Anglo-Celtic Connections

Today, Saturday 23 Oct 2021 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Title: Silent No More: Researching Our Great War Dead

Speaker: Glenn Wright

Details: Documenting fatal casualties was an enormous undertaking during and immediately after the Great War. One of the first illustrated guides to the cemeteries in France and Belgium was Sidney C. Hurst’s Silent Cities, published in 1929. Now, more than a century after the war ended and with easy access to personnel records, we can break the silence and tell the story of our ancestors who served and died in the war. With the proliferation of online information, including death and burial documentation, newspapers and community-based research, we can document our war dead as never before. This presentation will look at the development of memorials and cemeteries and, more importantly, will review the major resources, well-known and not so well-known, that are available online and elsewhere, for researching Canada’s Great War dead.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rcumvpj0tHdKSD49Y6zPjh5uBf5ANTLVe

All Ottawa Branch monthly presentations are open to the public at no charge.

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Friday 22 October 2021 to contain 282,373,129 unique entries, increased from 281,999,667 at the previous update.

Years with changes of more than 10,000 records since the last update are: for births 1886-87, 1990-92; for marriages 1986-87, 1989-91; for deaths 1988-90.

This week FMP added new records for the Plymouth Diocese and thousands of additional records from the Southwark Archdiocese to the England Roman Catholic Parish Records collection. 

These records for 1781-1921 include:

Over 55,000 baptism records
Over 16,000 marriage records
Over 15,000 burial records
Over 15,000 congregational records

There are now 2,584,958 records in the Catholic collection for England.

Having been raised there I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to see the dominance of Eastern England, especially East Anglia when it comes to cropland.
As the ESA WorldCover Viewer map provides data on land cover at 10 m resolution across the whole world you can get in close to a place of interest. The map distinguishes 11 different classes of land cover, including tree cover, grassland, cropland and built-up land.

via Maps Mania.

Another unusual genealogy database. The search screen is conventional headed by boxes for First & Middle Name(s) and Last Name. There’s also a Keyword search.

Searching for “ancestry” returns 128 results, “genealogy”  124 results, and for “family history” 20. The information returned is sparse: Name, Residence Place, Application Date, Certificate Number and Others Listed. No further detail is linked.

The top places associated with the “genealogy” patents were: Utah (38), Colorado (25), Massachusetts (12), Canada (10), Alabama (5). Surprised?

You might also be surprised by where in Canada these US “genealogy” patents were filed from — BC (8 in the Lower Mainland), Quebec (2 in Beaconsfield).

Do you qualify? MyHeritage’s best plan for discovering family history — which gives you access to all records and tools, is for Legacy users who are not currently subscribers of MyHeritage. It includes a unique Price-Lock Guarantee. This means you will be able to continue to enjoy the Complete Plan for the same 50% discounted price for as long as you keep your subscription.

If you’re an existing subscriber cancel before the end of the term. Then wait for a discount offer. It won’t take long.

The offer expires on October 25, 2021.

Old postmortem records for St George’s Hospital, in 76 volumes from 1841 to 1946, an estimated total of 36,000 cases, are freely available online. Most patients were from the lower classes.

A blog post illustrates the type of information of interest for family history that may be found. For example, Albert Pratt, a four-year-old boy who died on 20 August 1889.

His parents lived at Brighton but the child had been staying at 1A Bulmer Place Notting Hill Gate. In this house the floor of the W.C. [Water Closet] was in a very bad state, having all crumbled away. The Landlord refusing to do anything. Within the last 6 weeks 6 persons living in the house, 4 children and 2 young women had had sore throats but all recovered.’ Young Albert, was diagnosed with Diphtheria and ultimately succumbed to the illness.

The project to conserve, digitise and catalogue the postmortum records, funded by the Wellcome Foundation, is in progress with records to about 1920 complete.

Browse or search the collection from https://archives.sgul.ac.uk/post-mortem-examinations-and-case-books/.

