Oliver Morley, our present Chief Executive and Keeper, has accepted a role as Chief Executive of the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) starting from 4 November 2013.
Oliver has been Chief Executive and Keeper since March 2010, and over the past three and a half years has made a major contribution to the continuing success of the organisation.
Oliver said to staff, "While I'm greatly looking forward to the new opportunity with DVLA, it's been a privilege working with such a talented group of staff, our enthusiastic readers, and the people who make our archive sector so vibrant. I will miss The National Archives but will leave confident that our public task working for the record is greatly strengthened. I am very proud of all the organisation has achieved over the past three years - we have transformed the Kew site physically and environmentally, implemented a complete refresh of our world-class digital services, and delivered unprecedented transparency with the 20-year-rule change to the public record, at the same time as delivering significant savings to the taxpayer."
An update on the process for recruiting a replacement will follow shortly.
03 September 2013
Significant loss for TNA
Can you find these Scottish origins?
Are you up for a challenge? Do you research people with Scottish origins?
I was contacted the other day, via a reference from BIFHSGO member Hugh Reekie, regarding the likely Scottish origins of two Olympic weightlifters. With tossing the caber and other feats of strength a mainstay of Scottish games it isn't surprising weightlifting champions might be thought of as having Scottish origins.
Family History Activity Survey: Canadian results
Of the 143 responses to this survey, and thanks to all those who participated, 110 were from Canada.
Only 15% were not a member of a genealogical or family history society of some type.Provincial. state and UK county focused organization were the most popular.
Ancestry was the most frequent response to the query "I have a personal paid subscription to the following online databases". At 88% that was well ahead of Find My Past at 55%. Interestingly 22% had some form of a newspaper database subscription. Trailing was canadiana.ca; with LAC choosing that site to host their digitized records we can expect it to become more popular once the content grows significantly to match the subscription fee.
As regards genealogy software, 63% use Family Tree Maker, 22% Legacy, 12% Roots Magic and 5% The Master Genealogist. Among the 22% who use some other genealogy software there was more than one response for PAF, Reunion, and Ultimate Family Tree.
Only 38% of respondents subscribed to a genealogy magazine. Internet Genealogy (21%), followed by Family Chronicle (17%) were the most popular.
Societies are always looking for volunteers, yet 70% of respondents mentioned doing some sort of volunteer activity. 34% helped with and event; 28% wrote of spoke with no more than nominal payment; 23% volunteered in a library or archives;19% served as a board member or other official capacity, the same percent as did indexing.
55% percent of respondents were in the 61-70 age category, 20% 51-60 years of age. As a 65 year old Canadian man has a life expectancy approaching 20 years, women longer, and 67% of members retired, the immediate future is bright for genealogy/family history societies.
Come back to the blog for responses for other countries, and to the final two questions.
02 September 2013
Toronto Trust Cemeteries project nears conclusion
Jane MacNamara has written a blog post that the indexing part of the Toronto Trust Cemeteries project has just finished! While there is still quite a bit of arbitration to be done Jane informs it is going quite quickly. See the details on the last page indexed, and earlier posts which document the history of the project, at http://torontofamilyhistory.org/projects/.
Congratulations to Jane who has headed up this project since before its launch in September 2009, and to all the team members who have provided a lasting documentary heritage online for these important Toronto cemeteries.
September backup nag
It's a long long time from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September . Your days will be very long if your hard drive crashes and you find yourself struggling to retrieve or recreate important information without a backup. Save yourself the heartache. Backup your hard drive. It's September 2. If you forgot to backup on the first of the month make it a priority today.
Benchmarks update for August
How did your favourite genealogy sites do during August? Comparable figures are for a month ago.
August has been another quiet month genealogically with a limited number of new records; although for those searching through the Canadian 1921 census, released on 8 August, it may not have seemed so. Nevertheless, 18 sites improved Alexa ranking, five dropped.
