08 June 2017

BIFHSGO 10 June Meeting: AGM and Great Moments

9:00am: 2017 Annual General Meeting
The 23rd Annual General Meeting of the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa will receive and conduct business in accordance with the bylaws. Details are at http://www.bifhsgo.ca/cpage.php?pt=44

10:00am: Monthly Meeting: Great Moments in Genealogy

1) A Mystery at Boughton Castle, by Brenda Turner
In late June of 2016, Brenda Turner visited Broughton Castle, not far from Banbury in Oxfordshire, and close to where she was living then. Broughton Castle is the home of Fiennes family, which includes the actors Joseph and Ralph Fiennes and the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Despite claims in the castle’s guidebook and web site that a disastrous sale had taken place of the family’s property of the Castle’s contents in 1837, she did not believe it, and decided to find out if she could figure out what had really happened… and used her family history research skills to do it.

2) A Big Surprise With YDNA Test Results, by Bill Arthurs
YDNA testing is an important vehicle for determining lineages for the relatively recent past. In his Titus family research Bill Arthurs has determined sets of modal YDNA markers for both the English and Dutch Titus lineages dating back to the late 1500s. The remaining German lineage has lacked a volunteer for testing. That is, until last October, when the test of a German volunteer produced unexpected results.

3) Despite What You Tell Your Children, More Than One Official Record Exists to Prove What Really Happened, Dianne Brydon
Family lore relates that Robert Brydon and Margaret Armstrong married in Scotland before emigrating to Galt, Ontario in 1841 with their infant son Francis. Robert’s sudden death in 1866, without a will, changed the course of his family’s history and Margaret’s subsequent petition for guardianship of her younger children provided evidence to suggest that Robert was not Francis’ father. A subsequent hunt for evidence turned up a variety of documents which proved Robert lived in Canada, as a single man, during the 1830s, before Margaret’s reported arrival. This talk will lay out the evidence compiled to appease the skeptics.

4) The Elusive George Mason Hales, by Gail Roger 
Ten years ago, all that Gail Roger knew about George Mason Hales was that in 1791, he had an inn in the parish of St Ann’s Soho, Westminster, and that he might be related to her. She eventually found out that he is indeed a relative, and that almost everything she knew about him was wrong — except that inn in Soho. This will be an illustration of how, sometimes, a seemingly dead end can lead to multiple great moments in genealogy.

The meeting is in The Chamber at Ben Franklin Place (101 Centrepointe Drive, Ottawa).

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