Anglo-Celtic Connections

Here’s the table of contents for the new issue.

Researching English Criminal Ancestors
Michelle Dennis presents the evidence used to reveal the life and fate of her criminal ancestor

Written in Stone: Accessible Online
David A. Norris looks at online sources for locating gravestone inscriptions for ancestors who served

Research on the Run? Try MobileFamilyTree!
Tony Bandy reviews Synium Software’s mobile app for family research

Searching For Florida Ancestors?
Leslie Michele Derrough recommends online
resources available at the State Library and Archives

A Web of Oral History
Sue Lisk looks at online collections of oral histories and why they can be valuable to family historians

Immigrant Colonies of North Carolina
Diane L. Richard examines the period of the late 19th and early 20th century

Exploring City Directories Online in England and Wales
Ed Storey offers suggestions for researching your ancestors from across the pond

The Stories of General Stores
Sue Lisk suggests online sites that help you understand how general stores played a role in our ancestors’ lives

Deciphering Elusive Surnames
David A. Norris looks at coping with troublesome handwriting and smudged letters

NetNotes
Internet Genealogy looks at websites and related news that are sure to be of interest

Back Page: Perils of Deciphering Old Handwriting
Dave Obee says be flexible in interpreting the results of document translations

Go to https://www.internet-genealogy.com/issue_contents.htm where you can click an underlined heading to preview the first page of an article (except one-pagers)!

 

The 2021 CHA conference is different this year in so many ways. It is entirely on-line. It occurs over eight days, and spans two months. None of the sessions are concurrent.

This isn’t in time for the first day. Here are my top three pick sessions for the remainder of the week:

Tuesday 
2:15 – 3:30 pm. Settler Colonialism, Immigration, and Empire in Western Canada
3:45 – 5:00 pm: Residential Schools in History and Memory

Wednesday
4:15 – 5:30 pm: Epidemics, Pandemics, and Public Health Responses

Find out more and register at https://cha-shc.ca/english/what-we-do/annual-meeting/annual-meeting.html/. Attendance is free with a donation request.

See the full schedule, including the sessions in July, at https://cha-shc.ca/_uploads/60a3ebf72662c.pdf

 

Poking around on the LAC website I found a link to the document Quarterly Financial Report for the Quarter Ended December 31, 2020: Statement Outlining Results, Risks and Significant Changes in Operations, Personnel and Programs.

Aside from the financial information, it identifies three of LAC’s key risks:

Using its existing systems, LAC may not be able to acquire, manage and sustainably preserve the exponential volume of digital content it acquires and digitizes and that is transferred to it. To mitigate this risk, LAC must definitely optimize the systems, infrastructure, processes and tools that underpin its digital operations. The testing and deployment of LAC’s Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) and the development of the project to renew its archival information system will partially mitigate the effects of this risk, by contributing to the improvement of its capacity and the interoperability of its digital infrastructure.

Virtual access to LAC’s collection may not meet the expectations of current users and may not help it to attract more users. Developing LAC’s digital infrastructure, digitizing the collection, making it available and developing user-friendly digital tools are essential to facilitating access to the collection. To mitigate this risk, LAC will update its user-centric service delivery strategy. In addition, it will develop an integrated management approach for its virtual tools and services.

LAC may not have sufficient capacity to meet its legal obligations regarding access to the archival records of federal institutions and to personal information. LAC’s responsibilities in this area go well beyond those of other departments, since LAC is the custodian of billions of pages of documents that it holds on behalf of more than 200 Government of Canada (GC) organizations. LAC will continue to participate in GC efforts to identify
government-wide solutions to the challenges presented by the current delivery model. However, in view of the increasing volume and complexity of access requests subject to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, LAC will need to find solutions so that Library and Archives Canada can acquire the necessary digital tools and provide the required services in accordance with service standards. The development of a more efficient digital service delivery model will partially mitigate the effects of this risk.

COMMENT
The risks are expressed as “may not.”  That should be “do not.”

How can LAC honestly write the “exponential volume of digital content it … digitizes” when digitization has decreased? Maybe the exponential mentioned is an exponential decrease!

No doubt, virtual access to LAC’s collection does not meet the expectation of users. No question about it, both in terms of the response on the web and new digitization initiatives. What can we expect in terms of improvements to service as a result of the strategies and approaches mentioned?

LAC is not meeting legal requirements in response to the Access to Information requests. Delays are months and even a year and more. Regular clients have become surprised and delighted when a substantive response comes.

Sometimes it takes a person at a distance to give us perspective and really appreciate value.

The No. 1 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station project, covered in this blog post by Paul Chiddicks who writes regularly for the UK Family Tree magazine, is a case in point. Read it for yourself.

Paul has many more blog posts worth investigating at https://chiddicksfamilytree.com/

Thanks to Andrea Harding for bringing Paul’s blog post to my attention. Suggests like that are always welcome.

The British Newspaper Archive now has a total of 42,915,614 pages online (42,441,368 last month).

This month 65 papers had pages added (51 in the previous month). There were 29 (22) new titles. Dates range from 1802 to 1990.

