Anglo-Celtic Connections

Saturday was a good genealogy day.

I’ve been asked why I spent so much time covering new and updated resources on the blog. Additional material comes online at regular and irregular intervals. There are monthly issues of magazines and updates to FreeBMD, annual updates as closure dates for civil registration records are passed. Sometimes news arrives unexpectedly; maybe an organization finished indexing a collection — we may be alerted to it through our subscriptions.

But as I discovered just this past weekend, sometimes updates fly under that routine scan.

As you may recall, I’ve been researching my great uncle Edward Cohen who died in the Great War serving in the British Army. In writing up his story, watch for it in the next issue of BIFHSGO’s Anglo-Celtic Roots, it occurred to me to check again whether his father Maurice had ever become a naturalized British citizen. I’d looked before without success, finding it hadn’t been a priority. Now there was a reference to a detailed application at TNA. So I asked a friend in London to do a lookup at Kew on their next visit.

I found out that the family emigrated to London in 1868 when he was four years old. That’s much earlier than I thought. I knew he had a sister born in Amsterdam in 1867, he was in the 1881 census and married in London in 1878 1887. As I didn’t find him or the family in the 1871 census it seemed emigration would be in the 1870s.  I still can’t locate him or the family in the 1871 census.

His citizenship application was in 1919, so it was closed until 2019. It’s worth keeping and periodically reviewing a list of outstanding facts you’d like to discover.

 

On Thursday, 12 May, from 1 to 2:15 pm, Stacey Barker, Tim Cook, Jeff Noakes, and Michael Petrou from the Canadian War Museum will offer an in-depth examination into Canadian lives forever changed by the Second World War in a free Zoom event. The session is moderated by Mélanie Morin-Pelletier.

Find out more and register at https://www.warmuseum.ca/event/short-stories-second-world-war/.

Michael Petrou and Mélanie Morin-Pelletier are both speakers at the OGS/Ontario Ancestors conference 2022.

New UK and Ireland collections “on the horizon” for Ancestry.

Edinburgh, Scotland, Alien Registers, 1794, 1798-1825

UK, World War II Photographs, 1939-1945

UK, Women’s Royal Naval Service Records, 1917-1919

Edinburgh, Scotland, Lord Provost Passports, 1845-1916

Sussex Parish Registers

Westminster, England, Militia Records, 1757-1828

The Bristol Parish collection will be adding additional years.

Additions elsewhere are also coming to Ancestry. For Canada, they are:

Web: Canadian Headstone Index, 1840-2017
Canada, Newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Celebrate May Day.

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, by Maud Newton 
An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family–and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.

The British Library’s top 10 most unusual collection items

Arolsen Archives’ #everynamecounts Project Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help Uncover Information on Victims of Nazi Persecution
An interesting project — makes one ask, what are LAC’s plans for handwriting recognition? The 1931 census?

Ancestry adds UK and Ireland vitals indexes from newspapers.com
For marriages (2,495,690 records) and obituaries (8,653,927 records). These are OCR records so expect errors, like a person marrying two different spouses on the same day.

US 1950 census update
The MyHeritage and Ancestry searchable indexes both currently contain all records from Alaska, American Samoa, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Panama Canal Zone, Rhode Island, South Dakota, US Virgin Islands, Vermont, Wyoming, Indian Reservation Schedules, and four overseas islands of Canton, Johnston, Midway, and Wake.

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Anonymous, Brenda Turner, Colleen Murray, Glenn Wright, Michelle Landriault, N.D.M., Teresa, Toni, Unknown

Another amazing month for the British Newspaper Archive, now with a total of 50,585,003 pages online (49,829,385 last month). That blows past 50 million with the fourth-best month since January 2020.

This month 148 papers had pages added (240 in the previous month). There were 29 (54) new titles. Dates range from 1827 to 1995.