Familysearch.org has 34 added or updated record collections in August for a total of 1,637 (1,634). Census & lists account for 140 (140); birth, marriage, & death 997 (967); probate & court 149 (149); military 116 (116); migration & naturalization 91 (90); other 144 (143). It has Alexa rank 5,173 (4,819). As shown in the image this year has seen a decline in Alexa rank, still above the level two years ago. The peak was a year ago.
Findmypast.co.uk has an Alexa rank of 30,121 (34,046). Findmypast.com ranks 145,657 (139,794).
MyHeritage.com's Alexa rank was 5,097 (5,319)
Family Tree DNA has 648,531 (643,955) records in its database. It ranks 29,031 (28,843) on Alexa. 23andMe breaks above the 10,000 barrier to rank 9,993 (12,841).
GenealogyinTime.com ranks 41,073 (50,517); Mocavo.com has rank 79,399 (99,129); eogn.com had a major jump up in rank to 30,635 (40,868).
Britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk remains at 6,944,464 digitized pages as for the previous month; Alexa rank 180,184 (181,039).
Newspapers.com contains 1,784 (1,327) newspapers including 666,480 (666,313) pages for England and 1,085,741 (744,185) pages for Canada with now more than 700,000 page images from the Ottawa Journal . It has a major Alexa rank jump to 102,761 (130,409).
Cyndislist.com claims 327,853 (327,756) total links in 200 (200) categories, with 1,788 (1,789) uncategorized; Alexa rank 102,739 (130,602).
FreeBMD.org.uk has 231,194,115 distinct records, Alexa rank 96,977 (114,127).
CanadianHeadstones.com has over 696,000 (674,000) gravestone photo records from across Canada. It scores 771,282 (668.445) in Alexa traffic rank.
Deceasedonline.com ranked 808,177 (892,109).
The Canadian Gravemarker Gallery (gravemarkers.ca), with over 760,000 (750,000) photographs from across Canada, regained about half the large drop between June and July to rank 7,078,499 (7,775,170) on Alexa.
Amongst Canadian family history societies bifhsgo.ca Alexa ranks 2,782,272 (4,951,634), qfhs.ca 3,053,397 (2,849,206), and ogs.on.ca 339,258 (418,018).
And in case you're curious, Anglo-Celtic Connections has 4,950 (4,866) posts; on Alexa the .ca site ranked 232,286, a huge jump from (331,602) even though according to my statistics August showed a decline in visitors.
Did I miss something significant? If so please post a comment with statistics if applicable.
01 September 2013
Rockstar Genealogists: Who Do You Think They Are?
Ruth Burkholder
Pauleen Cass
Bruce Durie
Craig Scott
Randy Seaver
Sharn White
31 August 2013
Irish Family Ghosts: an interview with Jane McGaughey
Jane McGaughey, a speaker at September's BIFHSGO conference and faculty member at Concordia University's School of Canadian Irish Studies, recounts how family ghosts were aroused as she explored her Irish origin ancestor's involvement, and death, at the 1838 Battle of the Windmill at Prescott. Listen to the interview, and learn more about the other conference attractions, at http://www.bifhsgo.ca/
Port Credit area newspapers online
A handful of issues of newspapers from the Port Credit area, west of Toronto, are added to the collection available through the Canadiana Discovery Portal at http://search.canadiana.ca. They may be found by searching for “Mississauga Library System” at the site, are free and may be searched. Available are:
The Port Credit News, 4 issues between 1927 and 1937;
The Port Credit Weekly, 13 issues between 1938 and 1959;
The Weekly, 12 issues between 1959 and 1967;
The South Peel Weekly, 4 issues between 1968 and 1969.
Halton-Peel Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society in partnership with the Mississauga Library System, funded the availability of these newspapers.
While at the Canadiana site take the opportunity to browse some of the other resources available.
via the OGS eWeekly Update.
LAC and the 1921 census: timeline
Based on documents obtained through an access to information request, here is some information on the process that LAC went through in making the 1921 census available.
