Anglo-Celtic Connections

Two conservative-leaning publications, the Toronto Sun and Western Standard, quote from an investigation by Ottawa-based  Blacklock’s Reporter.

The investigation references Access to Information records showing “Canada’s chief archivist Leslie Weir personally ordered the content removal on thousands of national archives web pages with “offensive content”, “outdated historical content (that) no longer reflects today’s context and may be offensive to many.”

COMMENT:

As outlined in the Preamble to the Library and Archives of Canada Act, LAC’s mandate is as follows:

– to preserve the documentary heritage of Canada for the benefit of present and future generations;

– to be a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, contributing to the cultural, social and economic advancement of Canada as a free and democratic society;

– to facilitate in Canada co-operation among communities involved in the acquisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge;

– to serve as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions.

LAC would do a better job if it left the interpretation of the past to others and adhered to its mandate of preservation and access, including digitization to enhance access across this vast land. If that was the intention of Leslie Weir’s purge it’s one I can support. If it just switches one type of spin for another it should not be funded.

As mentioned before, I’ve been trying the new MyHeritage LiveStory facility. This is the story of my granduncle, based on a still image of my grandfather who died in 1971 as the presenter, my words in his mouth, and the voice of “Andrew” one of the LiveStory options.

Jonny Perl of DNA Painter presented an update on some useful, and a couple of amusing additions at RootsTech.

He explains more flexibility to WATO, the Shared Cemtimorgan Investigator, updates to clustering on chromosome maps, with more promised later in the year, ability to import and work on segments of one chromosome. Some additional visualization capability on Ancestral Trees may be useful to add context to your family history, even if your interests run to the astrological!

Hot on the heels of those for several western European countries Ancestry now has some more recent UK phone book indexes with 25,993,611 records.
The records typically include name, street address, city and country, but not the phone number.  Frequently there is no first name, just an initial.

There are several options for exploring recent UK phone books found by searching the term.

 

 

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Adversarial Collaboration
An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman

ON Stage: Spotlighting the History of Theatre in Ontario
From the Archives of Ontario, a virtual exhibit http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/en/explore/online/historytheatres/index.aspx.

Local history in The National Archives Library
A blog post on local histories, with examples from TNA’s collection. Check the catalogue,

Ancestral epidemics
A blog post on the 1832 cholera in England by Shauna Hicks for the Genealogical Society of Queensland.

Servicewomen in the Second World War
LAC will post this webinar on its YouTube channel on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, at 11 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time).

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Anonymous, B Bradley,  Brenda Turner, Lynne Willoughby, M. Anne Sterling, Maureen Guay, Paul Milner, Robert Halfyard, Teresa, Unknown.

A year ago at RootsTech MyHeritage revealed animation of family photographs. Some thought it creepy, even scary.

This year they upped their game. With LiveStory there’s not only movement of facial features, it speaks synchronized with a text. Initially, it uses information drawn from a family tree you have on MyHeritage. I found that a rather dull recitation of facts, and it sometimes jumped to conclusions, say that the marriage was happy. However, you can edit the text and change the voice. What you can’t change is pronunciation. Ypres was mispronounced, just as did the BEF soldiers. Passchendaele was a particular challenge.

See the MyHeritage demo here.

I’ve been trying it and hope to have my own demo shortly.

 

 

 

Happy St Piran’s Day

A special BIFHSGO event is coming. A virtual presentation on 20 April 2022 at 7pm EDT with Dr. Joe Flood, administrator of the Cornwall DNA Projects. He will share his expertise on the haplogroups and genetic lines of this historic county in South West England.

Cornwall is regarded as one of the Celtic nations, homeland to the Cornish.
Dr Flood’s talk “DNA and Genealogy – The DNA of Cornwall” will cover a quick introduction to the use of DNA in genealogy, with a particular emphasis on Cornwall touching on:
Autosomal DNA and Cornwall – finding cousins, solving brick walls and confirming family trees, % Cornish;
Y DNA and Cornwall – surname reconstruction and project strategy; the Coad project
and book; using Y-DNA to solve brick walls; clusters; and,
Haplogroups and the Y-haplotree; the prehistory of the Cornish people through DNA (Beakers, Germanic, and Danish/Viking).

Dr Joe Flood is a policy analyst, mathematician and author, who lives in Australia. Through researching families in Cornwall, he established and is the administrator of the Cornwall DNA projects on the FamilyTreeDNA website. He is particularly interested in rare Cornish YDNA, and in the prehistory of humanity as revealed in the Y-haplotree. Dr Flood also runs a One Name Study on the Coad and Coode surnames.

Please plan to join us for this BIFHSGO Special Event. Registration is open here.

Here’s the full Table of Contents of the March 2022 issue from the Society of Genealogists.

Where Have All the Collections Gone? Preservation and Digital Transformation at the Society of Genealogists
Christine Worthington, Transformation Manager

Women at War
Emma Jolly

The Memorial Cards Collection
Christine Worthington & Else Churchill

Boys will be Boys
Michael Gandy, FSG

Volunteering for the Pedigree Roll Project
Jo McKinnon

Adventures with the Great Card Index
Graham Simons

Catholic Ancestors – A Select Bibliography
Michael Gandy, FSG

Unravelling the Double Life of William Stedhall / Peter Smith
Peter Manning, VP. FIGRS.

