Anglo-Celtic Connections

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Ontario Additions to Newspapers.com
Highlights are in the Bradford area:
The Witness. 34,777 pages for 1880–1985
The Bradford Times, 29,042 pages for 1991–2017
Bradford West Gwillimbury Topic. 11,375 pages, 2007–2018

TheGenealogist has added over 5 million individuals to its
Residential and Trade Directories Collection with dates from 1744 to 1899. The new records cover England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Channel Islands, along with a few internationally.

The Byward Market and the First Golden Age of Jewish Life in Ottawa

What can we learn from the history of pre-war Germany to the atmosphere today in the U.S.?
Catch a live interview at 1 pm on Tuesday with author David Dyzenhaus, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Registration is free.

Ice storms, January downpours, heavy snow, no snow: Diagnosing ‘warming winter syndrome’

Fluke: chance, chaos and why everything we do matters by Brian Klaas for the LSE at 1:30 pm: Monday 29 January LSE. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/01/202401291830/fluke

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous,  Barbara May Di Mambro, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Gloria Tubman, Helen Gillespie, Joseph Denis Wayne Laverdure, Ken McKinlay, Margaret Dougherty, Maureen Guay, Nick Mcdonald, Robert Ross Halfyard, Sunday Thompson, Teresa,  Unknown.

Until 15 February OGS/Ontario Ancestors is accepting proposals for Branch and Special Interest Group centralized programming for 2024.  These live webinars will primarily take place on the second and third Thursdays of the month at 7pm ET using the Zoom platform.

Find out more at https://ogs.on.ca/call-for-speakers-centralized-programming/

Florida-based Peggy Jude’s presentation for Legacy Family Tree from Wednesday is available for free for a couple of more days. It offers advice on time-saving shortcuts for your PC or Mac. As she suggests, try them one or two at a time to avoid overload.

She speaks enthusiastically about text expanders, software tools that automatically expand an abbreviation or shortcut to a full word, sentence or more. Be aware the one she speaks of most highly has a 30-day free trial, after which it’s a $39.96 USD annual subscription. There are free options — I’ve not tried them.

These new records typically include the individual’s name, year, and place of residence but not the telephone numbers, for 2001 and 2003. Some entries have possible relatives.

England: 18,723,475 entries.
Scotland: 2,170,524 entries.
Wales: 1,248,242 entries
Northern Ireland: 492,777 entries

These are about one-fifth of the population, one-third for Northern Ireland.

On 26 January, 60 more items were added to the Canadiana collection. Items, like annual reports, from the second half of the 19th century predominate. This time, there are several from Hamilton churches and two years of class lists from Hamilton Collegiate Institute.

You can access the Canadiana collection online with a full-text search.

Chances are a branch of your family tree made its way to  Australia. Until 28 January, MyHeritage is providing free access to all its records from Australia — encompassing 108 million records from across 297 historical record collections. That includes 18 titles with more than one million records each; the largest is Australia Electoral Rolls, 1893-1949, with more than 16 million records.

A few niche additions to FMP’s offerrings this week.

Britain, Jewish Commercial Directory 1894
This new set contains 4,171 records from 1894. Transcriptions and images are available. 233 are named Cohen, six named Smith. You get first and last name, occupation, place and street. The original publication is organized by place and street.

Scotland, Buchanan Society members 1725-1948
Find 1,053 records, documenting members of Scotland’s Buchanan Society between 1725 and 1948. The transcribed information is first name(s), last name, year,  occupation and address. Be sure to look at the linked original, which may show the relationship to others in the collection. Males dominate the contemt while there are some women included — 28 Marys.

Ireland Memorial Inscriptions
In this new-and-improved set, you’ll find 682 photographs and transcriptions spanning over 300 years from  1711 to 2019. Included are Arbour Hill, Christ Church Cathedral, Huguenot, and St Patrick’s Cathedral cemeteries in Dublin.

Last Friday, I blogged, “I’m doubtful there were as many as 100,000 home children, as properly defined, who arrived in Canada between 1869 and the start of WW2.”

I’ve now come across the following from the 1930 Annual Report of the Department of Immigration and Colonization.

The total to 1930 of 95,016 emigrated by the various agencies is more than I anticipated. Add to it 1,018 names included in the LAC database to 1939 and the total is 96,034. Not quite 100,000, but close.

Those are the official figures. They must be the truth is they come from the government!

Are they actualy children as described by the column heading?

A sample passenger list for 1900 showed 2.2 percent were age 19 of older. If applicable to the whole it reduces the total to an estimated 93,900.

In Britain the Elementary Education Act (1870) required that children aged between five and 13 should be able to attend a school. In 1880 a further Education Act made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten.

Older than 13 and they would be expected to enter the workforce, as did both my parents in the late 1920s.

It’s debateable whether those past the school leaving age were properly classed as children. About 20% of that 1900 group were beyond school leaving age. The terminology used for those older was often juveniles or young people. 

This index provides information about historic properties in the United Kingdom and Ireland and their owners between 1222 and 1967. The properties in the index have been converted into public accommodations. The index, 481 records, is searchable by property location, property name, and associated family surnames.

Sadly my ancestors, showing a regrettable lack of consideration,  failed to be wealthy enough to appear.

The FreeBMD Database was updated on Monday, 22 January 2024, to contain 290,006,167 unique entries, up from 289,764,153 on 22 December.

The years with more than 10,000 new entries are 1992-1994 for births, 1991 – 1994 for marriages, 1993 and 1995 for deaths.

When estimating the number of home child descendants living in Canada and the proportion of the present population they constitute, it’s essential to account for “leakage.”

How many home children and subsequent generations left Canada? Was it in more significant numbers than the general Canadian population? Having moved at least once, so being less firmly rooted, they may have been more inclined to seek greener pastures by returning to their roots in the UK or trying their luck in the USA or further afield.

There’s some pertinent information in an undated confidential publication from the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Canadian Immigration Policy and Backgrounds, which includes data as late as 1937. To summarize:

1901-1911:  Immigration was  1,847,651. The net
growth in the immigrant population was 887,461, so 960,190 were lost, perhaps no more than 90,000 of those to death. That’s 47% lost to emigration.

1911-1921: The text mentions, “In 1921, only 50.3 percent of the survivors of the 1911-21 immigrants were still in Canada.” That means by the end of the decade, 49.7% of immigrants were not residents, which would include war dead.

1921-1931: “From calculations based on the Censuses of 1921 and 1931, on the percentage of immigrants still living who arrived in any decade and are still in Canada, we find only about 26.3 percent, or 1 in 4 remain for a period of over 30 years, 38.8 percent for 20-30 years, around 42 percent for 10-20 years, while a little over 50 percent. remain after from one to ten years.”

A reasonable conclusion is that estimates of the percentage of home child descendants in today’s population that do not account for emigration from Canada will be wild overestimates.

 

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A reprint of Pinks Cemetery (Mountain View), Hull Township (Gatineau), Quebec, has just been released. Recorded by Bruce Elliott and originally published by Ottawa Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society, 1973. This reprint is by Global Heritage Press, Ottawa, 2024.