On 27 March 2012 there was a post, 1921 Census countdown!, on the LAC blog. It advised that the census would be available on LAC on 1 June 2013 and that it was "Our intention is to make it available to researchers online, in the same format as previous censuses, as soon as possible after that date."
On the same day, in response to a comment, it was announced that "Library and Archives Canada (LAC) will digitize the microfilms for the 1921 census and make them available online as JPEG andPDF images."
As of late 2012 there was coordination between Statistics Canada and LAC. Some LAC staff gained access to the census through a strict security protocol. Information from the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project was used in evaluating the census.
On 12 February 2013 Sylvie Tremblay, manager, online content at Library and Archives Canada, and a well respected genealogist, was able to provide the following answers to questions:
1. Do you know if the census has already been digitized?However, as of that date a decision had not been made regarding Ancestry.com and availability on the LAC website. Sylvie Tremblay writes:
Yes, the census is already digitized and the images are of very good quality, since the original records were in pretty good condition.2. Do you know what format the images are or will be in?
The preservation copy will be in TIFF and be stored on one of our secure server. JPEG and PDF derivative images have also been created. Overall, there is a total of 197,529 images for 1921 census with an estimated total population of 8.8 million.3. And if they're delivered to Ancestry, would they be sent on a single hard drive or multiple hard drives?
Because of the number of images and the size, multiple hard drives will be required.4. Would LAC also provide metadata by role/folder, or even down to the image level?
Only an original paper format finding aid existed for 1921 census. Statistics Canada has provided us a copy and we are currently creating an electronic copy. We are capturing geographical metadata such as province, district name and number, sub district name and number. Our intention is to create metadata based on sub districts that will provide first and last image numbers for each sub district. I am providing you a sample for Alberta.
"the 1921 census is still under discussion with a third-party about offering it online. I expect that the decision will be made soon, whether it will be available on LAC website or not."Until mid-May there was considerable turmoil at LAC. The Librarian and and Archivist had come under pressure owing to some poor decisions, including expenditures in Spanish language training, which resulting in his departure on 15 May. Two senior staff were absent on stress leave. Undoubtedly the ability to move items through the bureaucratic system was impeded.
On 31 May an agreement with Ancestry.com was signed and LAC staff had a news item ready to distribute. However, no information was released until 4 June when it was announced that "Census of Canada, 1921 - Available to Researchers in the Next Few Weeks"
It is unclear why there was a more than two month delay in making the 1921 census available on Ancestry.com. Certainly Ancestry needed time to load and link the collection. A hold may have been placed at the political level as Minister James Moore became concerned about LAC making its collections available through third parties. Only with the Cabinet shuffle on 15 July, and appointment of a new Minister, was the census finally made available on 8 August.
Although LAC appeared to have good intentions in providing a "countdown" the performance did not live up to client expectations. Genealogists became frustrated at the lack of substantive information, especially in the weeks before the official transfer to LAC and after until 8 August and release.
More Wow at OGS 2014
I'm delighted to learn that Paul Jones and Marian Press, both highly respected genealogists from Toronto, will be speakers at the Ontario Genealogical Society 2014 conference.
30 August 2013
Caring for Medals and Trophies
From the National Museum of Australia, a 55 minute YouTube video on practical means of caring for your collection of medals, trophies and similar objects.
LAC`s 2007 blunder
In 2007 LAC and Ancestry.com signed a continuing framework agreement regarding digitization of LAC content and making that content available through Ancestry servers.
A document just received under an Access to Information request shows that under the 2007 agreement Ancestry.com would maintain rights to the intellectual property and images in perpetuity. It would prohibit LAC from properly managing its own collection. LAC would give up the right to manage document images, including of the census ... in perpetuity.
This was a blunder. Although the significance of online access may not have been so obvious in 2007, and similar organizations in other countries made the same blunder, in no way should the government have given up perpetual rights to images of a major Canadian collection, like the census, to a commercial organization, and a US one at that.
