Migration evidence?

My interest in this blog is family history, while some of my readers extend that to anthropology, especially when DNA evidence is involved. I try to keep somewhat abreast by reading Dienekes' Anthropology blog, although it often goes way over my head. 

One of his postings that didn't was on the forthcoming release of results of the genetic analysis of Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, at more than 5,000 years the oldest Homo sapiens sequenced so far. 

Dienekes' blog deals with how the analysis might help resolve a debate in favour of the theory that "prehistoric Europe was a dynamic patchwork of genetic-cultural units entering the continent from different routes at different times, gradually forming the cornucopia of its proto-historical ethnic groups."

While I don't understand how one person's DNA analysis would accomplish that be your own judge by reading the post at  http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/10/tyrolean-iceman-week-is-upon-us-and.html

Heritage Ottawa Lecture: A brief history of The Glebe

The following is a notice from Heritage Ottawa

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GLEBE, OTTAWA

Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Ottawa Public Library Auditorium, 120 Metcalfe St., corner of Laurier Ave. W. 

Free, courtesy of Heritage Ottawa

What is a "glebe" and how did Ottawa get one? How did "a glebe" become "the Glebe"? Amateur local historian Ian McKercher will trace the evolution of the Ottawa Glebe over the last 220 years.

This lecture will be in English.

Leslie Huber presentation in Ottawa

It was my pleasure to attend the Ryan Taylor memorial lecture on Saturday morning in the auditorium at LAC featuring US genealogist Leslie Huber. She had driven here with family to enjoy a short vacation, and her birthday.

The talk was on her explorations of her ancestry, especially the German and Swedish lines. That was a refreshing change for many of us who never need to look at those nationality records. The presentation was enhanced by readings from her recent book relating interesting and amusing anecdotes on her research experiences.

At many points in the presentation she gave research tips, nothing very new for the not large but appreciative audience who were mainly experienced researchers.

I wonder if the Ottawa Branch of OGS, the sponsor of the Ryan Taylor lecture, and BIFHSGO could get together to cosponsor this event in the future. This would give it a greater profile, larger attendance if it became a joint monthly meeting, and be appropriate as Ryan had addressed both Ottawa Branch and BIFHSGO events.

TNA podcast: The 1911 Census: a vision of England

This was a presentation given at Kew on August 31 by freelance researcher, writer and former TNA advisor Dave Annal. He puts the census in context with the previous Victorian censuses and points out the significant change, individual household census returns, in 1911.

He gives examples of men who subsequently died in the British forces in WW1, illustrates some cases of people living in poverty, tells about those who refused to respond as a suffragette protest, and mentions dead children being listed as a reason why the 1911 census appears to have overestimated the population.

The presentation is clear and informative. Find it at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/1911-census-england.htm

Ontario Public Library Week

October 16-22, 2011 is Ontario Public Library Week.

You'd never know it from the home page of the Ottawa Public Library.

Happy Anniversary OGS!

The following was forwarded to me by an OGS members.  This is rather late in the actual day to be posting, but better late than never.

October 15, 2011. While we have been celebrating our 50th Anniversary all year, it's worth sharing that today, October 15th, is the actual birthday of The Ontario Genealogical Society. On October 15th 1961 The Ontario Genealogical Society was established in a meeting at the University of Waterloo. The fledgling Society was sponsored by the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society of Ontario, and Dr. G.E. Reaman of Waterloo Ontario was made the first President. Dr. Reaman's first President's Message is found on the front page of the very first Bulletin (now Families) which OGS members may view in the Members Only section of our website. Through the hard work of enthusiastic genealogists across the province, we have changed and grown a great deal since that day in 1961. Thank you to all members of The Ontario Genealogical Society for your tireless efforts and contributions over the years. Your dedication has made us who we are today. Happy Birthday and welcome to our 51st year! Sarah Newitt Executive Director OGS ed@ogs.on.ca

Atlantic Canada genealogy project

An amazing number of people are descendants of migrants from Yorkshire in the late 1700s, to what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The families are the focus of the Atlantic Canada Genealogy Project including those of Canada's prime minister.

via Genealogy Canada

WWII escapers and evaders

There are just 10,529 records in this findmypast.co.uk/ index to records at TNA.

Each entry in the index gives name, rank, number, corps and the reference to the original file; some also give details of decorations, date of capture, the camp in which they were held, and/or the date of escape, for example, across the border into Switzerland.

Here is a Canadian example. Is this the same B F Macdonald who later served as Major-General commanding the United Nations India-Pakistan Observer Mission?

