Anglo-Celtic Connections

According to one source, 3,750 Canadian women married airmen from outside Canada — Australia, New Zealand as well as the UK and elsewhere, while with the WW2 British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada.

Based on the total number of airmen who graduated from the Plan, and their national air force affiliations, a rough estimate of the number of Canadian brides is 2,700 to RAF personnel, 600 to RAAF and 450 to RNZAF. There must be large error bars on those estimates, especially for RAAF and RNZAF, as there were many RAF personnel who stayed in Canada for extended periods as part of the training establishments.

For New Zealand, “about 3700 women from 37 countries, including Canada, Italy and Palestine followed their husbands and fiances to New Zealand.” that’s according to
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/women-together/war-brides-organisations

Searching New Zealand’s Papers Past  yielded several mentions.

30 June 1943 — over 70 NZ airmen have married Canadians
12 July 1944 — first group of Canadian war brides arrives in NZ
19 Nov 1945 — Canadian war brides arrive in New Zealand

No totals were found for Australia. The NLA Trove database yielded:

28 April 1944 — 2 Canadian war brides reached Australia
28 June 1944 — large party of war brides” arrived in Sydney
26 June 1945 — Thirty-nine Canadian war brides and 12 children of Australian airmen will arrive in Sydney shortly.
7 August 1945: 39 Canadian brides and 12 children arrived in Sydney about a month ago. Hitherto only about 20 Canadian war brides had arrived in Australia. An estimated 200 are still in Canada.
15 August 1945: 39 brides from every province of Canada and 12 children arrive in Sydney
August 1945 — It is estimated that 200 brides still in Canada await passage to Australia,.”
24 Sept 1945: 10 Toronto girls (wives) travelling to San Francisco where they will be part of a party of 142 brides and 25 babies travelling on the S S Matonia.
3 October 1945: 80 Canadian brides of Australia airmen arrive in Vancouver to proceed via San Francisco.
4 October 1945 —  One hundred and ninety-four Canadian wives of Australian airmen have arrived here on their way to Australia. Thirty husbands accompanied the group, 90 more met their wives here. Several of the group are widows. One bride is taking her mother to Australia. Thirty have babies.
Group will sail on Friday.
7 March 1946 — approximately 120 Canadian wives, fiancees, widows and children of Australian servicemen will sail by the Monterey from San Francisco on March 15. The women come from all provinces, but the majority are from the prairies.
24 May 1946 — Ship Monteray arrive Sydney with 18 Canadian wives and fiancees

Canadian newspapers have numerous reports of marriages to Australians and New Zealander’s as well as British airmen.

At the most recent BIFHSGO London SIG we discovered several of us have connections to Hackney. This YouTube video, by long-time resident Sean Gubbins, gives an overview of Hackney’s geography and history. It includes information on and links to local organizations, also on his Walk Hackney website, that may be useful in exploring further.

Sean Gubbins leads walks and, during the lockdown, produced a series of 20 self-guided tours around areas of the borough. Each has 3-4 lines on each of 10-20 locations along the route, They’re free on his website at walkhackney.co.uk.

 

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Kingston & District Branch of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada
Interested in Canadian history and Black history? On Saturday, 25 September 2021 at 2:00 PM EDT on Zoom, award-winning author Jean Rae Baxter speaks on  “WHEREAS it is Unjust” – Upper Canada’s Role in the Fight to End Slavery.  Pre-registration (free) is requested at  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUldOuprj0vH9CK-CqPToos9pDbQ25LwOH2

Ancestry has updated New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 Immigration & Emigration, now with 95,195,319 records.

FRIDAY FOSSICKING is a weekly review of the world of family history from an Australian viewpoint. Check it out at https://thatmomentintime-crissouli.blogspot.com/2021/09/friday-fossicking-3rd-sept-2021.html

What Is a Good Credit Score? (+ Why You Need One)

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Ann Burns, Christine Jackson, Mary Pomfret, Nancy Cutway, Nancy Frey

Did you know LAC has four advisory bodies?

Or perhaps more accurately, did you know LAC had four advisory bodies?

You probably wouldn’t know unless you scrolled down to the bottom of the website at https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/ and click on Our Mandate.

Acquisitions Advisory Committee has information up to Date modified: 13 November 2019.
Services Consultation Committee last reported on 24 January 2020.
Stakeholders’ Forum has information up to 13 November 2019.
Youth Advisory Council has a membership to 21 April 2021. It supposedly meets once a month, on a Thursday evening, for 1.5 to 2 hours. Unlike the other seemingly moribund groups there is no indication of what might have been discussed at prior meetings.

There are other consultations. There have been many consultation sessions specifically on the new OPL/LAC building.

The LAC website also has a section Public Consultations at  www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/aboutus/consultations/Pages/default.aspx/. It doesn’t mention the new building consultations. It does list one open consultation Enriching LAC’s library collections which was opened on 15 November 2018.   The last update is 26 September 2019. Is that consultation still open?

Contrast that with a tweet yesterday from Chris Paton:

Absolutely buzzing after latest stakeholder meeting with @PRONI_DFC this morning! Will write up shortly, but some potentially very exciting developments happening soon! PRONI should get archive of the year for how it has been working to provide access over the last 18 months.

