See you in Toronto

I'll be presenting in Toronto on Saturday at the Toronto Branch OGS event GENEALOGY IN LONDON: A workshop about searching for Londoners and other British ancestors.

My presentation is:

Bereft of Life, They Rest in Peace. But Where?

Finding a burial can mean extending your family tree by discovering a relative or relatives buried in the same or a nearby plot. But in his book Ancestral Trails Mark Herber succinctly states: "It can be very difficult to locate an ancestor's place of burial in London..." Unlike English BMDs, there is no single national registration of burials. The difficulty is compounded for those of us an ocean away who can't just hop on a London Transport bus to search in cemetery or local record offices. Now the Internet genealogy database revolution is starting to help the search. In overview, 18th century and earlier burial records for London and suburbs are scarce. More than 350,000 burials from the 19th century, before the closure of central London churchyards under the Metropolitan Burials Act of 1852, have been indexed and are available online. Of the commercial cemeteries established in the 1840s only Abney Park has an online database. Indexes of burials from municipal cemeteries established as a result of the 1852 Act are starting to become available online, but mostly still require searching in original chronological records. A process to help narrow the search for candidate cemeteries will be described.

There are more readers for this blog in Toronto than anywhere else, although Ottawa and Gatineau together have more readers. If you're coming to the Toronto event do introduce yourself.

For the Ottawa people, I've tentatively agreed to make this presentation for BIFHSGO in April.