Legacy Webinar: British and Irish research: the differences

Brian Donovan, nominated as a Rockstar Genealogist from Ireland and head of Irish Collections at Findmypast, presents the next in the series of Legacy Family Tree webinars on Wednesday at 2 pn EST.

British and Irish research: the differences

Ireland was England’s oldest colony, so many assume the records will be the same. They are not precisely because the two country’s histories and their relationship to each other were different. We all know about the terrible loss of Irish records, but there are great treasure troves of surviving records which don’t exist in England - records about war, rebellion, security and land control. So while there are great obstacles (record loss, language, differing histories), there is a great wealth of resources rarely accessed by genealogists. This talk will examine these differences in records and research techniques between Britain and Ireland, why Irish records were created, or destroyed, and how they can be used to unlock your past.

Check it out and register at https://familytreewebinars.com/

MyHeritage DNA TV commercial

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4,000 Canadian War Bride Survivors

Finding Ottawa Citizen death notices for two war brides, Janet McClymont, age 91, and Anne Huggins, age 89, spouse of a Barnardo boy, sent me back to a project I'd put aside.

Back in August 2016 my blog post on Survival of World War II Canadian War Brides and Their Descendants had estimates of war bride survival. I was not confident of the estimate of 5,500 so took a fresh look.

43,454 war brides came to Canada after the Second World War; 94 per cent were British. Their age distribution has never been published. Passenger lists record them only as adults. My estimate of their ages on arrival in 1946 is shown in the bar chart, median age 25 years.

The distribution will shift to the right with the passage of time and shrink as death takes its toll.

The most useful tool for quantifying this is the cohort life table. For a particular birth cohort such a table provides the probability of death year by year. Ideal would be a table for women born in Britain in the 1920s who moved to Canada in 1946. Lacking the ideal there are tables for women in the UK, and various sub-divisions, and for women in Canada. Some tables are for birth cohorts but more commonly for events during a year or group of years.

The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) has a database which provides year by year probability of death for the UK female cohort that reached the age of 30 years in 1951 for subsequent years. In blue on the graph. https://goo.gl/cDFKNX.

Statistics Canada includes in the CANSIM database, Table 053-0003
Elements of the life table, Canada, provinces and territories
annual (number) using the qx option at https://goo.gl/y15a8u the most appropriate data for Canada. In red on the graph.

Calculation with the ONS statistics yields 4,747 war bride survivors in 2017. The Statistics Canada statistics yields 3,514. In round figures that's 4,000 war bride survivors in 2017.

As a rough check, based on these calculations we would expect about 500 - 700 war bride deaths in 2017. Based on Canada's population of 36.6 million a community of 1 million people, like Ottawa, would expect to see 14-19 war bride deaths in a year, likely less as not all the women who arrived in Canada in 1946 stayed in the country. Several reports of war bride deaths have been published this year in the Ottawa Citizen.

IrishGenealogy.ie updates BMDs

 A slew of free historical birth, marriage and death records have been added to IrishGenealogy.ie.
New records include 1916 births (transcript verified) and the index + register image of marriages from 1869/1870 to 1881 (verified). There's more anticipated.
That's all according to Clare Santry at Irish Genealogy News.

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Indexing Opportunities

FamilySearch Indexing presently has more than 100 projects underway.

For Europe there are 71, five of which are for the UK.

UK, England, Derbyshire—Parish Registers, 1754–2005 [Part F]

UK, England, Northumberland—Parish Registers, 1754–2012 [Part D]

UK, England, Surrey—Parish Registers, 1754–1970 [Part B]

UK, England, Warwickshire—Parish Registers, Marriages, 1754–1960 [Part 5]

UK, Wales—National Library of Wales, Marriage Bonds, 1754–1900 [Part A]

For North America there are 66 projects ongoing, all for the USA, none for Canada.

Ancestry's World Archives Project has seven projects ongoing. For the UK they are:

Bedfordshire, England, Workhouse and Poor Law Records

Belfast, Northern Ireland, The Belfast Newsletter (Birth, Marriage and Death Notices), 1738-1925 (Part 3).

