The National Archives, UK, offers five online presentations in January.

Family History: Using First World War Army Records
Saturday 13 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Will Butler, Head of Military Records at The National Archives,, explores key sources for researching those who served in the First World War.

Family History: Using Civilian Internee Records
Saturday 20 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Roger Kershaw, Collections Specialist at The National Archives, explains how to find records of civilian internment relating to individuals.

The Forgers: The Story of the Holocaust’s Most Audacious Rescue Operation
Wednesday 24 January 2024, 19:30 (2:30 pm EST)
Roger Moorhouse in conversation about the forgotten story of the Holocaust’s most audacious rescue operation, saving thousands of Jewish lives in the Second World War.

Poverty, Language and the New Poor Law in Wales, 1834–1871
Friday 26 January 2024, 14:00 (9 am EST)
Records specialist Paul Carter delves into the difficulties faced by the poor in England and Wales when dealing with a central poor law authority, responsible for the high-level administration of poor relief for millions of poor people across a bilingual society.

Family History: Using Prisoner of War Records
Saturday 27 January 2024, 10:30 (5:30 am EST)
Roger Kershaw is back to help get started researching ancestors who were taken as Prisoners of War during the Second World War. You’ll be introduced to Prisoners of War from across different theatres of war and some of the key records held by The National Archives.

Find out more and book at https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/visit-us/whats-on/online-events/

Library and Archives Canada has a database, linked from here, with 33,036 references to immigrants who stayed, were born/baptised, married or buried at the Grosse Île Quarantine Station between 1832 and 1937.

The records are particularly valuable for those of Irish origin for the period before 1865 after which passenger lists for incoming vessels to Quebec City/Montreal became available.

The database has transcribed all information contained in the various source documents. While it is possible to obtain copies of some of the original records, those in the custody of the Québec Service Centre of Parks Canada contained in oversized registers are too fragile to consult, or even for photocopying.

That’s unfortunate as the search capability at LAC is limited. You can search by surname, given name(s), and keyword. If you know the name of a ship of interest you can search for that in the keyword but results displayed don’t show the year. You have to click the item number for each hit to see that. It would be useful to have a tabulation of the ships by year, but you cannot keyword search by year.

You could get lucky and find information on a ship and voyage, but hardly any passenger names, at The Ships List.

In This Week’s Online Genealogy Events post, I highlighted (bolded) Wednesday afternoon’s Legacy Family Tree Webinar presentation, “Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy: New Beginnings in 2024” by Steve Little.

If you missed it, I recommend taking 90 minutes to view it in the next few days while it’s free if you’re not a LFTW subscriber. If you’ve some experience with AI, like ChatGPT, Bing or Bard, be patient with the first part. 

It will be interesting to see how his predictions for the year pan out when he reviews them at year’s end. Will handwriting recognition technology reach the stage where we can employ it ourselves on a document of our choice, which Little says is still beyond the boundary of practicality?

Webinar Library

The main cover story for the January 2024 issue is

Websites To Watch

Jonathan Scott previews resources coming
online in 2024 and identifies Second World War service records being digitized by Ancestry as the biggest highlight. He speculates that with the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings falling in June, that might be the focus for the initial release.
Library and Archives Canada gets a mention in the coverage of Findmypast, while the focus of their effort is expected to be extracting family notices from the newspaper collection.

In the other featured article, Felicity Day explores why our Georgian ancestors loved to dance.

That scratches the surface. Fire up your browser to read the rest of the magazine available online via your public library in much of Canada.

Catch up on what was new at FamilySearch in 2023 in this review of highlights. The article covers free records, family trees, digital books, libraries and centers, discovery experiences, help and support, and RootsTech 2023.

It also highlights the FamilySearch collaboration with Library and Archives Canada and Ancestry to make the 1931 Census freely available online.

I thought to add the Ottawa Public Library becoming a FamilySearch affiliate, but looking back, that was over a year ago, in December 2022.

Today is the 297th anniversary of the birth of James Wolfe in Westerham, Kent.
Remembered chiefly for his victory in 1759 over the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec, leading to the capture of Montreal in 1760 and the acquisition of Canada by Britain in 1763. He is arguably one of, if not the most significant persons in the history of Canada. 

The photo shows the vista over London from his statue at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, adjacent to the zeroth meridian.

I’ll be watching the first episode of the 10th series of PBS’ Finding Your Roots on Tuesday. Alanis Morrissette’s family were neighbours when I moved into my home in Ottawa. Her mother came around to welcome us and insisted we come over to hear a tape of her daughter singing.

If interested in her family story, check your local listings. It appears to be airing at 8 pm in Ottawa,

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Back to a classic, one of my most helpful blog posts for those stymied by lack of access to WW2 service records.

Did they cross the Atlantic during the Second World War? … more.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

On 27 December, Libary and Archives Canada published a progress report on activity toward improving access to information and privacy (ATIP).

Most requests by family historians relate to records of former Canadian Armed Forces members. Reported together with records of former federal public servants, 6,520 requests were completed in the three months to the end of November, that’s 55% of the number outstanding at the start of the period. The average file was 24 pages.

However, LAC had 10,554 overdue ATIP requests of all types remaining in its queue on 30 November 2023. That excludes requests made outside the ATIP process.

Annually, 13,000 requests are received.  How long can you now expect to wait? According to the report, the ATIP Team can now respond to 73% of new requests within legislated timeframes, generally 30 calendar days from receiving an official request.

You may not have to wait, if perchance your request had been previously dealt with. According to the report “Soon, the public will be able to access previously released ATI requests via LAC’s website rather than having to submit a dedicated request to the ATIP Team. These measures will help make LAC’s archival records available to a wider public in a more immediate way.” When will “soon” be?

If interested in the details, read the full report at https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng/corporate/transparency/reports-publications/atip-reports/atip-action-plan-progress/Pages/december-2023-update.aspx

To end the year, an acknowledgement and thanks to the organizations that supported the blog by providing complimentary access to their services during the year. In alphabetical order:

Ancestry for access to full Ancestry.ca, newspapers.com and Fold3 subscriptions.

FamilyTreeWebinars for full access to familytreewebinars.com

Findmypast for full access to findmypast.com.

MyHeritage for full access to MyHeritage.com.

Also, until they faded to black, to Moreshead Magazines for pdf copies of Internet Genealogy.