The 18 newspapers with more than 10,000 pages added are

Title	Years
Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore)	1929, 1935-1938, 1946-1951, 1954-1961
Tonbridge Free Press	1871-1896, 1898-1962
Sydenham, Forest Hill & Penge Gazette	1873-1894, 1905-1939, 1946-1949, 1951-1962
St. Pancras Gazette	1866-1939
Nottingham and Midland Catholic News	1908-1911, 1913-1934
Runcorn Weekly News	1988, 1991-1994
Kilmarnock Standard	1982, 1984, 1990, 1994
Kensington News and West London Times	1876, 1882, 1887-1888, 1913, 1917-1918, 1920, 1922, 1925, 1927-1928, 1930-1934, 1938-1939, 1944, 1950, 1952-1954, 1957-1962, 1965, 1967, 1970-1971
Evening News (Waterford)	1899-1914
Cleveland Standard	1908-1953
Bury Free Press	1960-1967, 1970-1973
Edinburgh Evening News	1925, 1927-1928, 1930
Paisley Daily Express	1882, 1887-1888, 1890-1893, 1989
Woodbridge Reporter	1869-1900
Daily Record	1992
Loughborough Echo	1952, 1986, 1994-1995
Harrow Observer	1965, 1981, 1993, 1995
Buckinghamshire Examiner	1971, 1984, 1994-1995

Much as we’d like the opportunity to be there in person, who wouldn’t want to enjoy their Vancouver Island environment, there’s an open invitation to join a group of enthusiastic Campbell River genealogists to Zoom and learn about FamilySearch. The event is free online, so no travel is required.

A pdf preprint of the article Newfoundland and Labrador: A mosaic founder population of an Irish and British diaspora from 300 years ago is posted in BioRxiv. The lead author, Edmund Gilbert, is well known for his studies of geographic distribution and linkages from DNA data.

Analysis of 1,807 Newfoundland and  Labrador individuals shows English ancestry is predominant except for Irish in the south and south-east. A genetic bottleneck exits approximately 10 to 15 generations ago.

These findings are consistent with the isolation of outports and known genealogical evidence. The comparative genetic data to establish DNA connections to French (and Spanish?) settlers is not available, nor is that of the indigenous populations.

125 million! With 124,218,791 records total in this collection! It must be new to Findmypast (FMP) and the 125 rounding the industry-standard promotion rhetoric.  Who’s counting! 

As we know from the British Newspaper Archive project, one of the aces FMP holds is its relationship with the British Library. That’s to the fore as they acknowledge working “in partnership with the British Library” on this project.

Here’s FMP’s description.

“These records are mostly from the 2021 electoral registers, along with the regular suppression list. It’s an excellent resource for researching current history, discovering more about the social landscape, or gathering data on your local area. These records will often give you a name, an estimated age, an address and years occupied. For many of us, these will be some of the first records we can find ourselves in.”

For living people you’re looking for, this sounds great. How good is it, you ask me? Will I find people related to me?

I’ll answer the second question first. I have relatives and friends one would think would be included and are long-term at the same address. The first listed is in the one location from 2002-14 with no information later. Another, in a nearby village, is there from 2016-22; and another in four of the years between 2002 to 2016.

I got different results for more distant relatives, ones I’m not in touch with. One was only listed twice, each for a single year at different addresses. There was no sign of a family of four male siblings, three born in Wiltshire and one in Berkshire in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe they left the country without telling me!

So what’s the answer to the first question?

Hit and miss.

Can Ancestry do any better? They have UK, Electoral Registers, 2003-2010 with 65,218,309 records. So no. The Ancestry collection is smaller and covers a more limited period.

MyHeritage has no comparable collection, nor does TheGenealogist.

Also, this week FMP makes available the US 1950 census images with partial indexing as performed by the US National Archives. FMP is not working on a complete transcription or enhanced name index.

 

On Wednesday, I made my first research trip to Library and Archives Canada at 395 Wellington in more than two years. Masks required, but no vaccination check. Lots of protective equipment is evident since my last pre-pandemic visit.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the helpful front-line staff. With the restrictions in place, requiring reservations more than two weeks in advance, the site did not seem overly busy, giving more time for staff to provide help. While I only recall the names of two, Tom and Steve, the service provided generally more than met expectations.

Here’s the second of my interviews with speakers at the 24 – 26 June 2022 OGS/Ontario Ancestors conference.

If you missed the first interview, with Wayne Shepheard, find it here.

I have a few more planned while Penny Allen, official conference”bloginator,” will interview quite a few others. The plan is to link them on the conference speaker profile page.

Why are we doing this? The initial impetus was to provide information about the speaker, and the presentation, encourage you to attend their presentation and register for the conference. You’ll find out more about the individual and perhaps discover they have other interests coincident with yours. I found that during both interviews, so reach out to make one-to-one contact with the speaker if you discover a commonality of interest.

Newly online at Ancestry, from holdings at the UK National Archives.

