns, societal changes, and family dynamics over time. Maintaining relevance of the census questions for genealogy is, and has always been, an uphill battle.

The latest issue is now available, free to enjoy at https://www.irishfamilyhistorycentre.com/product/irish-lives-remembered-issue-61/

Articles: 

• Mike Feerick – Chuck Feeney: An Appreciation
• Fiona Fitzsimons – Remembering Chuck Feeney: the Entrepreneur Philanthropist’s Longford Lineage
• Cara Eiwanger – The Myth of Irish-American Acceptance in the Mid-nineteenth Century
• Donna Rutherford – A Deep Dive into Ethnicity Estimates
• Rob Flanagan Stieglitz – Case Study: Resolving the Mystery of My Ancestor Thomas Tighe’s Birthdate
• Eamonn P. Kelly – The mysterious Bishop Erc: Saint and Sun God, Part One
• Katharine Simms – Saints and Scholars: the Keenan/O’Keenan Clan and Other Hereditary Historians
• Brigit McCone – Doctoring Dynasties: The Legacy of Irish Medicine in Africa
• Deirdre Powell – The Irish Family Legacy of Mathematical Genius George Boole
• Elizabeth Cowan – “Send you kisses”: Sapphic Revolutionaries, part 2
• Timothy Murtagh – Henrietta Street: From Townhouse to Tenement

Regular columns: 

• Dear Genie – Our Genealogists help you with your research block
• Heritage Highlight – Strokestown Park’s National Famine Museum
• Emerald Roots Interview – Kayleigh Bealin, Research Manager, Eneclann

Books and Films:

• Four Courts Press Book Excerpt – Medieval Dublin XIX edited by Seán Duffy (2023)
• Four Courts Press Book Excerpt – Marsden Haddock and the Androides by Neil Cronin (2023)
• Genealogical Publishing Company Book Excerpt – A Guide to Irish Parish Registers by Brian Mitchell (1988)