Several people and organizations have expressed concern about arrangements between Canadiana.ca and LAC regarding the former being granted exclusive rights to host images of documents owned by the latter. We have been ensured these are time-limited arrangements that would make images, not otherwise likely to be available online, widely available. Given the 2007 rights blunder by LAC there is cause to be cautious.
To rectify the situation with Ancestry.com in August 2012 LAC started negotiation of a new agreement. This was successful. In addition the agreement encompassed rights to as many as 11 other collections including the 1921 census with a three year period of exclusivity. Agreement in principle was reached in September but it took until 23 May this year for the lawyers to finally conclude a mutually acceptable legal text which was signed at the end of May.
To what extent was granting this access to Ancestry.com dictated by the need to rectify the previous error? Is LAC now free to make census and other document images available to other organizations?
News on News: The British Newspaper Archive
Now there's information from the project updating on the situation.
"We now have almost 7 million pages and with our new processing system we are going to be able to add around another 4 million pages in the next 12 months. Compare that with the (although rather impressive if we do say so ourselves), 3 million pages processed in the past 20 months since launch! However, in order to support this great improvement in production throughput, we have been very busy modifying our scanning and OCR workflow process. Don’t fear though, we have still been scanning titles and have almost 1 million pages ready to process. We are extremely sorry for the delay, but we will be able to start adding these pages within the next few weeks.This is an important project for family history. It's good to see plans to get it back to the target digitization rate. Hopefully technological advance will allow catching up on the backlog.
In addition, our licencing team have been working hard with publishers to secure access to even more 20th Century titles (up to 1953)! We’ll be able to give you more details shortly. We’re excited and can’t wait to tell you more!"
29 August 2013
British WW1 soldiers wills and letters available
Wills and letters of 278,000 English and Welsh soldiers from World War I are to be made available online according to articles from the BBC and the Guardian.
Search the index by name, date or regimental number for free, and obtain a copy of any will for a statutory fee of £6.
Information on accessing Scottish and Irish soldiers wills, which are archived separately, is available on Chris Paton's blog at http://goo.gl/Ui1hWj
The Financial Health of Canadian Genealogical Societies
Each year organisations federally registered as charities in Canada for tax purposes are required to file T3010 returns with the Canada Revenue Agency. Part of the return, including financial information, is available on the Revenue Canada website.
Each year I summarise those returns. Here they are for the 2012 year of operation with a comparison to 2011 in parenthesis. These are taken mainly from Schedule 6 but in some cases where that is not available from Section D. Go to http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/chrts-gvng/lstngs/menu-eng.html and search for "genealogical" or "family history" to see the complete returns.
Summary
More societies ran a deficit in 2012 than the previous year. AGS and OGS had substantial surpluses of revenue over expenditures.
The Quebec Family History Society had the highest annual membership fee ($65), the Genealogical Society of Nova Scotia the lowest ($30).
The Alberta Genealogical Society
Total assets of $540,282 ($536,466), and liabilities of $170,921 ($200,592). The total revenue was $239,942 ($254,380) of which the major component was revenue received from the provincial government of $132,612 ($140,322). Expenditures totalled $206,455 ($218,231), the total expenditure on management and administration being $116,928 ($124,320). The membership fee remains at $50.
British Columbia Genealogical Society
The society finds itself in a reasonably balanced financial situation. Total assets were $200,748 ($203,016) and liabilities $6,939 ($10,085). Total revenue was $25,596 ($24,783). Expenditures totalled $26,422 ($22,502). The individual annual membership fee remains unchanged at $45.00,
British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa
No report is filed as of 28 August 2012. The membership fee remains at $40.
Manitoba Genealogical Society
Total assets of $34,386 ($50,743) and liabilities of $ 11,583 ($22,458). Total revenue was $49,448 ($43,966). Expenditures totalled $59,162 ($58,222) of which management and administration accounted for $6,255 ($4,442). The annual membership fee remains unchanged at $40.