UK, Women’s Royal Air Force Service Records, 1918-1920. 

The collection consists of 31,399 records from AIR 80 – Air Ministry: Master General of Personnel and Director of Personnel: Airwomen’s Records,
It includes enrollment forms, certificates of discharge, correspondence, and casualty forms for active service, which were recorded when personnel switched units.
Members of the WRAF served in various non-combat roles, including clerks, cooks, housekeepers, photographers, drivers, tinsmiths, pigeon keepers, welders, and more.

UK, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Service Records, 1917-1920. 

The collection contains 19,773 records from WO 398: War Office: Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps: Service Records, First World War.
The information is on:  application forms, enrollment forms, certificates of identification, certificates of discharge, correspondence, medical history forms, and casualty forms for active service, which were recorded when personnel switched units, references from employers, clothing history sheets, which contain details about uniforms.
Occupations were typically cooking, waitressing, administrative work, and cleaning.

Records in both collections may include name, with a maiden name if married, birthplace, birth date, race, nationality, residence, marital status, occupation, date and place of enlistment, date and place of discharge, regiment, unit, service number, names and addresses of next of kin, relationship to next of kin.

Clients have experienced chronic delays in Library and Archives Canada‘s responses to access to information (ATIP) applications. They are significant, months and even years. The situation became severe enough to warrant an investigation.

A report Access at issue: The challenge of accessing our collective memory by The Information Commissioner of Canada, Caroline Maynard, was tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, 26 April 2022.

It concluded that “LAC is not meeting its obligations under the Access to Information Act.”

The report, sent to the Minister of Canadian Heritage in January, includes a copy of his response in an annex. The Information Commissioner then commented, “I remain disappointed by an apparent lack of engagement to make concrete and positive improvements.” The Commissioner calls for “making the proper resourcing of ATIP operations a higher priority.”

More broadly, the report comments that “The challenges that LAC is facing cannot all be addressed through its actions. I call upon the Government to take a broader perspective in its efforts to improve access to information, and to find solutions that address the root causes of these problems.”

Two challenges facing Canada’s access to information system more generally are singled out:

-the manner in which consultations on access requests are conducted between institutions; and
-the lack of a Government-wide framework for the declassification of records.

The Information Commissioner makes the following ten recommendations.

1. Direct LAC ATIP officials to use their delegated authority to respond to all access requests with outstanding consultations forthwith.
2. Direct LAC ATIP officials, for new access requests requiring consultations, to establish a rigorous process to determine the length of time the consultations should take and to respond to those requests before the expiry of the extension sought, with or without the institutions’ input.
3. Process all pending access requests for records classified as Top Secret forthwith, even as implementation and certification of new infrastructure continues.
4. Respond to the backlog of access requests that resulted from LAC suspending ATIP operations during the pandemic.
5. Implement fully functional infrastructure to allow ATIP officials to process Secret and Top Secret records efficiently.
6. Ensure ATIP officials have access to the LAC network and record-processing software at all times, so LAC is always in a position to respond to access requests.
7. Require institutions to review and, whenever possible, declassify or downgrade the classification of records prior to transferring them to LAC.
8. Negotiate adequate funding for LAC’s ATIP office to support new programs introduced by other institutions.
9. Review and adjust the permanent funding for the various units with the ATIP office to reflect their workload.
10. Publish on the LAC website by the end of 2022 the concrete results achieved to implement these recommendations and provide quarterly updates.

In response the LAC website posted a Statement by the Librarian and Archivist of Canada. Lesley Weir accepts that there is a shared responsibility — “With the support of our Minister, we will pursue all available means and channels within the Government of Canada to properly fulfill our mandate and address the issues raised by the Information Commissioner.”

COMMENT
The “apparent lack of engagement to make concrete and positive improvements” by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, reflects more general government neglect. Recall that the mandate letter to the Minister made no mention of this chronic problem at LAC. While the recommendation of the Commissioner was for LAC to provide quarterly updates on concrete results to implement the recommendations, the Minister commits only to “updates on progress on a semi-annual basis beginning in late 2022.”

For those who have been waiting months and years for a response to routine requests, those not made under the provisions of ATIP and so lower priority for LAC, like Second World War service files, this response from the Minister gives little hope for improved timeliness. Management, starting with the Librarian and Archivist, and the Minister should treat seriously the LAC mandate, which calls for holdings to be available, not just held and not just those ordered under ATIP.