Anglo-Celtic Connections

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.

Tuesday 15 Feb. 2 pm: Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, from Ottawa Branch of OGS and The Ottawa Public Library.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/.

Tuesday 15 Feb. 7 pm: So They Came – Young Men Farmers, by Elaine Becker for Oxford Branch OGS. https://oxford.ogs.on.ca/events/branch-meeting/

Tuesday 15 Feb, 7 pm: Developing the North: Hydroelectric Dams and the Hinterlands in Canada and India, 1953-1958, by Jill Campbell-Miller for the Ottawa Historical Association. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/hydroelectric-dams-and-the-hinterlands-in-canada-and-india-1953-1958-tickets-264736202107?ref=estw

Tuesday 15 Feb.8 pm: It Goes with the Territory! Find Your Ancestors in Pre-statehood Records, by Alice Hoyt Veen for Legacy Family Tree Webinars and BCG. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/it-goes-with-the-territory-find-your-ancestors-in-pre-statehood-records/

Wednesday 16 Feb. 2 pm: The perfect back up plan for you: Backblaze, by Andy Klein for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/the-perfect-back-up-plan-for-you-backblaze/

Friday 18 Feb, 9 am: The Tudor Socialite, by Jan-Marie Knights for The (UK) National Archives. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-tudor-socialite-tickets-227095477687

Friday 18 Feb. 2 pm: Genealogical Gold in British Columbia, by Dave Obee for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/genealogical-gold-in-british-columbia/

Friday 18 Feb. 7 pm: Bound for Niagara: Examining Underground Railroad Genealogy, by Rochelle Bush for Niagara Branch OGS. https://niagara.ogs.on.ca/events/niagara-peninsula-branch-educational-webinar-2022-02-18/

Saturday 19 Feb. 10 am: Sisters of Providence Motherhouse History and the Home Children records, by Veronika Stienberg for Kingston Branch OGS.
https://kingston.ogs.on.ca/events/branch-meeting-and-presentation-by-veronika-stienberg/

Saturday 19 Feb. 1 pm: GenPins and Research Boards: Using Pinterest for Genealogy, by Cheryl Levy for Quinte Branch OGS. https://quinte.ogs.on.ca/2022/02/09/february-19-using-pinterest-for-genealogy/

 

Now with 2,372,275 records from “hundreds of new yearbooks”, updated from 2,318,578 records last May.

Where are those 53,703 records from? Ancestry isn’t saying.

Ontario now has 1,650,659 records, up from 1,648,511 last May.  British Columbia now has 201,341, Alberta 151,475, Saskatchewan 78,921, Manitoba 42,410, Quebec 221,006, New Brunswick 5,112, Prince Edward Island 0, Nova Scotia 21,354, Newfoundland and Labrador 0. 

Ottawa has 132,489 records, with no change for Ashbury College (1918-1988), Elmwood School (1923-1988) and Carleton University (1943-1980) the largest part.

Here’s hoping someone says “Isle of Ewe” to you today. 💕https://t.co/3i8Uv11I0p#ValentinesDay2022 #ValentinesDay pic.twitter.com/n8bpJr0wNW

— NLS Map Collections (@natlibscotmaps) February 14, 2022

 

If there was someone in your ancestry connected to a prestigious institution, like a royal chapel, you’d undoubtedly want to know and perhaps feature it in your family history. Although your chances may not be great, if you do have family links to royalty, the nobility or ordinary folks living in the vicinity those below are not-to-be-missed online records.

At BIFHSGO’s monthly meeting last Saturday Kristen Mercier presented 600+ years of stories from St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Until recently Kristen was Assistant Archivist for St George’s Chapel Archives & Chapter Library, and now Archivist for the Arnprior & McNab Braeside Archives.

The website www.stgeorges-windsor.org/archives/ has links under the Resources tab to Research Guides on The Order of the Garter, Military Knights, Naval Knights, The College of St George and The Properties of St George. There is almost a century of annual reports, and, of great interest, 16 out of print pdf versions out of 19 Historical Monographs, Volumes of particular interest-

Volume. 10. The Baptism, Marriage and Burial Registers of St George’s Chapel, Windsor is of obvious genealogical interest. Much of that data has been incorporated into the databases of the major genealogical websites.

