Ken McKinlay has updated a Family Tree Knots blog post with links to instruction manuals for Canada’s post-Confederation census enumerations.
Manuals aren’t exactly inspiring reading, but if you take the time to read them thoroughly, they may help you understand some peculiarities. For instance, there’s the thorny question of race. You may not like it, but here’s the reality of the 1921 instructions.
https://familytreeknots.blogspot.com/2024/03/canadian-census-enumerator-instructions.html
This collection contains images of marriage and baptism records for Royal Navy personnel dated between 1754 and 1878. The source is holdings of The National Archives, Kew:
ADM 6: Admiralty: Service Records, Registers, Returns and Certificates, 1673-1960 (Piece 432);
ADM 7: Admiralty: Miscellanea, 1563-1956 (Piece 1);
ADM 81: Admiralty: Royal Marines, Woolwich Division: Correspondence, Registers and Papers, 1805-1869 (Piece 25);
ADM 193: Admiralty: Royal Marines: Miscellanea, 1761-1982 (Piece 9);
ADM 305: Admiralty: Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar: Miscellaneous Books and Records, 1755-1968 (Piece 86).
Searching for keyword Canada surfaces three hits, all in ADM 193 that includes “various Royal Marine units overseas.”
Two are for the same marriage event — Thomas Newton and Catherine McCullough who married on 10 August 1814. The location, Amarachy, Upper Canada, is a mystery.
The other is the baptism of Ann G Thistleton on 27 February 1818 in Montreal, born on 8 February 1814 to William and Ann Thistleton.
Sourced from PRONI, the bulk of these ten directories are for Belfast. You will find some other towns, like Londonderry and even villages. Sadly for me, of the 1,508,227 records, only 175 were for Kilkeel. Even though it was too late for my interest, the 1865 directory had two pages on Kilkeel with a town profile and a list of clergy, gentry and traders.
Choose from selected free online events in the next five days. All times are ET except as noted. Assume registration in advance is required; check so you’re not disappointed. Find out about many more mainly US events at Conference Keeper at https://conferencekeeper.org
Tuesday 4 5 March
8 am: The Mathematics of Coincidence, by Sarah Hart for Gresham College.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/maths-coincidence
2 pm: Ottawa Virtual Genealogy Drop-in by OGS Ottawa Branch.
https://meet.google.com/nvz-kftj-dax
2:30 pm: Finding Her: Our Female Ancestor, by Melissa Tennant Rzepczynsk for Allen Country Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/9961533
7:30 pm: The History of Camp 30, by Amy Barron for OGS Durham Branch.
https://timetraces.com/durhambranch
8 pm: Empowering Genealogists with Artificial Intelligence, with Steve Little for Utah Genealogical Association:
https://ugagenealogy.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EDNoGnzuRzSZ0tDn2_kjsw
8 pm: Beyond the Church Register: Finding and using religious archives in Australia, by Ben Hollister for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/beyond-the-church-register-finding-and-using-religious-archives-in-australia/
Wednesday 5 6March
2 pm: Using DNA To Identify Irish Ancestral Locations, by Michelle Leonard for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/using-dna-to-identify-irish-ancestral-locations/
7:30 pm: British Home Children and Huron County, by Cookie Foster for OGS Huron County Branch.
https://huron.ogs.on.ca/events/huron-branch-british-home-children-and-huron-county-cookie-foster/
Thursday 6 7March
6:30 pm: Sorting Your DNA Match Lists, by Kelli Bergheimer for Allen Country Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/9951976
7 pm: Oh, Canadiana! by Kathryn Lake Hogan for OGS.
https://ogs.on.ca/march-webinar-oh-canadiana-kathryn-lake-hogan/ (Free to OGS members)
Friday 7 8 March
2 pm: Researching in Cumberland and Westmorland, by Joe Saunders for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/researching-in-cumberland-and-westmorland/
7 pm: Storytelling Our Ancestors: Genealogy in Fiction, by Cameron Alam for OGS Kent Branch
https://kent.ogs.on.ca/events/kent-branch-storytelling-our-ancestors-genealogy-in-fiction/
Saturday 8 9 March
9 am: Back to Basics: Civil Birth, Marriage, and Death Registrations, by Ken McKinlay,
and
10 am: So, who was Jack Hibbard’s wife? by Ann Burns
for the British Isles Fmily History Society of Greater Ottawa.
https://www.bifhsgo.ca/events
2 pm: Finding Your Innisfil Roots, by Mark Hall for OGS Simcoe County Branch.
https://simcoe.ogs.on.ca/branch-meetings/
Clotworthy and McQueston
These unusual surnames show up and sucked me down the rabbit hole when searching this 5,745-member database with Canada as a keyword.