Those with more than 10,000 pages added were:

Title	Pages	Dates
London and China Express	91,678	1858-1861, 1863-1905, 1907-1919, 1923-1931
West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser	78,714	1951-1956, 1959-1990
Lynn Advertiser	61,502	1926-1928, 1971-1977, 1980-1989
London Daily News	22,740	1912-1920
Cycling	22,076	1893, 1907-1912
Galway Express	16,428	1853-1920
Inverness Advertiser and Ross-shire Chronicle	15,382	1849-1885
Blackpool Gazette & Herald	15,326	1894-1896, 1899-1907, 1913-1919
Northern Weekly Gazette	13,608	1910, 1922-1931
Torquay Times, and South Devon Advertiser	13,076	1934-1949, 1951-1961
Teviotdale Record and Jedburgh Advertiser	12,050	1855-1872, 1874-1878, 1881, 1885-1910
Kirriemuir Free Press and Angus Advertiser	11,626	1915-1960

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has just  completed War Graves Week to  “shine a light on our work.” Website visitors were invited to “discover your local connection” using a postcode link to “find out who lived in your area.”

While it does not work for Canadian postal codes you might want to check it out for UK addresses in your family’s past. Who from your ancestor’s neighbourhood lost their life? Was it someone they knew or from a family they knew? Can it give any insight into your ancestor’s wartime experience?

To find the present postcode, they didn’t exist until trialled in 1959, use the Royal Mail postcode finder.

Using my grandfather’s address in Edgeware the person found in the CWGC postcode search was Betty Mary Daphne Perrin, a civilian who died on 5 October 1944, age 17 years. She was the daughter of Henry and Evelyn Perrin and died at 5 Pembroke Place. That was 150 metres from my grandfather’s house.  There were two other casualties buried in the same cemetery who died on that day who lived even closer!

A brief description of a bomb experience just 500m from my grandfather’s home, it could have been the same raid, is at http://bombsight.org/explore/greater-london/barnet/edgware/ starting at the 7th paragraph. I can now appreciate his wartime experience a bit more.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

I’m sure I’ve seen that before, but worth repeating.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest
A panel discussion (audio mp3) from the LSE on what’s philosophically interesting about comedy. Both have a lot in common: showing up the ordinary as odd, critiquing the status quo, hecklers… But can humour be a source of knowledge?

Group-think: what it is and how to avoid it
Genealogical, family history, library and archive organizations aren’t exempt.

Royal archives that we pay for but aren’t allowed to read: a brief history
The examples are for Australia and the UK, but undoubtedly relevant for Canada.

TheGenealogist now has Image Archive pictures pinned to maps
See the video explanation and example at https://youtu.be/Mt5f-mAyJ5Q

Newspapers.com adds The Evening Standard and The Independent

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Celia Lewis, Douglas Wallace, Jo Stanbridge, Judith H., Michael Harrison, Robert Halfyard, Roger Thomas, Unknown.

Starting on Monday there’s a gradual build-up to a full weekend of lectures during the annual OGS conference, this year all online.

Monday thru Thursday the single sessions start at 7 pm.

Thursday is the regular monthly OGS webinar open to the public with no fee.

Friday is Ancestry Day, a separate registration event.

Proceedings on Saturday and Sunday start at 9 am with two parallel sessions. On Saturday at 3 pm there’s an allowance for a 2-hour OGS Annual General Meeting. On Sunday session go until 5:40 pm.

All the details and registration are at https://conference.ogs.on.ca/schedule/

Ealing adds 1802-1812 to the collection which now covers 1717 to 1876 with 18,982 records.
Records for  Harrow, All Saints are added which now covers 1838 to 1876 with 1,280 records. A larger Harrow collection is Harrow, St Mary with 9,775 baptismal records from 1653 to 1840.
The addition of Hayes records from 1557-1812 brings the parish total to 9,816 up to 1875.
FMP also adds baptismal records for Hillingdon from 1559-1876 although without including it in the parish list. Could it be listed as Uxbridge with 18,106 records from 1538 to 1876? 

At Friday’s BIFHSGO social I was asked about the BIFHSGO logo, specifically the colour. I recalled it was originally black and white with a rustic hand-drawn appearance. Over the years it changed to a more uniform shape and the colour varied. I’ve forgotten the details.
After the social I realized that the Wayback Machine has an archive of www.bifhsgo.ca. It goes back to 2001 with 447 captures at various dates.

If interested to see how the website and logo have changed, see https://web.archive.org/web/20101201000000*/www.bifhsgo.ca/.

The Wayback Machine is a useful tool to have in your arsenal for those times when the website you remembered has vanished. Go to https://archive.org/ and click on Web, then enter the web address (URL) for the site you want.

Just a small addition to these parish records. 1,004 baptisms are added for 1921 and 558 marriages and banns for 1936. These are the most recent years available.

The Archives annual report, available at the time of writing as Document 1 at https://app05.ottawa.ca/sirepub/mtgviewer.aspx?meetid=8216&doctype=AGENDA was received by Ottawa City Council at its meeting on 26 May as part of the City Clerk’s 2020 annual report.

The 27-page report is substantive and detailed. In summary:

With 2020 being an abnormal year, Archives activity dropped in aggregate, especially relating to its corporate mandate. Yet the benchmark statistics below nevertheless also show that, over this year despite the pandemic and its effects and restrictions (including redeployed staff), the Archives did not lag very far behind overall expected results, with its community work holding steady and its public engagement through reference and outreach being significantly more than ever.

There’s a quantitative annual summary and statistics section on various aspects of the Archives activity. For instance, a four-year month-by-month bar chart showing search totals for the Ottawa Museums and Archives Collections (OMAC) online catalogue. That’s in contrast to the annual report of the Ottawa Public Library which fails to report on the operation in anything like that detail.