Join us for an Ottawa family history meetup at the Canadian War Museum cafe on the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Socialize with fellow genealogists and share our passion for uncovering family histories.

Date: Thursday, 6 June (corrected from the 5th)
Time: 1 pm
Location: Canadian War Museum Cafe

The present weather forecast for the day is cloudy, with a 60 percent chance of showers and a high of 24°C. Fortunately, the museum cafe offers both indoor seating and an outdoor terrace, providing comfort regardless of the weather.

Parking: Metered street parking is often full, but the museum basement has ample paid parking. This is especially convenient for those with mobility issues, as there is an elevator to the main level.

Public Transit: The Pimisi O-train station is about 500 meters from the museum, making public transit a viable option.

The cafe is accessible without paying the museum entry fee.

Come and connect with our community, share stories, and maybe even discover new insights into your family history. I look forward to seeing you there!

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Does God Exist? A Mathematical Answer.

Love, grief and assisted dying
From the Wellcome Collection. In this deeply affecting story, Michelle Elliot explores the events and emotions around the time of her mother’s medically assisted death in Canada, where the practice is legal.

Ancestry adds New South Wales, Australia, Assisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1828-1896

Advanced Notice: Family History: Using military history records
On Friday, 28 June, Will Butler, Head of Military Records at TNA will explore how using these sources can enrich genealogical research and help develop your understanding of an ancestor’s time in military service. This webinar, presented on Vimeo,  will focus on army, navy and other records prior to the Second World War.

Most viewed new YouTube Genealogy Items, more than 1,000 view in the past week. Mostky US.

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Alison, Anonymous, Teresa, and Unknown.

Wow! A huge number of titles updated in May, most in the last few days, are listed at FamilySearch. How many are substantive changes and how many administrative or reformatting is unclear to me. You might want to check.

Seventy-two (72) Canadian titles saw updates. All provinces are mentioned in the titles, with the exception of Alberta which, of course, is included in Prairie Provinces and Canada-wide titles.

One hundred and thirteen (113) titles for England were updated, including those incorporating Wales and UK-wide in the case of military titles.

An addition seven (7) are exclusively Welsh. Four titles (4) are exclusively for Scotland. There are twenty-three (23) Irish titles.

On Thursday I made my way to 395 Wellington, mainly to renew my user card.  I’d not visited for a couple of years, and LAC has hosted no events to attract me there.

The renewal went smoothly, thank you Sébastien, with no queuing needed. The facility had few clients that morning. I wandered lonely as a cloud, to borrow a phrase, but no daffodils, on the 2nd floor and was one of six I saw on the 3rd. Staff, helpful as ever, readily answered my questions, and left the consultation desk to help me find McKim’s Newspaper Directory tucked away on a low shelf.

Almost nothing had changed. There are some new microfilm readers replacing the steam-powered ones!

At the entrance, work was underway to install tactile paving at the top of the steps; thanks PWGSC.

With the new facility just a couple of years away it’s understandable there are no major investments going into 4905. If that were not the case I’d be advocating augmenting the sterile list of facilities and hours with the ability to take a virtual tour of the facility. That’s in the same way that real estate agents now allow virtual visits to properties for sale. They might even go one better and show where to find items on the shelf, like the McKim directories.

Perhaps they could do that for Ādisōke.

Coastguards 1801-1952
Published in association with The National Archives, the collection includes 212,426 images and transcripts from establishment books, service records and more.

The majority of the records are for service pre-dating the drastic reduction in personnel when the Coastguard was removed from the Admirality to the Board of Trade on 31 March 1923.

British Royal Navy and Royal Marines Service and Pension Records 1704-1939
FMP have added 101,555 transcriptions to this existing collection from TNA series ADM 139.

TNA describes the series as Admiralty: Royal Navy Continuous Service Engagement Books which “give the date and place of birth, physical characteristics on entry, and a summary of the service of each rating.”

If you don’t have the convenience of a FMP subscription, digital copies of Royal Navy ratings’ service records 1853-1928 can be searched and downloaded for free from TNA with registration. The indexes to ADM 139 are also available to download as digital microfilm.