Neil Desmond Clotworthy was buried in 1992 in the Friends Burial Ground, Temple Hill, Dublin. Curiously, a Dublin burial appears in a Northern Ireland database!
The inscription has him born in Canada on 15th July 1917. Ancestry has records giving the birth as in Saskatoon, living in Vancouver in 1931, leaving Montreal on 1 July 1932 for Liverpool, living near Enfield, Middlesex in 1939.
Hazel Doreen McQueston was buried in 2011 from Tandragee Baptist Church, Armagh, Northern Ireland. The inscription is that she was the wife of Melville G. McQueston of Canada. There’s an In Memorium note in the Montreal Gazette giving her birth date as 31 October 1918 and death as 14 August 2011 in Newtownards. Melville died in 1983 in Montreal and is buried in a military grave. Could she have been a war bride?
OGS Leeds & Grenville Branch hosts author Jean Rae Baxter at 7 pm tonight, Monday 4 March.
This presentation tells the story of the American War of Independence from a “Canadian” point of view. Covering the period from 1777 to the settlement of the Loyalist refugees in what is now Canada, it will examine the effect of the conflict on those who opposed the Revolution. It wasn’t just white colonists who became Loyalists! The native people, especially Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), and thousands of enslaved black people, earned their freedom through their service to the British military. All these became Loyalists, too.
More details and registration at leedsandgrenville.ogs.on.ca
AI has the potential to streamline family history research and reveal exciting discoveries. Although able to generate impressive amounts of plausible text, it’s no perfect all-knowing expert. The companies make that clear up-front.
“ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.”
“Gemini may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check its responses.”
“Copilot uses AI. Check for mistakes.”
Mistakes cross the line to blatant lying, as I found when one of them produced a quote from an old book that supported my theory. When I checked the book, the quote was nowhere to be found. When confronted, the AI app eventually acknowledged the fabrication.
Just as you would in finding “facts” in a compiled family tree, always test AI information against primary sources so you can harness it responsibly for your family history.
Let AI do what it does best. Examples are:
Suggest record sources you may have missed.
Suggest outlines and drafts.
Summarize documents. TL/DR!
Transcribe faded documents using handwriting recognition tools.
Colourize old photos.
I also suggest treating it as a toy to learn about its burgeoning capabilities in these early days. It’s fun to get it to write poetry like this which it did when prompted about the forthcoming total eclipse of the sun on 8 April.
Cosmic Tango
Sun and moon, celestial pranksters, Engage in their cosmic dance. Sun says, “I’m the center of attention!” Moon winks, “Hold my shadow.”
The sky dons its twilight cloak, Birds gossip, leaves gasp. Sun’s corona—fancy halo or bad hair day? Moon shrugs, “It’s all about perspective.”
Eyes squint through eclipse glasses, Hearts race like caffeinated squirrels. Totality arrives—a cosmic mic drop, And we’re left starstruck, craving more.
Sun reclaims its spotlight, moon sulks, But we? We’re forever changed. We’ll tell our grandkids, “I saw the sun blush!” And they’ll say, “Sure, Grandma. Pass the bananas.”
This year, the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, also marks the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Juno Beach Centre (JBC) is marking the occasion with a new exhibition “Rising to the Challenge: The Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War”.
If a trip to Juno Beach and other sites in the vicinity is on your bucket list, read the advice in 5 tips for travelling from Canada to the JBC in a more eco-friendly way. It mentions an Air Canada offer of a discount for travel to any destination in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain between 26 May and 15 June.
Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.
Tracing Your Marginalised Ancestors
By Janet Few.