New Brunswick Genealogical Society
2012 return not posted as of 28 August 2013. The annual membership fee remains at $35.
Genealogical Association of Nova Scotia
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012, GANS had total assets of $299,013 ($303,274) and no reported liabilities as in the previous year. Total revenue was $27,317 ($32,549). Total expenditures were $ 31,578 ($30,717). The Association's annual membership fee remains at $30.00.
Ontario Genealogical Society
Total assets of $ 2,422,659 ($ 2,324,973) of which $ 1,683,357 ($1,480,530) was held as cash bank accounts and short-term investments. Liabilities totalled $248,103 ($246,412). Total revenue was $757,938 ($ 621,393) including $289,240 ($297,991) from memberships. Expenditures totalled $548,437 ($617,151) of which $141,664 ($136,994) was spent on management and administration. The annual membership fee of $60 membership will increase by by 2% in 2014 and in 2015 plus any fee for branch membership, typically $15.
Québec Family History Society
Total assets of $68,127 ($ 65,742) of which $ 60,304 ($49,056) was held as cash bank accounts and short-term investments. Liabilities totalled $12,655 ($7,899). Total revenue was $46,507 ($60,623) the largest component of which, $ 32,649 ($34,440) was for memberships. Expenditures totalled $48,878 ($47,420) including $24,815 ($28,886) for occupancy costs. There continue to be no costs for management and administration. The annual fee continues at $65.
Saskatchewan Genealogical Society
Total assets of $111,629 ($46,921). Liabilities totalled $119,484 ($ 65,054). Total revenue of $255,601 ($261,767) included $152,955 ($146,050) from provincial government sources. Expenditures of $255,408 ($262,316) included $176,707 ($170,572) for management and administration. A regular family membership was $40.00, $50.00 with access to Society databases online, unchanged from the previous year..
Victoria Genealogical Society
No financial statement was available. Individual annual membership remained $50.
From London to Brighton in 3 minutes
This time a special train journey was made, with the improvements continually being made there is now no non-stop service to Brighton; soon there will be no non-stop service between London and Gatwick. If things get much better non-stop services will be entirely eliminated!
All three journeys, 1953, 1983 and 2013, are shown in a synchronized, side-by-side video at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23853863
Thanks to Paul Jones for the tip.
28 August 2013
Ancestry adds TNA Non-conformist Records
- Ancestry is playing catch-up again, this time with Non-conformist BMD records from The (UK) National Archives for which they did not get the original digitization contract.
Under the heading England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1970, you'll find over 2.5 million records from:
- RG 4:General Register Office: Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths surrendered to the Non-parochial Registers Commissions of 1837 and 1857.
RG 5: General Register Office: Birth Certificates from the Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist Registry and from the Wesleyan Methodist Metropolitan Registry.
RG 8: General Register Office: Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths surrendered to the Non Parochial Registers Commission of 1857, and other registers and church records in the Protectorates of Africa and Asia.
Beginner's Guide to Genetic Genealogy
There's a new introduction to genetic genealogy, so new it wasn't available last Saturday when I was lecturing in Brampton. Written by Kelly Wheaton, the 13 chapters are:
LESSON 1: An Overview of the Types of DNA Used By Genetic Genealogists
LESSON 2: Which DNA Test
LESSON 3: YDNA Exploring the Y Part 1
LESSON 4: YDNA Part 2
LESSON 5: Introduction to atDNA
LESSON 6: atDNA Nuts and Bolts
LESSON 7: atDNA Ancestral Origins Part 1
LESSON 8: atDNA Ancestral Origins Part 2
LESSON 9: atDNA Matches
LESSON 10: atDNA More with Matches
LESSON 11: Deeper Exploration by Subject
LESSON 12: Chromosome Mapping
LESSON 13: Privacy, Paranoia, Patience and Persistence
