TheGenealogist releases Second World War Casualty Lists

The following is a news release from TheGenealogist.

TheGenealogist is adding to its Military Records collection with the release of more than 1 million entries for people recorded in the Second World War Casualty Lists. Sourced from collection WO 417 held at The National Archives, these documents contain records from the war years of 1939 to 1945 and list casualties sustained by the British Army during the Second World War. There are volumes for Officers and Nurses, with separate volumes for Other Ranks. The Casualty Lists were compiled from daily lists that had been prepared by the War Office Casualty Section and cover the various expeditionary forces deployed in different locations across Europe, Africa and Asia as well as for personnel at home.

British Army Second World War casualties include wounded and POWs

WW2 Casualty Records will give family history researchers details of ancestors’ names and regiment as well as ranks and service numbers for those recorded. The World War 2 casualty lists contained more detail than their WW1 counterparts and often list the date of the casualty (as well as the list date), plus other information such as the unit a soldier had been serving in at the time. 

Included in these lists are those who had been unaccounted for by the military, been dangerously ill or injured, captured as a Prisoner of War or died. The records include troops who had been serving in a number of places across the world, but also cover personnel who had lost their lives, were injured at home or were serving at an overseas station outside the theatres of war. Updates and corrections appear in the records as new information was received by the War Office. 

These records allow a researcher to use TheGenealogist’s unique SmartSearch by simply clicking the magnifying glass at the bottom of the transcript. This will automatically search for any other records relating to that person. For example, if they were a Prisoner of War this will return other records from TheGenealogist’s military collection, including PoW records that reveal what camp that soldier had been recorded in.

If a person had died, you also get a smart link to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) which brings up details of their war grave, with further information. 

Use the WWII casualty list records to:
● Find ancestors who were Missing, Wounded, Killed in Action or Prisoners of War
● Discover army personnel seriously ill or accidentally killed serving at home or overseas
● Check an ancestor’s rank and service number
● Find the theatre of war in which your ancestor was serving when they became a casualty

Read our article:  WWII Casualty Lists finds two motor racing aces executed by the Nazis
https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2019/wwii-casualty-lists-finds-two-motor-racing-aces-executed-by-the-nazis-1059/

Lights. Camera. Action. : RootsTech Film Fest.

Last Fall RootsTech, with partner Deseret News, initiated the RootsTech Film Fest. Participants in three categories: youth, amateur, and professional, were to submit a short video (under 3 minutes) centered around the conference theme Connect. Belong.

Videos were posted on YouTube. The 7 Youth, 61 Amateur and 15 Professional semi-finalists are posted at www.rootstechfilmfest.org/vote/.

Judging will be a delightful task. I've not looked at even half so may not have seen the best. Of those I did view I liked Part of the Beat in the Pro category, and Serendipity in the Amateur.

I'm hoping that these might motivate genealogical and family history societies to go beyond writing competitions.

Scottish and English additions at Findmypast, and more

The major additions at FMP this week are for New York and Mexico. For the UK it's:

Lancashire Wills & Probate 1457-1858 (Index)
Over 38,000 additional index records taken from the Lancashire Archives Probate Index for the Archdeaconry of Chester have been added the collection. The new additions span the years 1700 to 1799 and consist of wills where the deceased's estate was valued at over £40.

The records in this collection are sourced from the Lancashire Record Office and the Lancashire and Cheshire Records Society. The index will give you details about the type of material available, the probate year, occupation and residence.

Scotland, Newspaper Death Reports
A collection of 72,276 death notices printed in Scottish newspapers between 1807 and 1990.  Death notices were paid announcements usually written by a family member and sent to the newspaper. It would have been a cost to the family to have a notice in a newspaper. The titles and publication years covered by this collection include:

Inverness Herald (1839-1846)
Inverness Journal & Northern Advertiser (1807-1823)
Northern Ensign & Weekly Gazette (1850-1855)
The Aberdeen Journal (1823-1839)
The Scotsman (1852-1854)
The Shetland News (1885-1963)
The Shetland Times (1872-1990)

Scotland, Renfrewshire, Paisley Poll Tax 1695
For each of these 2,488 transcripts records the amount of information in each varies. You may find a combination of occupation and the name of their employer, spouse or parent.