A Honeymoon in France, 1914
Peter Bolton

Curtis Miranda Lampson – from American Farmhand to British Baronet
James Day
Comment:  A particularly interesting article. A brief summary of his life is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Lampson

Initiatives for the Improvement of Parish Registers in the Diocese of Carlisle
John Wintrip

Triple Cross – One up on a Double Cross
Fred Feather

‘Oh I do Like to be Beside the Seaside’ The Jerusalem of the Past… and so many other stories
Helen Dawkins LRPS

Correspondence

Readers’ Queries

Obituaries

Deceased Member

Centre Pull-out Section

Society of Genealogists’ News

Library update

This week Findmypast headlines the 7,914  entries in the Quaker Women’s Petition, 1659. This anti-tithe petition delivered to Parliament was organized by the Society of Friends, or ‘Quakers’.  Not all signatories were followers of the faith, but all disagreed with the taxes imposed by the Church of England. The index, created from an early 1900s transcription, gives first and last name and location which is typically a county or group of counties.

A larger new collection, over 50,00 records, is Lincolnshire burial transcriptions for the parishes of Horncastle (1559-1684, 18,039 records), Louth (1754-1812, 4,939 records), Bourne ( 1562- 1562,  19,574 records) and Great Grimsby (1855-1943, 14,712 records).

They’re the 800 lb gorilla of the genealogy world. You can’t ignore them — and they got that way for a good reason.

Here’s the company press release.

LEHI, Utah–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Taking photos and attaching them to a family tree on Ancestry can help people preserve images and memories, help connect family members with information they would never have found otherwise, and build ​​deeper connections with loved ones. That’s why Ancestry^®, the global leader in family history, today announced its exclusive partnership with media preservation and archiving specialist company Photomyne.

By integrating Photomyne’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technology, Ancestry customers will get an even easier way for family historians to digitize old family photo albums, by scanning and uploading multiple photographs at once through the Ancestry mobile app.

“Almost everyone has a shoebox filled with old family photos and albums that sit on a top shelf in their closet. The problem with that is that no one sees or shares them and they are often forgotten,” said Heather Friedland, Chief Product Officer at Ancestry. “With the Photomyne technology integrated into the Ancestry mobile app, you can now easily and quickly scan full pages of multiple images from your photo albums at once and with a click, have them automatically digitized and saved to Ancestry. Uploading your photos to Ancestry ensures your family memories are preserved and your family’s stories will be cherished for generations.”

Unlike other scanning tools, Photomyne’s AI technology uses the phone’s processor and their proprietary algorithms to:

• Auto-detect image boundaries and auto-crop photos
• Scan multiple images from one page and split into individual images
• Enhance and restore the quality of images

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words and photos are more valuable now than ever with the rise of user generated content,” said Photomyne CEO Nir Tzemah. “We are excited to be able to give the Ancestry community an even easier way to upload, scan, enhance and share priceless family images and memories.”

Ancestry customers will now also be able to upload and share images of photo albums previously added to Ancestry and apply the same auto-cropping, rotation, and image enhancement.

Beginning today, anyone can get started by downloading the Ancestry app and creating a free account.

COMMENT: I’ve not been able to try these, possibly because the release for Android platforms is delayed, while IOS is active.

 

For RootsTech, MyHeritage announces a dedicated hub where visitors can learn about everything related to the 1950 census, prepare for its launch, and search the collection.

MyHeritage will start fully indexing the 1950 census records as soon as the images are released on 1 April. Once this project is complete, MyHeritage will be offering free access to the indexed 1950 census records.

MyHeritage 1950 census page: https://www.myheritage.com/census/us/1950census/
U.S. Census Hub: https://myheritage.com/census/us/
Blog post with more details about the release of the 1950 census: https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/01/1950-census-release-is-coming-up-soon/

Comment: With MyHeritage indexing this census, as well as the consortium of Ancestry and FamilySearch, we can look forward to a real test of present-day indexing capabilities — accuracy as well as timeliness.

Find your strays in West European in this new Ancestry collection,  786 million records for eight EU countries with dates ranging from 1995 to 2015. Data available is Name, Residence Date, Street Address, Residence Place, Postal Code. But NOT phone number!

Here are the details

Phone Book Index	Records
Belgium, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, and 2002 to 2015 (in French)	70,397,625
Denmark, 2001 and 2003 (in Danish)	9,797,801
France, 1997 to 2007 (in French)	272,943,625
Germany, 2001 and 2003 (in German)	71,860,529
Italy, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010, and 2011 (in Italian)	112,689,401
Luxembourg, 1997, 2001, 2002 and 2003 (in French)	662,779
Netherlands, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2011. (in Dutch)	31,865,565
Spain, 1999, 2002, and 2004 to 2015 (in Spanish)	216,179,948