 

 

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

Tuesday 19 Oct. 7 pm: A Fresh Light on Old Newspapers, by Dave Obee for Sudbury District Branch OGS.
https://www.sudburyogs.com/

Tuesday 19 Oct. 8 pm: My 20 Year Mystery – Finding family origins with Y-DNA, by Shellee Morehead for BCG and Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/my-20-year-mystery-finding-family-origins-with-y-dna/

Wednesday 20 Oct. 2 pm: Comparing the Genealogy Giants 2021: Ancestry, FamilySearch, Findmypast, and MyHeritage, by Sunny Morton for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/comparing-the-genealogy-giants-2021-ancestry-familysearch-findmypast-and-myheritage/

Thursday 21 Oct. 1 pm: Surviving the Famine: Tracing the Irish Famine Generation in Ontario, by representatives from the Canada Ireland Foundation for Kawartha Branch OGS. 
https://kawartha.ogs.on.ca/

Thursday 21 Oct, 3 pm: Using Family Tree Maker Software, by Mark Olsen for Simcoe County Branch OGS.
https://simcoe.ogs.on.ca/

Thursday 21 Oct. 6:30 pm: Family Food: Using Family Recipes for Family History, by Allison DePrey Singleton for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/5589361

Saturday 23 Oct. all day: Scottish Indexers Conference, various speakers.
https://www.scottishindexes.com/

Saturday 23 Oct. 1 pm: Silent No More: Researching Our Great War Dead, by Glenn Wright for Ottawa Branch OGS.
https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/

Here’s a report on progress with Library and Archives Canada’s Co-Lab Challenges since last month. One project  reported progress.

Arthur Lismer’s Children’s Art Classes, remains 0% complete.

John Freemont Smith is 94% complete (92% complete last month.)

Canadian National Land Settlement Association remains 98% complete.

Molly Lamb Bobak remains 88% complete.

Diary of François-Hyacinthe Séguin remains 98% complete.

George Mully: moments in Indigenous communities remains 0% complete.

Correspondence regarding First Nations veterans returning after the First World War remains 99% complete.

Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 remains 96% complete.

Legendary Train Robber and Prison Escapee Bill Miner remains 99% complete.

Japanese-Canadians: Second World War, remains 3% complete.

The Call to Duty: Canada’s Nursing Sisters remains 92% complete.

Projects that remain 100% complete are no longer reported here.

Other Co-Lab activities not part of the Challenges may have happened; seemingly we’ll never know.

The new issue of the free Irish Lives Remembered online magazine is out.

Feature article contents 

Fiona Fitzsimons – HSH Prince Albert II of Monaco makes a Major Donation to Trinity College Dublin to Honour Family Links with the College and with Ireland
Michael McShane and Catherine Kerr – The Re-Indexed 1821 Census for Cavan is Now Available at Cavantownlands.com
Maurice Gleeson – Testing Siblings Helps the WATO (“ What Are The Odds” ) Tool Hone in on Unknown Relationships
Robert Flanagan Stieglitz – Great-Great-Grandfather Thomas Flanagan, A New Yorker Carved in Stone: The Search for His Parents in Cloonfree, County Roscommon
Paul MacCotter and Eamonn O’Hanlon – The O’Hanlons of Orior (County Armagh)
Eamonn P. Kelly – The Goddess and the Horse-Eared King: Brigid and Labhraigh Loingseach – Ancestral Deities of the Leinstermen
Brigit McCone – The Spiritualized Internationalism of Annie Besant
Nathan Mannion – John Purroy Mitchel, the “ Boy Mayor of New York”

One of the regular columnists, Photodetective Jayne Shrimpton, analyses a reader’s photograph who asked “ My Great-Grandfather and his Siblings in Canada – Please Tell Me Anything!” [

With 11,968 burials Tyne Cot Cemetery in Belgium has more war graves than any other. That’s according to this CWGC blog post. 451 are Canadian. The names of an additional 34,998 are inscribed in the Tyne Cot Memorial — none Canadian

Tyne Cot isn’t the largest memorial site. The Menin Gate at Ypres commemorates 54,596 who died; 6,926 are Canadians.

The Vimy Memorial commemorates 11,240 war dead, 11,152 Canadians.

 

Much to my surprise, I found the first episode of the new BBC series of Who Do You Think You Are? on YouTube.

He also discusses it on a BBC comedy show.

The episode was fun, not a lot of genealogical research though. Nobody pointed out that having Edward 1 as your 23-times great-grandfather means he is one (or more) of 16.7 million ancestors in that generation. It goes back to around 1300 when the population of Britain was around 3.5 million (with substantial uncertainty.) Lots of pedigree collapse. Likely anyone with a deep history in England could make a credible claim to be Widdicombe’s cousin.