There are also additions to the newspaper collection accessible through FMP including the Middlesex County Times, and The People.

New to FMP from outside the UK are 93 volumes of New York City Directories spanning the years 1786 to 1923 and over 55 million transcripts of Mexican baptisms, marriages and burials between 1560 and 1950 sourced from the International Genealogical Index.

OPL Offers Digitization Lab for VHS and 8mm film

Did you know that OPL now has a digitization lab located at the Beaverbrook Branch,
2500 Campeau Drive, Kanata?

The lab is equipped with bookable work stations that allow you to digitize your old photographs, slides and negatives.

While many branches are equipped with scanners Beaverbrook apparently has the ability to digitize VHS and 8mm film too.

There's a tour and orientation to the equipment at Beaverbrook, the stations and the online booking system on Wednesday 20 February, at 10:30am.  Find out more and book (it's likely to be oversubscribed) at https://biblioottawalibrary.ca/en/event/digitization-lab-tour

Grandparents in Canada

This infographic presents results from the part of the new 2017 General Social Survey on Canadians aged 45 and over who are grandparents.

The General Social Survey is based on a sample size of about 18,000.

FamilySearch adds 5.9 million Family Notices from the British Newspaper Archive

These "Family Notices" added to the collection on 5 February come from a variety of newspapers from the British Newspaper Archive. Major newspapers from the nineteenth century include The Courier, The Scotsman, The Chartist Northern Star, The Daily Telegraph, The Illustrated London News, the Western Mail, and the Daily Mail.
It contains information on deaths, marriages and births which are advertised as from 1800 to 1900. Some entries are from as late as the 1940s.
This is another collection were only abstracts are available unless you're at the Family History Library, FamilySearch Centers, affiliate libraries or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 

Arnprior Area BMD Abstracts

The Arnprior & McNabb/Braeside Archives announces availability of birth, marriage, and death (BMD) abstracts online. They are short summaries of birth and marriage announcements, obituaries and death notices from the earliest issues of area newspapers (from the late 1800s up to 1934.) Each abstract is its own searchable record and, where available, there is a link to the digitized page of the newspaper where it originally appeared. The abstracts are from a variety of newspapers, with the Arnprior Chronicle being the most prevalent by far. The complete list of the newspaper titles that were digitized is available here were you'll find more details on the content and how to search.

The Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society gets credit for providing funding for the project.

BIFHSGO Monthly Meeting: 9 February

9:00 to 9:30 am
An Exciting Future for BIFHSGO: the next 25 years
BIFHSGO President Duncan Monkhouse will present the Board's plans for the coming years

10:00 to 11:30 am
Lord Bathurst’s Settlers to Murray Township 1815-1817
Many people are aware of the military settlements in Perth and Richmond established by Lord Bathurst, but a smaller settlement that also took place on the Bay of Quinte at the same time is largley forgotten. Brian Tackaberry will talk about this settlement, which was focused on the Canal Reserve lands set aside by Simcoe in 1796. Disbanded soldiers from several regiments, including the Glengarry Fencibles and the 41st Regiment, were given lands for their service. A small group of  loyal "Emigrants" and their families, mostly from London, England, were also settled on the land, to secure this important transportation site in case of future hostilities with the Americans.

Brian Tackaberry, a retired teacher, has served as a director with the North Lanark Highland Games in Almonte since 1984 and is a member and researcher for the North Lanark Historical Society. He has done extensive research on the Bay of Quinte region, doing several local cemetery and census transcriptions. His first book, entitled James McMasters and Family: to Quinte and Beyond, described his researches on the McMasters family. He has done extensive research in the military history of the Almonte area and was co-author of the publication The Lost Generation of Mississippi Mills: WWI Casualties to mark the 100th Anniversary of the start of WW 1.  His second book, Forgotten Heroes, dealt with Valour Award recipients from the war. He is currently a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada, and the Ontario Genealogical Society.