Volume. 16. The Order of the Garter: It’s Knights and Stall Plates, 1348-1984 is another name-rich source. It’s a diversion to scan the often rightfully obscure royalty and nobility, foreign and domestic, and occasional worthy Prime Minister included. Also, those who had their banner removed like the German Kaiser of the First World War.

Both volumes are well indexed in the original, so the pdfs not being word-searchable is a minor irritant.

 

Over 4.2 million new transcripts are now available in TheGenealogist’s ORB collection. With over 11 million records online, this is the largest collection of searchable AIR 27 records. The originals are at the UK National Archives.

ORBs are made up of Form 540 – Summary of Events (the majority), and Form 541 – Detail of Work Carried Out to provide an accurate record of the functioning of the Royal Air Force and some Dominion and Allied squadrons under the command of the British. Appendices that go along with these documents give many statistical details as well as “Secret Orders.”

Events records are arranged by squadron number and date and time of sortie or flight.

The UK National Archives has its own access to some of these records at https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/royal-air-force-operations-record-books-1911-1963/. Ancestry also has an ORB collection with 751,751 records. Is the way records are counted is the same at the various sources?

UPDATE
Information from TheGenealogist
“We are very close to having indexed all of the records, but already have all the images online to browse. I know that some magazines state that Ancestry has completed the release but this appears to be for browseable images only (we also have the complete browseable images). TheGenealogist is by far the largest collection of searchable AIR27 records online with over 11 million versus Ancestry’s at just over 750,000 (according to their Card Catalogue).”

The Valentine’s Day gift from MyHeritage is FREE access to all 600 million marriage records for a limited time, from 13–20 February. That’s 100 separate databases from the international MyHeritage collection.
https://www.myheritage.com/research/category-2020/marriage-divorce

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

New Ancestry.com Feature Warns Users When They Might Want To Stop Sticking Noses Where They Don’t Belong From The Onion.

Worldle
Name a country from its map outline guessing game.

South Australia Records
South Australia, Australia, Incoming and Outgoing Passenger Lists, 1845-1940 with 581,599 records and  South Australia, Australia, Adelaide Hospital Admission Registers, 1841-1946 with 487,164 records, are the largest of six South Australia collections newly added to Ancestry

10 ways to find out what your house was like generations ago

Tracing Your Family History with the Whole Family
New from Pen and Sword

Supportive Home Automation to Help Seniors Age in Place

Accuracy of groundhog weather prediction
Better than the Farmers Almanac!

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Anonymous, Barbara, Chris Madsen, Colleen Murray, Judy Humphries, Lori Scott, Lucy, rob bennie, Sheila, Teresa, Unknown.

Norfolk Workhouse Admission & Discharge Registers for Aylsham (1836 – 1904), Forehoe (1870 – 1913), Loddon & Clavering (1814 – 1900) and Norwich (1802 – 1901) Poor Law Unions are now available. Covering the workhouses of Aylsham, Buxton, Heckingham, Oulton, St Andrew’s, and Wicklewood, these 279,125 records include transcripts and linked images of the original record.

Norfolk had 22 Poor Law Unions. Records at the Norfolk Record Office listed here suggest there’s scope for more coverage.

Norfolk Non-Conformist Records 1613-1901 added separately to three FMP collections — England and Wales Non-Conformist Births and Baptisms, England and Wales Non-Conformist Burials, and England and Wales Non-Conformist Marriages.

For births and baptisms, there are  42,772 records from 1691 to 1919, the majority including transcripts and images. Marriages from 1658 to 1896 in the Norfolk collection total 4,296 records. The 7,334 burial records are from 1666 to 1959, most lacking images.

Norfolk Newspapers: Lynn Advertiser
Editions for 1944, 1952-1957, 1998 have been added in the past week to the Lynn Advertiser bringing the overall coverage of the paper to 1842-1945, 1950-1957, 1963, 1967, 1971-1977, 1980-1999.