New from Pen and Sword(Paperback)
This was also a talk at RootsTech on Day 2.
Toronto Public Library
The catalogue and search capabilities are restored.
Maps shape our lives – showing us not just where we are, but who we are
Don’t miss the comments.
No Leap of Faith
A timely LAC blog post
Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Mary Pomfret, Nick Mcdonald, Sunday Thompson, Teresa, Unknown.
The Reverend Donald Alexander McKenzie passed away peacefully at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital on 24 February 2024 in his 91st year.
Don was ordained in the United Church of Canada in the 1950s and moved to Ottawa in 1975. On retiring from the ministry Don worked as a consulting genealogical researcher especially interested in church and congregational histories.
The Ottawa Public Library catalogue lists 17 books he authored in its reference collections at the Main and Centepointe branches, many still available through Global Genealogy.
For years Don was a LAC regular at 395 Wellington Street, sometimes communting by bicycle, to abstract data in the microfilm room, and joining groups of fellow resarchers for lunch-time conversation in the firth floor cafeteria.
https://ottawacitizen.remembering.ca/obituary/donald-mckenzie-1089429407
This document, the official basis on which Parliament votes funds for the fiscal year starting 1 April, is now online here.
LAC’s upfront messages this year are:
In Budget 2023, the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, starting in 2023–24, and by $4.1 billion annually after that.
As part of meeting the government committed to reducing spending by $14.1 billion over the next five years, LAC is planning the following spending reductions.
LAC will achieve these reductions by doing the following:
As in previous years, here is a look at the number of mentions of some keywords giving insight into importance and trends. Here they are in this year’s plan with last year’s in parathesis: Digit* 30 (66), Continu* 41 (33), Indigenous 27 (42), Innov 3 (6), Geneal* 2 (2), Ādisōke 8 (23), newspaper 1 (1), director* 0 (0), census 0 (0). There is one mention of artificial intelligence, the same as the previous year —”LAC will work on topics such as artificial intelligence with academic partners or on genealogy services with companies working in that field.”
The following is extracted from a table showing the planned results, the result indicators, the targets and the target dates for 2024–25, and the actual results for the three most recent fiscal years for which actual results are available.
The increase in the number of images digitized for access shows an increase to 6.5 million, up from 3.5 million in 2022-23, and 2.4 million in 2021-22.
Looking back this digitization falls far short of 2015-16 when it was 11 million files, not images! If a microfilm with 1,000 frames is scanned is that 1,000 images, but one file? Clarity please.
Where is the committment to making the content of the images digitally searchable? Is that meeting the priority “to attract new audiences and better serving existing users to meet or exceed their expectations”? How does LAC know what the expectations are?
The impact of government-wide spending reductions on services to LAC clients is unclear. How much will DHCP funding be reduced? What will be the impact on clients of changes to digital infrastructure and online access tools?
Just announced at RootsTech, a new initiative from MyHeritage — digitized newspapers. Oldnews.com, a stand-alone subscription, just as newspapers.com is a separate subscription from Ancestry, is “the leading website for exploring historical newspapers from around the world.”
According to the company promo, the site gives:
Access millions of historical newspaper pages
A wide array of titles, from international newspapers to small-town gazettes
Historical newspapers from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Netherlands and many more countries
Extensive coverage of the 1800s and 1900s, from major world events to local news
Articles that were extracted and enhanced using AI technology
Millions of newspaper pages are added each month.
Available at launch, and for a 7-day free trial, are:
United States: 64,368,505 pages in 14,054 titles
Australia 24,430,061 pages in 1,705 titles
Austria: 13,545,808 pages in 627 titles
United Kingdom: 3,894,581 pages in 3 titles
Czechia: 1,796,938 pages in 81 titles
Germany Newspapers: 1,378,556 pages in 94 titles.
Netherlands: ?
I had early access and found:
There are many Canadian newspapers available, although it isn’t clear if they are in addition to those available through MyHeritage.
The London Gazette is the main UK newspaper available. It is also freely available at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/.
The Australian papers are a large set that includes various government gazettes, and much more. It looks like they derive from Trove?
The US, and perhaps other content may be derived from the now defunct Elephand.com/.
