Anglo-Celtic Connections

A detailed account in the Castleford Women’s Institute Tweedsmuir Community History Collection describes a tornado event that hit Castleford, Ontario in June 1893. The two-page document, housed in the Arnprior & McNab/Braeside Archives, recounts significant damage to the local schoolhouse and surrounding buildings.

However, research reveals a date discrepancy. I’ve found no other records to confirm a tornado in the area during June 1893. Instead, evidence points to a notable tornado event on May 23, 1893:

1. The Ottawa Citizen reported a deadly tornado in Ottawa on May 23, 1893 (published May 25).
2. The Michael Newark Digitized Tornado Archive records a widespread tornado outbreak on the same date.

It’s possible the Castleford account actually refers to this May event, with the date misremembered as June. The vivid details suggest an eyewitness account, potentially written years later from memory.

This finding highlights the importance of cross-referencing historical sources and considering how memory can affect the accuracy of eyewitness accounts over time.

Katherine Borges posted the following from meta.ai on Facebook as a warning for those using AI.

meta.ai
I apologize for the mistake. You are correct, the three citations under “Academic Papers and Research Articles” are fictional and do not exist.
I generate text based on patterns and associations in my training data, and sometimes this can lead to errors.
In this case, I attempted to create plausible-sounding citations to support the information I provided, but I clearly went too far. I should not have claimed that these sources existed or implied that they supported the information.
I strive to provide accurate and reliable information, and I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. In the future, I will be more careful and …

From my experience, when AI produces a response that is exactly what you want, too good to be true, be careful. Verify. I was given a quote from Friedrich Engels’s 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England that was entirely fictitious. When I checked the book, the quote was nowhere to be found.

Via Maps Mania, from University College London, how London has been seen through the eyes of Europe’s cultural luminaries by mapping some of these observations of the city.

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

Popular Recent YouTube Videos

Note: The “Ant & Dec” video  shows an exceptionally high views per day rate due to its recency (8 hours old at the time of data collection).

Goblincore, cottagegoth (sic).
Persephone’s blog post leads me to this

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DNA Tests Discount
Looking for a Y-DNA or mtDNA test. Family Tree DNA has discounts throughout August.
AncestryDNA’s autosomal test is $79, reduced from $129, plus taxes and shipping, until 11 August. For an extra $1, new subscribers can add a three-month World Deluxe Membership.

Weather Chat
The European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) has an experimental AI-based assistant. You can ask questions like Will it rain in Toronto on Wednesday? Get a summary chart for the next 10 days by asking for a meteogram for a city of interest.

Alan Turing to ‘answer questions’ in new AI display

Thanks to this week’s contributors: Anonymous, Brenda Turner, gail benjafield, Gillian Leitch, Nick McDonald, Teresa, Unknown.

This is one of those weeks where FMP is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Or, that could be unearthing hidden treasures if you have an ancestor among the 19,990 new records from Yorkshire this week. The 3,853 baptism records come from “parishes across Yorkshire” between 1859 and 1924. Just over sixteen thousand monumental inscriptions are from as far back as the 17th century.

Newspapers with additions before 1900 this week are the South Eastern Advertiser (Sussex) for 1861-1896, 1898-1902, 1907-1915, 1917, Belfast News-Letter, 1767, Bognor Regis Observer, 1883, 1961-1969, Lancaster Guardian, 1853-1854, 1856, 1909, 1911-1912, 1957-1967, 1975, 1988-1990, 1992, 1998, Market Rasen Weekly Mail, 1875, Rugby Advertiser, 1873, 1900, 1994-1995, 1999, 2002, and Thame Gazette, 1876, 1983-1985, 1987-1994, 2001-2003.

Four of the 153 people interred in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery who died on 3 August died in 1885.

The deaths in the Ancestry record for Beechwood range from 1874 to 1988, which is 114 years. There have to be days with more than one death. How much of a coincidence is four on exactly the same day?

According to the binomial distribution, the probability is 1.13%. Four deaths on the same day would be expected on at least three days of the year.

Carrying it further, exactly 5 out of 153 people dying on the same day of the same year over 114 years is approximately 0.003, or about 0.3%. That’s about one day in the year.

Much more than that would indicate an anomaly such as an epidemic or tragedy.

You might be surprised that almost a quarter of the years, 23.7%, would have no deaths. Ancestry’s Beechwood record shows 30 years have no burials for 3 August deaths.

According to a blog post by The National Archives (UK), between 1937 and 1948, the British Council operated a scholarship program that brought 1,400 people from all over the world to study in the UK. The records are individually catalogued and can be searched in the Discovery Catalogue in series BW 84.