Due to pandemic restrictions, the 2021 Shannon Lecture series will take place in the Spring of 2022. It will be virtual and will be about “The exploitation of natural resources in Canadian history”. The convenor will be Stephen Osei-Owusu, a Ph.D. candidate in History and Political Economy. The dates and speakers will be announced in March.

The theme of the 2022 Fall series, originally scheduled for Fall 2021, will be “Climate History”. The convenor will be Professor Joanna E. Dean.

https://www.agra.org.uk/podcasts#202202.

There’s mostly good news in the press release Canada tops G7 growth despite COVID from Statistics Canada.

The population of Canada in the spring of 2021 was 36,991,981. (find the current population estimate by Worldometers here — it keeps changing!)

Approximately 1.8 million more people were calling Canada home in 2021 compared with five years earlier, with four in five of these having immigrated to Canada since 2016.

The growth rate is almost twice that  of every other G7 country; the population increased by 5.2% from 2016

Nearly three in four Canadians lived in one of the 41 large urban centres.

Toronto (6,202,225 people) remains the most populous CMA, followed by Montréal (4,291,732 people) and Vancouver (2,642,825 people). Ottawa–Gatineau (1,488,307 people) regained fourth place after temporarily losing that title in 2016 to Calgary (1,481,806 people). Edmonton (1,418,118 people) remained the nation’s sixth largest CMA.

The most populated downtowns were Toronto (275,931 people), Vancouver (121,932 people), Montréal (109,509 people), Ottawa (67,169 people) and Edmonton (55,387 people).

Urban spread occurred in the intermediate suburbs (20 to 30 minutes from downtown) in Edmonton (+23.4%), Calgary (+23.3%) and Ottawa (+21.4%). The growth in these intermediate suburbs largely surpassed that of their respective downtowns, urban fringes and near suburbs.

Are you waiting patiently, or impatiently, for a substantive response from LAC to a request for information? Frequently I hear researchers expressing frustration over long delays, the situation was mentioned in a webinar I attended on Tuesday evening.

Library and Archives Canada Annual Report on the Access to Information Act: 2020–2021, published in January, details the situation for that period in context.

Requests received grew for four years from 2015-2016 until declining in the 2020-2021 (pandemic) year, notably at the start of the year.  Overall, the number completed did not keep pace so the backlog grew from 2,885 to 16,922 — 586 percent.

During 2020-2021 urgent requests related to medical benefits, social services, class actions, legal proceedings, and other urgent circumstances were prioritized. That would not include applications for genealogical and historical research, thus the delay.

Forty-two percent of requests in 2020-2021 (3,529) were identified as being from the public, as distinct from media, organizations, businesses (private sector) and academics. An additional 30% were not identified so it seems likely over half the requests were from individuals pursuing their family history. Six in every seven of the public requests were informal, and 90% of informal requests were for Canadian Armed Forces and Canadian Public Service Records. The bulk of our community applications will be a low priority.

In January 2021 the Information Commissioner initiated a complaint against LAC regarding its ongoing failure to provide timely access to information. An official report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the 2021-2022 fiscal year (by the end of March.)

UPDATE
Media Relations for the Information Commissioner informs that the report will now be coming out in April 2022.

WHAT TO DO

If you have a request pending, re-submit as a “formal” request and pay the $5 application fee. This will prioritize your request since LAC has a legal obligation to provide an answer and the documents within 30 days. If applying for a Second World War service record, familiarize yourself with the access conditions for making a “formal” request for the file.

If you are dissatisfied with services at LAC in meeting legislated timelines, write to your MP.

Your local or provincial family history/genealogical society likely has an advocacy mandate. If so, encourage your society to lobby for service improvements. Better still, like-minded societies whose members have encountered long delays in accessing archival records might partner to bring their collective concerns to senior management at LAC and the political level.

COMMENT
The report Library and Archives Canada Annual Report on the Access to Information Act: 2020–2021 is full of detail, a model of openness. It should be linked with similar LAC reports.

UPDATE

I’m told by Media Relations from the Information Commissioner that the report will now be coming out in April 2022.