Once again this year the Ontario Genealogical Society is offering half price on membership renewal if you pair with someone who becomes a new member. They get the half-off deal too.

As a result of this, and other recruitment initiatives OGS increased its membership by 2% in 2021, that’s according to information from Society President  Heather McTavish Taylor at a webinar last week.

Heather mention the offer as starting on 1 November. As of writing, I don’t see the offer slashed across the OGS webpage nor information on the procedure to follow.  When I do I’ll post that information along with an offer to pair with a new member and attempt to match existing members with potential new ones. Stay tuned.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Explore ancestral places with YouTube
What can you find out if you search YouTube for a place of ancestral interest, perhaps adding a county?

YouTube: Understanding Probability and Genetic Genealogy

Time Team Digital

Archives of Ontario to recommence public services
As posted by OGS but not on AO website. Long overdue

Climate Change in the Arctic

How much would Bach make on Spotify?

Thanks to this week’s contributors. Anonymous, Brenda Turner, Gail, gail benjafield, Glenn W, Judy Humphries, KAYTHEGARDENER, Lynne Willoughby, M. Anne, Myrtle Johnston, Nancy Frey, Nick McDonald, rob bennie, Robert Halfyard, Susan Courage, Susan Oleskiw, Unknown.

You can’t miss “Find Your London Family” on the cover of the issue.

Jonathan Scott, a regular contributor, explores the most important website for probing the lives of Londoners. From A and AIM25 to W and West End at War, Scott finds 47 sites with London interest. They included the major commercial sites, archives, family history societies, and much more. If you want to find pictures to illustration your family history try https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/.

In the second featured article, Old Postcards, Heather Baggot reveals how she “follows the clues in postcards to uncover fascinating family stories.”

In Pillow Talk, Jas Adams gets into sex in the 1940s. A study in 1949 with over 2,000 people interviewed, supplemented by over 1,000 people in the Mass Observation study, found the 31% believed life could be happy without sex while 37% said it was impossible to be happy without sex.

If that’s not enough to get you to check out the issue, available through your public library, there’s other content on Oxfordshire, brickmakers, canal workers, nonconformists, Zotero, the 1911 census and more. A good way to spend a rainy day.

 

If your heritage lies in Essex new records for Chingford, Leytonstone, South Chingford and Walthamstow in Findmypast’s Essex Marriages and Banns 1537-1935 collection are likely to be of interest. Those parishes are now in the London Borough of Waltham Forest.

The number of records is dwarfed by those of the other FMP addition this week, over 5.7 million records:

California marriages, 1850-1945
Indiana marriages, 1811-2007
Iowa marriages, 1809-1992
Massachusetts marriages, 1841-1915

Many have linked images of the original; the indexing is from FamilySearch.

As of 30 September for Canada, there are 31,113,161 entries in the newspapers.com Obituary Index, 1800s-current. That’s up from 31,056,223 in April. The database is particularly valuable for more recent years when official death records are not available.

For the US, there are now 843,651,119 entries in the equivalent index, up from 834,426,322 entries in April.

Looking for a deceased relative in East London? Chadwell Heath Cemetery (now known as Mark’s Gate) from 1934 comprising 16,681 records,  and Eastbrookend Cemetery from 1914 containing 23,066 records, are now available to view on www.deceasedonline.com. 

The records comprise digital scans of the original burial registers up to 2006, computerized records from 2006 to 2019, and grave details for each of the graves and their occupants

Coming next to complete the Barking and Dagenham collection will be Rippleside Cemetery with 62,622 records from 1886 to 2019.

 

Gloucestershire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1813 now has 4,858,358 records. In January 2019 the collection had 4,855,897 records, so the update is an increase of 2,461 records. No indication if the additions are for a particular parish or parishes.

The British Newspaper Archive now has a total of 45,139,078 pages online (44,623,834 last month).