The meeting is in The Chamber, Ben Franklin Place, 101 Centrepointe Drive, Ottawa, Ontario

1926 Census and other Library and Archives Canada Items

1926 census of the Prairie Provinces 
While at LAC on Tuesday I asked about progress on making the 1926 census available. You will recall that the census moved into LAC custody on 1 June last year. It was indexed by FamilySearch volunteers and handed back in December. LAC posted here "We expect to have an online database by March 2019". The response to my query at the Genealogy desk at LAC was that there is no further news, that whatever work is being done on the census is happening in Gatineau and does not involve the genealogy group at 395 Wellington.

In the meantime there is access, news via a post by Gail Dever, that images from that census have been placed online by FamilySearch at https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/3029966?availability=Family%20History%20Library. They are not indexed even by location finer than province. A partial location index, at present only for Saskatchewan, is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17IfcgoxEz7qub6jJs6-SmDfe_JgvTGnnCCUj7GbQQXs/edit#gid=0. There's also a statistical summary of the census results with maps and lists of communities (search for appendix) at http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/CS98-1926.pdf if you're prepared to do some old fashioned hunting though images to find a person or family of interest.

New LAC/OPL Library
A public consultation and engagement process will soon be underway in connection with plans to build a shared facility to house Library and Archives Canada and the Ottawa Public Library downtown in a few years’ time.  The architectural firms tasked with designing the building will launch public engagement in a few weeks with local residents and people from across Canada.
At meetings on 28 February and 2 March – and online from 1 to 15 March – individuals interested in the project can participate in the first reflection activity specifically centered on the site: its potential, its influence on the building (panoramic views, physical orientation, etc.). Learn more about these activities<https://ottawa.ca/en/news/inspire-design-new-ottawa-public-library-and-library-and-archives-canada-joint-facility>.

Canadian Prime Ministers
There's a new display in the sunken lobby on the ground floor of LAC — a panel with a portrait of each Prime Minister and a short bio. If you happen to be in the building with up to five minutes to spare it's worth the detour.

Thanks to LAC Staff
While at 395 Wellington I had occasion to go to the registration and reference desks on the 2nd floor, the document order and retrieval area and genealogy desk on the 3rd. In each location I found the ladies pleasant and helpful -- thank you. If only they could find a way to teleport materials from remote storage to 395!

Titus One-Name Study Reborn

After a considerable hiatus, as his site was hacked, BIFHSGO member Bill Arthurs Titus Family website is back with over 186,000 names. They aren't all named Titus — Titus spouses and other relatives are also included — so the collection may not make it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

As Bill includes female lines it's a place to look on the off-chance someone you're searching married into the extended family as well as for Tituses.

The index shows each name associated with a Titus line classified as either New Brunswick (15), Dutch or Netherlands (14), German (12), or American (17).  There's a description of each line found by scrolling down on the Index page. Bracketed above are the number of generations in each line counting foward from when the progenitor immigrant arrived in North America. You may be tempted to estimate the approximate age from the generation but Bill cautions that can be deceiving. 

Bill also reproduces some of the articles he's published, like Reaching Ten Million the Easy Way.

Webinar: Reconstructing Your Genetic Family Tree

I'm posting this a week ahead as I'm betting it will be popular and may be oversubscribed.

Wednesday, 13 February at 8pm ET is for your calendar when Blaine Bettinger will present Reconstructing Your Genetic Family Tree in the Legacy Family Tree Webinars series.

"A genetic family tree is the list of genealogical ancestors from whom you inherited DNA. One of the goals of genetic genealogy is to recreate this genetic family tree through a process called “chromosome mapping.” Chromosome mapping uses cousin matches to identify which segments of DNA came from which ancestors, thus recreating your genetic family tree. We’ll look at the fundamentals of chromosome mapping and some tools you can use to begin to map your DNA."

Register here.