Women’s Royal Naval Service Officer Records
Images for 59,448 Women’s Royal Naval Service Officer records are now added to existing transcripts,  These are digitised images of the original National Archives records in series ADM 318 (officer files) and ADM 321 (appointments, promotions and resignations). Both collections cover the period between 1917 and 1919.
Digital copies of both Women’s Royal Naval service records series can be searched and downloaded from TNA for free with registration.

The collection added 89 new or updated titles in May compared to 67 last month. That includes four new titles
The earliest date is 1768.

The collection now totals 78,379,006 pages, up from 76,888,420 in the April update. Thirty papers had more than 10,000 pages added.

Continuing with exploring the specialist GPTs available through ChatGPT 4.o.
Be sure to read to the end to find out how free access to ChatGPT4 can get you much of the benefit of Genealogy Eyes covered in this post.
Genealogy Eyes, by Steve Little, “Look(s) at images, photos, and documents through the eyes of a family historian. Try it from your phone! Take a snapshot of a cemetery headstone, document/record, or anything else, and, using the official ChatGPT app, upload the image, say a little about the image and what you want, and click Send.”

With 500 conversations, it’s rated 3.7

Conversation Starters suggested were:

What can you tell me about this image?
Can you analyze the history in this picture?
What genealogical insights does this document hold?
How does this image reflect family history?

Case Study

To explore the capability I uploaded the following image and asked “What can you tell me about this image?”

Here’s the response.

Family Tree Expert GPT “answers family tree/genealogy/
ancestry questions using your uploaded GEDCOM (.ged) file (which you can export from most family tree software). This GPT doesn’t connect to third-parties (e.g. APIs) so your data stays within ChatGPT. Conversation data from this GPT isn’t used to improve OpenAI models.”

It has 400+ conversations and a 3.0 rating.

Suggested conversation starters are:

Can you tell me who John’s parents are?
What is the birth date of Alice?
Find all individuals with the surname ‘Smith’.
Show me the marriage details of Robert and Emily.

I uploaded a 1,778 person gedcom from RootsMagic . Querying the database I determined:

1,224 people have no death information
1,642 people have no burial information
109 have both death and burial information
10 have lived in Australia
14 have lived in Canada (not including myself!)
7 were born in Wales and died in England
22 people had last name A******* (anonymized)
10 people had middle name A*******
14 duplicates were identified of which 9 had no known last name.
240 were identified who are or should be in the 1921 census and were age less than 100 years.

Overall, even though some of the stats could be found through RootsMagic, there were others I could not.

Interesting.

Every month, we report on the progress of Co-Lab Challenges. Recently, we’ve also been tracking the number of additional contributions made through Co-Lab. As of 21 May, 3,841 items in Collection Search were identified as Co-Lab-only contributions, an increase from 3,797 a month earlier.

LAC has provided a list of 62 new additions between 1 April and 24 May 2024,

• 19 photographs
• 19 art pieces
• 3 documentary art items – maps and plans
• 18 textual items – manuscripts
• 3 other items

Co-Lab’s tasks include “transcribing, tagging, translating, and describing digitized records from our collection.” For the 41 image items (66%), this means tagging and describing.

For example, reference number 2919116, titled “Wellington Street near Bank Street, Ottawa,” likely has its contributed information within the Record Information – Details section.

Transcription, on the other hand, is more demanding. Item 5793108, “Letter to David T. Williamson from John and Annie Peters,” now includes a transcription of the handwritten letter on the final two pages.

In some additions, it isn’t clear what value has been added. However, aside from transcription, the tasks do not seem burdensome if you’ve found an item in your research that would benefit from enhanced tagging or description.

By contributing to Co-Lab, you can help enrich the records and make them more accessible for future researchers. Every little bit helps in preserving and enhancing our shared heritage.

Open GeneaGPT, by Steve Little, is a Genealogy GPT based on a collaborative source-available instruction set. An assistant for family history researchers, genealogists, and the generally curious. It has a rating of 4.7 and has been used in over 400 conversations.