TITLE	DATE RANGE
Faversham News	1900, 1904, 1936-1949, 1951-1980
Daily News (London)	1922-1938, 1940-1949, 1951-1954, 1957-1960
Cornish Post and Mining News	1889-1895, 1898-1899, 1919-1944
Bury Free Press	1988, 1993-1994
Newark Advertiser	1910, 1912, 1987-1990
Croydon Times	1861-1870, 1875-1878, 1880-1884, 1891-1899, 1901-1909, 1912-1918, 1920-1950, 1952-1961
Australian and New Zealand Gazette	1850-1882
Lynn News & County Press	1871-1873, 1875-1889, 1891-1892, 1913, 1915, 1918, 1924, 1938-1939, 1942

FamilySearch continues to cater to researchers with presentations each Tuesday and Thirsday advertized as at the beginner level. Find information on those sessions at https://media.familysearch.org/free-family-history-classes-and-webinars-for-october-2021/.

They are far from the only game in town. Many Societies have volunteers who are pleased to initiate people into genealogy’s magic arts.  Some societies and  commercial genealogical organizations. have a library of past presentations. 

And there are other resources at the beginner and intermediate level at https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Family_History_Library_Classes_and_Webinars

Don’t overlook your local public library, many of which have genealogy expertise on staff.

For more material, much more in-depth, try the over 1,000 free, on-demand sessions from RootsTech Connect 2021 at https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/rtc2021/.

73,934 births are now added to Ancestry’s collection of Ontario civil registration births. They include a transcript and images of the original register,

Ancestry’s collection shows Ontario births registered declined from 74,444 in 1914.

The pandemic meant no access to archival resources in many institutions. This brought a halt to research as the vast majority of materials in archives is still in the original format. More is on microfilm, but much of that is only accessible within the institution.

There was/is an initiative from some of the more progressive institutions, mainly UK with a few from other countries, but none from Canada, seeking a technological solution to maintaining access. Research Libraries UK recently produced a report, New Frontiers of Digital Access: The development and delivery of Virtual Reading Rooms and Virtual Teaching Spaces amongst collection-holding institutions from which part of the summary and conclusions section is reproduced below.

“Virtual Reading Rooms and Virtual Teaching Spaces are emerging services which have largely grown out of the coronavirus pandemic. Although a pragmatic response to the closure, or partial closure, of buildings during various local, regional, and national lockdowns, VRRs have become established as bespoke research services and VTSs as valuable routes through which archives, special collections, museums and galleries can engage with diverse groups through virtual learning sessions.

Both VRRs and VTSs benefit from relatively low technological thresholds and the majority of institutions have created these services utilising affordable hardware, readily available software, and pre-existing spaces. The establishment and growth of VRR and VTS services have benefited from the fact that onsite services (as of June 2021) are still operating at below ‘normal’ pre-pandemic levels. The ultimate scalability and sustainability of these services will only become apparent as onsite services return to a degree of normality. The growing number of such services, their creation outside of periods of lockdown, their application to a greater variety of collection types, and diversification of their user base, would suggest that VRRs and VTSs will continue to develop as valuable research and teaching services into the future.

Staff time and expertise are the largest attributable resource required for the delivery of VRR and VTS services. The success of these services depend much on the skills and expertise of staff, particularly their familiarity with the collection and ability to work closely with researchers. As a result, these services offer many opportunities to showcase the knowledge, skills, and expertise of library staff, and the valuable contribution that they can make to the research process, both as service providers and research partners. They also present opportunities for combining collections held at multiple institutions virtually (both nationally and internationally), without the requirement of digitisation, and offer new collaborative opportunities between researchers and institutions.”

The report notes such remote access is also a means by which institutions can address the climate emergency

“the seriousness of the climate emergency will also question the viability and ethical basis of international travel. These factors combined mean that research libraries, archives and special collections, and museums and galleries, need, as a community, to collectively consider alternative means of collection access through which original research can be conducted.”

 

Statistics Canada released preliminary data for births in Canada, except Yukon, on Tuesday.

In 2020, there were 358,604 live births in Canada, excluding Yukon. There were 13,434 fewer births in 2020 than in 2019 (372,038), the greatest year-over-year decrease (3.6%) and the lowest number of births in any year since 2006. The decline from 2019 to 2020 was observed in every province and territory in Canada.

December 2020 had the lowest monthly total in the last five years, While it’s tempting to attribute the low number to social distancing, it may in part be the result of incomplete data from Manitoba.

Similar to previous years, the proportion of boys (51.4%) was slightly higher than the proportion of girls (48.6%).
During the pandemic, a small but increasing proportion of births are occurring outside hospitals.