Individual genealogy and family history societies often have local indexing projects which can be found through their web site. OGS for instance has 

The Ontario Name Index, currently with 3,856,919 records available. No specific projects are listed. Work is ongoing. Find more information on TONI at https://ontarioancestors.org/toni-volunteers/

Ancestry adds Suffolk, England, Extracted Church of England Parish Records, 1538-1850

The 151,071 Suffolk records listed, not just parish records, are picked from a variety of sources. As such it is best used as a finding aid to more authoritative sources. 
Aside from about 1,000 16th and 17th century records for Dunwich records for the coastal strip are absent.

 These are "also searchable as part of a larger collection of related databases" which may have been previously available on Ancestry.

OHA Meeting: Canada, the First World War, and Military Scottishness

Jeff Noakes, historian from the Canadian War Museum, author of Forged in Fire: Canada and the Second World War and a co-author of Canada in the World Wars, will be speaking on "Canada, the First World War, and Military Scottishness" at Library and
Archives Canada (395 Wellington) on Tuesday November 14 at 7 PM. The meeting is part of the program of the Ottawa Historical Association, free and all are welcome.

11 November 2017: John K McLean

It was my privilege to be invited by Major James MacInnes, Deputy Commanding Officer, The Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa, to a wreath laying at the tomb of Private John Kenneth McLean in Beechwood Cemetery.
McLean, who died in Ottawa, is commemorated by a new Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone. I played a part in identifying he had not been commemorated, although his friend who died in the same incident was.
Born in 1897, his father John William died in 1900, and his mother Alice Ellen in 1904 after she had remarried. He came to Canada in 1913, not in a home child party, giving his occupation as clerk/stenographer.
His sister Constance Beatrice McLean came to Canada  in 1907 as a Barnardo home child. She married Clayton W. Gofton in 1918 in Waterloo where she died in 1922. It is not yet confirmed but she may have living Canadian descendants who would be the nearest relative of John K. McLean.

Ancestry adds UK, Absent Voters Lists, 1918-1925, 1939

Absent Voters Lists were introduced in 1915 to enable servicemen and women to vote by proxy or by post when away from home on active service. They record the civilian address and often the individual’s regiment, number and rank.

The counties or boroughs included for England are:
Bedfordshire
Birmingham
Dorset
London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham
London Borough of Islington England
London Borough of Lewisham
London Borough of Southwark
London Borough of Tower Hamlets
London Borough of Wandsworth
Tyne and Wear

For Scotland
Glasgow
Perth and Kinross.

Find a total of 156,687 names in this collection.

TNA adds First World War Pensions Award Files Index

Many of the over 1.5 million British personnel wounded during the First World War were discharged from the services with some form of pension.

An index to 22,829 surviving files in UK National Archives series PIN 26, Ministry of Pensions and successors: Selected First World War Pensions Award Files can now be searched on the TNA Discovery catalogue thanks to a volunteers project -- http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11539

Although these are British records seven relate to soldiers who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. They are:

Private Joseph ATTARD, Canadian Forces. Regiment No: 416226.
Private Louis BOURGEAT, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Regiment No: 417160.
Private Thomas NESBIT, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Regiment No: 26266.
Lieutenant J E ROBINSON, Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Lieutenant Owen Bell JONES, Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Private F BARKER, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Regiment No: 144520.
Private James RILEY, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Regiment No: 3030526.

Why these pension records are found in Britain is a mystery. While some migrated to Canada from Britain before the war and may have returned to or stayed there after the Armistice that does not appear to be the case for Louis Bourgeat.

Findmypast adds military records

The following are new to Findmypast:

Commonwealth War Graves Commission Debt Of Honour  -- First and Second World Wars --1,736,394 records. Brings to FMP the records from cwgc.org.

British Armed Forces, Roman Catholic Registers -- 1836 and 1975 -- 17,985 records. Transcripts linked to images of the original sacramental register.

British Army, Army Lists 1839-1946 -- 245,475 records. Includes Hart`s Army lists from 1839 to 1915 with a few gaps, 20 Quarterly Army Lists from December 1913 to December 1919, 29 Half-Yearly or Quarterly Army Lists from December 1938 to December 1946.

British Army, East Surrey Regiment 1899-1919 -- 28,863 records. Comprises transcripts of Boer War Medals 1899-1902, 1st Battalion Part II Orders 1915-1918, and 1st Battalion rank & file index 1916-1919.

