Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

This past week Ancestry had some problems adding items to its catalogue. It's now fixed (apparently) surfacing a database of 27,370 items added on 5 March — London, England, Royal Holloway and Bedford College Student Registers, 1849-1931. Among the first places in Britain where women could access higher education were Bedford College opened in 1849 and Royal Holloway College in 1886. In 1900, the colleges became part of the University of London merging to form Royal Holloway in 1985. Find a searchable index and images of the originals. You may find some unusual names, as I did searching for last name Reid, almost as if the handwritten documents had been machine transcribed and not reviewed.

Ancestry also updated the database Quebec, Canada, Notarial Records, 1637-1935 (in French) to 6,529,462 records.

COVID-19
With the situation expected over the next few weeks cancellations have been escalating. All Family History Centres are closed as are all Ottawa Public Library Branches, which means Historical Society of Ottawa events cancelled. No OGS events up to an including Gene-O-Rama. RootsTech London has been cancelled for 2020, which seems quite surprising considering it was not scheduled until November.

For perspective, compare total deaths from the Johns Hopkins University Database (5,819 as of Saturday evening) with those from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 which killed between 20 and 100 million people, including about 30,000–50,000 Canadians. And remember, the world population was 1.8 billion in 1918 compared to 7.8 billion today.

What to do instead 
With the withdrawal of services, and especially if you're self-isolating, why not consider this as a case of "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade."  You probably have a mental list of things you've been procrastinating over. I do. This is the chance to pick one or more items and get going. As a start try some online education. For instance, there are new items in the MyHeritage Knowledge Base.

Webinars
Introduction to DNA Testing in Genealogy and Family History
How to Use the Smart Matches & Record Matches MyHeritage Technologies
Suggested Relationship Paths: An Inside Look at the Theory of Family Relativity
Get the Most from the MyHeritage Search Engine for Historical Records
Following Your Family’s Immigration Trail on MyHeritage
MyHeritage: New Advanced Features and Technologies
Tune Up Your Family Tree with the MyHeritage Consistency Checker
Visualizing Ancestral Lines with DNA AutoClusters

Articles
What Smart Matches™ Are and How to Make the Most of Them
How to Get the Most Out of Your Family Site
Fun with Family Statistics
How to Start Building Your Family Tree on MyHeritage
How to Keep Track of Family Events with MyHeritage
What’s Considered a Strong DNA Match?
Managing Your Privacy on MyHeritage
Displaying Family Names on MyHeritage

If you're interested in Ireland and DNA and can spare 40 minutes try The Irish DNA Atlas – Revealing Irish History through Genetics from Edmund Gilbert.

The Yale Problem Begins In High School
On victimhood culture.

Just saying.
Did anyone notice that most of the senior government people (not politicians) speaking in COVID-19 are women?

Thanks to this week's contributors
Ann Burns, Bill Clayton, Bryan Douglas Cook, BT, Daniel Horowitz, Diana Thomson, Gail Dever, Jenna Bruno, Linda Stufflebean, Richard McGregor.