There’s no evident consultation occurring at Library and Archives Canada. No exciting developments. How is LAC now receiving input on its activities, aside from occasional pop-ups on the website? With little interest expressed by the Parliamentary Committee that’s supposed to oversee its activities, how is LAC accountable?

 

From the Publisher of Your Genealogy Today:

Our printer who prints Your Genealogy Today (YGT) contacted us just before we were about to send our Sept/Oct 2021 25th Anniversary issue to press at the end of August to say that they were delaying the printing of YGT due to pandemic-related workforce shortages and paper shortages. They could not guarantee it would be printed in September, or even early October for that matter. That left us no choice other than to source a new printer, which we have done on very short notice; getting press time is difficult – but not impossible.

As a result, WE ARE printing the Sept/Oct 2021 issue of YGT (for subscribers only), but effective with the Oct/Nov 2021 issue of Internet Genealogy (IG), YGT will be merged into Internet Genealogy. Going forward, your subscription will be switched to IG for the duration of what is owed to you from your existing subscription to YGT. If you currently have a subscription to Internet Genealogy, we will extend your subscription by the number of issues owed to you from your existing subscription to YGT. Please feel free to contact our office if you have any questions about this arrangement. Our toll-free number is 1-888-326-2476.
We now have a firm date to print in the week of Sept. 13. and the magazine will be mailed in the week of Sept. 20.

We felt that we had to act now, rather than wait to see if the previous printer was going to get the magazine out. If we didn’t source a new printer, our schedule would surely be jeopardized for IG, and History Magazine as well. In doing so we maintain two quality magazines, plus our special issues. With regard to articles already booked for YGT, any currently accepted YGT articles have been booked into future issues of IG.

COMMENT: While it’s sad to see the end of any publication the overlap between the content of the two magazines has been evident for some while. We should look forward to an even higher standard of content in Internet Genealogy and, perhaps, some new initiatives.

Hundreds of thousands of records from St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham are now online at FMP.

Over 138,000 baptism records
Over 155,000 marriage records
Over 101,000 burial records.

The hits are linked to images from the original register.

Also from Warwickshire, the Midwife’s Birth Register 1845-1875 for
Coventry midwife Mary Eaves attended over 4,400 births during her long career. The transcript gives the birth date, mother’s last name and address.

This notice was posted on the LAC website on 10 September.

Interruption of computing services from September 10 to 12, 2021
​We are updating some of our computing services from Friday, September 10 at 10 p.m. to Sunday, September 12 at noon (ET). Some of our websites may not be available during this time:

Library and Archives Canada websites
New France Archives Website
LAC Direct
We regret any inconvenience that this may cause.

10 am: The Paulin(e) Family Reunion: Taking Family Research to the Family, by Gillian Leitch for BIFHSGO.
www.bifhsgo.ca

1 pm: Dr. William Arthur Rupert Michell (1879-1966), by Karen Prytula for Ottawa Branch OGS
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/seasons-in-the-wind-tales-of-lanark-county-and-a-new-day-dawning/

If you’re new to researching English ancestry or could do with a refresher, I recommend viewing Paul Milner’s talk for Legacy Family Tree Webinars given on Wednesday evening. It’s free at the Legacy Family Tree Webinars site until 16 September. For webinar members, there’s an eight-page handout with additional information not covered in the talk, some new to me.

https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/tracing-your-20th-century-english-ancestors/

I was surprised the other day to discover, via a post referencing Lisa Louise Cooke, that the Google collection of historic newspapers isn’t as non-searchable as I’d thought. Here’s how to do it.

Go to https://books.google.ca/ enter the search term and hit return or the search magnifying glass. Then on the Any document drop-down select Newspapers. Click on the Any time drop-down to refine the date range.

Add additional terms to the search, like the place of interest, to further refine the results. There seems to be no way to identify at the site which newspapers are included. A sample search for the WW2 period found articles in Canadian papers The Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Toronto Daily Star, Calgary Herald, Maple Leaf, Windsor Daily Star, Regina Leader-Post, Edmonton Journal, Shawinigan Standard, St. Maurice Valley Chronicle, Sherbrooke Telegram, and Canadian Register.

There are also US and Australian newspapers. Likely the papers available are those listed by The Ancestor Hunt at https://theancestorhunt.com/newspaper-research-links.html, scroll down to Canada>Links by Province, select the province and then scroll down to Google News Archive. The same collection is available to MyHeritage subscribers.

Also new in newspapers is that Findmypast no longer provides access to Canadian or US newspapers. FMP does continue to add to the British newspaper collection, the latest being the Daily News (London) for 1846-1923, 1925, 1927, 1939. Newspapers.com continues to add US newspapers.

I’ve been looking forward to the BIFHSGO conference talks on 25 September.  Now I find the Register of Qualified Genealogists are streaming a free Conference: Genealogy and Social History: Know your Ancestors on the same day. Here’s the programme (pdf). Register at https://www.qualifiedgenealogists.org/2021-conference

Fortunately, the time difference works in our favour.  The opening presentation for RQG, What genealogists and social historians can learn from each other, by Caroline Gurney starts at 5 am ET.  Chris Paton’s talk Church and State: Ireland’s Vital Records starts at noon ET. By that time the final RQG presentation, one I’d particularly like to attend, Lying Bastards: the impact of illegitimacy on family history research, by Dave Annal, will be about halfway through.