The Concert Programmes Project

If your ancestor was a musician in the UK or Ireland you may find their name in The Concert Programmes Project, an online database of holdings of concert programmes to be found in selected libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland. Currently, it holds 5,500 collections of music related ephemera held by 53 institutions including the British Library, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of music, the national libraries of Scotland and Ireland and the Bodleian Library and Trinity College Dublin. It includes material from the end of the 17th century to the present day. Its detailed search facility allows users improved access to previously inadequately catalogued and therefore underused material.

http://www.concertprogrammes.org.uk/

via the Toronto Family History Centre Bulletin

23andMe ancestry analysis

Those of us who have had our autosomal DNA analysed by 23andMe sometimes feel ignored with all the attention the company pays to health matters. So it's refreshing to see some attention given this week at the ICHG/ASHG 2011 in Montreal. The 23andMe blog, The Spittoon, mentions two presentations in a posting at http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/10/13/the-nuts-and-bolts-behind-health-and-ancestry/

They are:

Assigning Intra-European Ancestry to Identical-by-Descent Segments using a Large Database of Self-Reported Ancestry. J. M. Macpherson, B. T. Naughton, C. B. Do, J. Y. Tung, J. L. Mountain23andMe.com, Mountain View, CA.
For assignment of ancestry to a given genomic region, traditional autosomal ancestry analyses rely on probabilistic models of haplotype frequencies. This approach has been successful in assigning ancestry in individuals with ancestry from widely-separated geographic regions, for example in admixture mapping studies of African-American and Latino populations. However, this approach has difficulty in discriminating between haplotypes from more closely-related populations. Here we introduce a method for autosomal ancestry assignment using identical-by-descent (IBD) segments from a large database of individuals of European ancestry who have themselves provided information about their, their parents', and their grandparents' ancestry. The method is frequently able to identify the European countries of origin of segments in individuals of known ancestry correctly, which suggests its use in identifying the origin of segments in individuals of unknown ancestry. The method is based on the idea that, if an individual shares an IBD segment with an individual of uniform ancestry from a given country, the segment likely derives from that country. To guard against the possibility of erroneous or misleading ancestry information, we use a procedure based on principal components analysis to filter the dataset. We examined the concordance of the method's results with the individuals' own self-reported ancestry information; depending on the country of origin, the method correctly identifies European country of origin from 55% to 85% of the time, and correctly identifies European region of origin 65 to 100% of the time. We also explore the accuracy of the method in Ashkenazi Jewish individuals, finding 85% concordance in individuals with self-reported Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. We conclude by analyzing how this method's coverage and accuracy depend on database size and mean population IBD sharing.
and

Guidelines for evaluating genetic associations for use in direct-to-consumer personal genetic analysis. S. Wu, G. M. Benton, J. Y. Tung, A. B. Chowdry, J. L. Mountain, B. T. Naughton 23andMe, Inc., Mountain View, CA.
Crowd-sourced, free, and online tools mingle alongside commercial and non-profit ventures now offering genetic testing and analysis to individuals. Groups that offer information about how genetics may influence health and physical traits base their services on the scientific literature, primarily genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but how they evaluate and report on this literature can vary. The standards for evidence used by different groups can range from very permissive to quite stringent, balancing different needs for validity, stability, flexibility, scalability, and relevancy to the state of research. 23andMe has developed and evolved a robust set of guidelines for evaluating genetic associations reported in the literature. These guidelines account for sources of error and bias -- including confirmation bias, multiple hypothesis testing, population stratification, and type I error -- by considering parameters such as sample size, existence of replications, effect size, and correction for multiple hypotheses. In addition, the guidelines address broader issues raised by reporting on research primarily focused on populations of European descent and on associations with different levels of evidence to a diverse consumer audience. We describe lessons learned from several years of evaluating genetic associations in the context of connecting individuals to their genetic information.

Ryan Taylor Memorial Lecture

Join me on Saturday at the annual Ryan Taylor Memorial Lecture, 10am at Library and Archives Canada. The speaker is Leslie Huber, the topic The Journey Takers which is also the title of her recent book. More info at www.understandingyourancestors.com and http://ogsottawa.on.ca

Thanks to Ed Kipp for the reminder

Anglican Diocese of Ottawa Archives news

Anglican Diocese of Ottawa Archives, just south of LAC, is now closed until March 2012, and who knows how much longer.

As stated at the archives webpage http://t.co/Qn3sLVKm

Construction around Christ Church Cathedral is obliging the Archives to empty its current vault and undertake construction of a larger new vault. The diocesan Archives will still issue certificates, and it will be handling requests from the Bishop's Office during these months, as it moves its collections from the old vault to the new vault.

Thanks to Ken McKinlay for the tip.

Ottawa genealogy education opportunity

Lesley Anderson's 2nd level Genealogy Class through the Ottawa Catholic School Board (Continuing Education) is taking signups. Classes begin on 25 October and runs Tuesdays/Thursdays morning for 3 weeks, until 10 November, from 9:30-11:30.