While most came from countries outside the British Commonwealth, 16 were from Canada. With one exception, they studied at and just after the end of WW2.

In his latest blog post, Ken recounts how he discovered the story of Vera Beresford, a war bride from Manchester, England. She had married Arnold Norman Richard Burfield, a Canadian soldier. Arnold was killed in action in Sicily barely a year later, on 23 July 1943.

By examining his military service file, Ken discovered a memo indicating Vera and their son Norman arrived in Canada on voyage W-779 on 6 January 1945.

Voyage W-779? Ken’s source for finding the ship’s name was new to me. Searching for W-779 at https://www.scribd.com/document/431744390/TrainShipSchedules39-45 reveals the ship was the Mauretania.

Searching the ship’s name at Library and Archives Canada and knowing the arrival date reveal that the voyage documents are on unindexed digitized microfilm reel C-5717, available at Canadiana/Heritage. It has one of the lowest file numbers, HQTS 63-303-779-1, of all those on the microfilm, suggesting it’s early on the reel. Ken found Vera and Norman listed in image 200.

This meticulous process highlights the importance of thoroughness and strategic searching.

Vera remarried, moved back to England in 1960, and lived there until her death.

Visiting HMS Victory at Portsmouth was one of the more memorable visits I made with my youngest brother not long before he died. It’s one of six sites of the National Museum of the Royal Navy across the UK.

You can visit online at https://www.nmrn.org.uk/index.php/. Take advantage of the guide sheets for Researching Naval Personnel, Identifying People & Ships and more.

The latest episode (number 8) of The Family History AI Show podcast has two items on using AI for summarization.

1. FamilySearch now has AI-powered summarization in their “Full-Text Search” experiment. This allows researchers to quickly grasp the essence of lengthy documents, saving valuable time and effort.
   I’d previously used the facility at  https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text with a search for “William H Northwood” to find a document of interest — snippet below.
   What’s new is “Summarize the document.” Here’s what it produced.

William H. Northwood and Amanda Northwood sold various lots in Leavenworth County, Kansas to Frank Friedl on January 9th, 1891, also as a mortgage to secure the payment of $400. The land can be sold if the payment is not made.
William H. Northwood and Amanda Northwood (sellers)
Frank Friedl (buyer).

The summary is accurate, although buried in a summary of other material on the page.

2. Starting at 24:59 in the podcast, Steve Little talks about summarization, which along with extraction, generation and translation, are core things large language models (LLMs) can do. He suggests a basic prompt to any LLM “You are a professional genealogist, summarize this text.” Link the document, or copy it below. It will provide a summary, and a variation of the summary if you do it again. The summary will remove complexity. Be aware the complexity may be important, and LLMs make mistakes. Experiment by selecting a LLM from the resource list below. Try several!

Then follow on in a conversation to get better results:

• Be specific about the type of information you need
• Specify the desired length or key points to include
• Experiment with different prompt structures

There’s more in the podcast .

Resource List
Meta AI: https://meta.ai
OpenAI (ChatGPT): https://openai.com/chatgpt
Anthropic (Claude): https://www.anthropic.com
Google (Gemini): https://gemini.google.com/app
Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/
Microsoft Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com
Apple AI: https://www.apple.com/ai

This index provides the name, spouse name, marriage date (year), parish, and a link to the original paper slip image. Here’s Ancestry’s blurb about this collection which now contains 1,697,636 entries.

Pallot’s Index to Marriages is essential for researchers with London ancestry, as it covers all but two of the 103 parishes in the old City of London. The dates span the time from 1780 to the onset of General Registration in 1837. The more than 1.5 million marriage entries come mainly from London and Middlesex, but also include entries from 2500 parishes in 38 counties outside of London-many not available in other sources. Also included are several records from counties in Wales. With indexing begun in 1813, several of the registers transcribed in Pallot’s index no longer exist, having been destroyed or lost in the time since.

The index slips were handwritten on paper, and indexing continued regularly over a period of more than 150 years. Each slip identifies the church or chapel in which the marriage was celebrated, the names of bride and of groom, whether spinster, bachelor, widow or widower and sometimes other detail along with the date of the event.

The original paper slips of the Pallot Index are owned and held at The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Canterbury, England. The Institute may have access to fuller details that may have survived among the original parish records. (www.ihgs.ac.uk) The Institute is a not-for-profit educational organization and researches in the records themselves can be arranged. Please visit their website for additional information about the services they provide.