British Army, Railwaymen Died in The Great War -- 21,047 records. An index pertaining to records found on the National Railway Museum website.

British Army, Irish Regimental Enlistment Registers 1877-1924 -- 11,975 records. An index pertaining to records found on the National Army Museum website.

The following additions have been made:

British Army, Northumberland Fusiliers 1881-1920 -- 4,340 records added for a total of 98,418 records.

British Army Service Records Image Browse -- addition of 5,480 records covering the Scots Guards 1799-1939, now a total of  9,716 browse volumes.

Remember Canadians at the Third Battle of Ypres (Second Battle of Passchendaele)

An article on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website looks back at Canadian's actions that ended the Third Battle of Ypres.

For the period 26 October to 11 November 1917, the Canadian Corps recorded casualties of more than 12,400 of whom some 4,014 were killed on the battlefield. 58 per cent of those were not identified (the red part of the daily bar) and are commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres.

The most costly days were 26 October, 30 October,  6 November, and 10 November.
18,287 CWGC deaths are recorded during the same period, 12,319 of them while serving with UK forces.

The General Register Office and the First World War

Audrey Collins, TNA's expert on The General Register Office, looks at the challenges the GRO faced during the First World War. Experienced staff joined up and demands changed in some unanticipated ways.

Read the post on the UK History of Government blog here.

12 best websites for tracing British First World War soldiers

These recommendations from Who Do You Think You Are? magazine are worth a look  -- www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/12-best-websites-tracing-british-first-world-war-soldiers.
Some of the websites are also good for Canadians, just add in the Canadian Virtual War Memorial, resources at Library and Archives Canada, and Canada and the First World War from the Canadian War Museum as background.

Remember Canadian War Dead: 10 November

The Canadian Virtual War Memorial records the deaths of 636 members of the Canadian Forces on 10 November.

428 died in 1917; their names are here;

406 died in Belgium during the final stages of the Third Battle of Ypres (Second Battle of Passchendaele);
384 were serving with the Infantry;
301 with no known grave are commemorated at the Menin Gate at Ypres;
131 were serving with the 7th Battalion, the most of any unit.

TheGenealogist adds 15,000 names from 53 new War Memorials

TheGenealogist has added to their War Memorial collection, now over 383,000 fully searchable records.

This latest release includes war memorials from Worcestershire and South Yorkshire as well as some further monuments from Australia, Canada, London and various other British counties. Included are those inscribed beside a Sherman tank at Olds, Alberta.

Fully searchable by name, researchers can read transcriptions and see images of the dedications that commemorate soldiers who have fallen in the Boer War, WW1 and various other conflicts.

These new records are available as part of the Diamond Subscription at TheGenealogist.

Read the article on War Memorials at:
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2017/war-memorials-that-reveal-ww1-heroes-681/

Ancestry adds Berkshire, England, Electoral Rolls 1840-1965

A bonanza for Berkshire researchers, 2,581,037 new electoral roll entries. Sourced from the Berkshire Record Office, Reading.
These are yearly registers listing names and residences of people in Berkshire, who were eligible to vote in elections. As the franchise was extended the coverage becomes more complete -- less exclusive.
The bar graph is for decennial years only. Records for 1936 - 1944 are missing. It looks as if some records for 1890 and 1930 are not included.
This database was produced by OCR. Beware errors and omissions. Check the images of the original printed registered linked. You may find indication that a person owned more than one property. Did they move on the same street or were the numbers changed? Did a relative move into a former residence?

Remember Canadian War Dead: 9 November

The Canadian Virtual War Memorial records the deaths of 343 members of the Canadian Forces on 9 November.

141 died in 1917; their names are here;

127 died in Belgium during the final stages of the Third Battle of Ypres (Second Battle of Passchendaele);
89 were serving with the Infantry;
47 with no known grave are commemorated at the Menin Gate at Ypres;
20 were serving with the 21st Battalion, 19 with the 22nd, the most of any unit.

Hold High The Torch

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission is asking people around the world to download a free app and use it on 11 November to share photos through social media, to create a global remembrance moment – a wave of light from Sydney to London.

The app allows you to take selfies and group shots, add torch stickers and share them on social media using the hashtag #HoldHighTheTorch.

Find out more at www.cwgc.org/learn/our-apps/hhtt