After a quick review of the basics the classes cover: Passenger lists, Directories, Wills, Military Records and Other Records. The focus is on using the Ancestry.ca website and other Internet resources. One class will be taken up with a field trip to the Library and Archives of Canada.

You can contact Lesley at education@bifhsgo.ca, call the Catholic School Board of Continuing Ed at 613-228-3338, or check out this and other courses Lesley has coming up at http://goo.gl/DQgnF

BC Finding Your Roots Tri-Stake Seminar

Saturday, October 15th is the date for the annual "Finding Your Roots Tri-Stake Seminar" at the Surrey Family History Centre on Saturday. The event runs from 8:30am – 4:00pm; the address is 6270-126 St. Surrey, BC.

There are five presentation time slots and eight presentation options in each.  Although I don't know many BC genealogists I recognized some presenters: Dave Obee, Eunice Robinson, Diane Rogers, Brenda Smith, Judith Ueland.

There's a full schedule at http://www.findingyourroots.ca/schedule.html

Internet Archive resources

At Saturday's BIFHSGO meeting I was asked how to find a book on the Internet Archive that had been a resource for one of last month's conference talks. It had been mentioned by Helen Osborn, a description of life in the London Borough of Lambeth at about the time of the 1911 census. The book, "Round About a Pound a Week", documented the lives of an ordinary working man's family.

Search the Internet Archive texts at http://www.archive.org/details/texts


It's well worth exploring the Internet Archive, and other sources for out of copyright digitized books, for descriptions of times gone by. Another book I came across is "From Crow-scaring to Westminster" describing the life experiences of Norfolk born George Edwards [1850 – 1933]. Edwards started life as an ag lab and the first three chapters of the book give a vivid impression of conditions under which he laboured as child and youth.

"At the next wheat-sowing I was again put to scaring crows, and when this was finished I was set to work cleaning turnips, and what cold hands I had when the snow was on the ground ! And what suffering from backache ! Those who know anything about this class of work may judge how hard it was for a child of six and a half years."

So much for the good old days!

Awesome Maps from The Ancestry Insider

The Ancestry Insider blog runs a post showing where FamilySearch and Ancestry are operating.

Although focused on camera locations office and digitization locales for Ancestry are also mentioned, although necessarily current locations.

I was surprised to learn that Ancestry uses an organization in Uganda to do some of its digitization. The last map appears to show Toronto as the only location in Canada where Ancestry has a presence. Although that's the location of Ancestry's Canadian offices they have certainly done digitization in Ottawa.

New version of the Home Children database

The following is a notice from Sylvie Tremblay of Library and Archives Canada

Gatineau, October 6, 2011 — Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce the release of a new version of the online database Home Children (1869-1930).More than 20,000 names of children, who came to Canada between 1925 and 1932, were added to the extended version. The names were extracted from passengers lists held at Library and Archives Canada.

The database is available at the following address:
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/home-children/index-e.html.

Library and Archives Canada would like to thank the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa [www.bifhsgo.ca] and its volunteers without whom this project would not have happened.

For more information, please contact webservices@bac-lac.gc.ca.

About Library and Archives Canada

The mandate of Library and Archives Canada is to preserve the documentary heritage of Canada for present and future generations and to be a source of enduring knowledge accessible to all, contributing to the cultural, social and economic advancement of Canada.

Library and Archives Canada also facilitates co-operation among communities involved in the acquisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge and it serves as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions.

Genealogy Services (www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/genealogy/index-e.html) include all physical and online genealogical services of Library and Archives Canada. They offer genealogical content, services, advice, research tools and opportunities to work on joint projects, all in both official languages.

Patricia Roberts-Pichette interviewed on Home Children

The latest in a series of BIFHSGO podcast interviews by Brian Glenn is with Patricia Roberts-Pichette on her project and book on John T. Middlemore and the children his organization brought to Canada. Patricia describes the book, planned for publication next year, which goes beyond the children and the organization to include the social history behind the movement.

Access this and other BIFHSGO podcast interviews at http://www.bifhsgo.ca/cpage.php?pt=59

Events related to Moonrakers at Peace and War

I received notice from BIFHSGO member Brooke Broadbent that the event originally scheduled for October 11th has been cancelled

On October 18th Brooke and Glenn Wright will be discussing researching family history and Brooke's new book, Moonrakers at Peace and War, at the Ottawa Public Library, Centrepointe. Details and registration are at http://programmes.biblioottawalibrary.ca/events/lib/eventsignup.asp?ID=26732&langtype=0&ret=http://biblioottawalibrary.ca/en/main/program?evdate=2011-10-18.

Brooke will also be speaking on his ancestors at war on November 12th at the BIFHSGO monthly meeting.

Thanksgiving

BIFHSGO member Persephone is posting on her Post It Notes from Hades blog this month and has a post I'll use to mark the occasion of Thanksgiving Day in Canada.