The Five Newest Additions in Genealogy at OPL and TPL

The following are newest additions for "Genealogy" at the Ottawa Public Library.


The Book of Humans - Rutherford, Adam
The Story of How We Became Us
ON ORDER 2019

Inheritance - Shapiro, Dani
A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
by Shapiro, Dani
Book - 2019 | First edition.

Roots Quest - Hogan, Jackie
Inside America's Genealogy Boom
by Hogan, Jackie
Book - 2019

DNA for Genealogists - Farmer, Kerry
Book - 2017 | 4th edition.

Researching Scots-Irish Ancestors - Roulston, William J.
The Essential Genealogical Guide to Early Modern Ulster, 1600-1800
Book - 2018 | Second edition.

Newest additions for "Genealogy" at the Toronto Public Library



How to weed your attic : getting rid of junk without destroying history
Dow, Elizabeth H., author.
Book , 2018.
ON ORDER

Si on parlait de nous... : 1861-1986, St-Valère, plus de 125 ans d'histoire.
Book , 1985. 408 pages :

Tricentenaire Seigneurie Lévrard-Becquet, 1672-1972
Book , 1972. 261 pages :

Bristol hearth tax 1662-1673
Book , 2018. xiii, 411 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates :

Mémoires d'un canton : Saint-Bruno-de-Kamouraska, 1893-1993.
Book, 1992. 350 pages :

Highlights from Internet Genealogy Feb/March 2019

My copy of Internet Genealogy arrived too late for my comments on articles to be included in the first of the month blog post. It just had a table of contents. Here are three articles I found of interest — my non-US perspective.

We're Virtually in Clover with Irish Records
Joe Grandinetti provides a primer for Irish research. Section headings are: BMD- Civil Registration; Catholic Parish Records; Caveats and Fringe Benefits in the Civil and Church Records; Censuses; Tithe Applotment Books; Griffith's Primary Valuation; Ancillary Records for Griffith's Primary Valuation; Subsequent Valuation Revision Books; The Schools' Collection; Petty Session Court Registers; Conclusion.

The History and Sacrifice of Many
The International Bomber Command Centre  "provides a world-class facility acknowledging the efforts, sacrifices and commitment of the men and women, from 62 different nations, who came together in Bomber Command during WWII." Not include are operations outside Europe and United States air operations. Tony Bandy looks at online resources in this article on the Centre's Digital Archive sent me to the IBCC website which is worth browsing and searching for names and places in your British family history.

Bay Watch
Sue Lisk describes five ways that you can use eBay to help research your ancestors and find "sunken treasure": She suggests searching by surname; town name; item name; institution; and combinations of them.

The magazine has now gone full colour; before pages in the centre were monochrome.

Robert James Epton, CWGC Beechwood

Private Robert James Epton, service number 144393 died a century ago, Tuesday, 4 February, 1919.

Born in Croydon, Surrey on 26 December 1896 to George and Bessie (Bruce) Epton. The family, including four siblings, emigrated in 1908 and settled in the Cummings Bridge area of Ottawa.

He was spouse of Florence Rose Wale who he married in England in 1916 and had a daughter Phyllis Violet Bessie born in England in the 1st quarter of 1917. Florence and Phyllis moved to Ottawa where they were living for the 1921 census and made their home. Phyllis married Daniel Smith and died 10 January 2015 (corrected).

A big man, height 6ft 2in, weight 185 lbs, he had served with the 77th Battalion, then the Canadian Ordnance Corps. He returned to Canada on the SS Grampian, which carried a large contingent from Ottawa and vicinity, and was immediately admitted to St John Military Hospital when he succumbed to pneumonia.

He was buried with military honours in Sec. 29. Lot 15. North-West. 3 at Beechwood Cemetery on 8 February 1919.

Transcription of handwritten documents

For those of us who struggle reading cursive writing, especially older forms, initiatives like Transkribus can't bear fruit soon enough. See how much progress is being made in videos posted to the READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) website:

Crowdsourced digitisation with DocScan



Transkribus around the globe – coverage on TVNZ

Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.


Moon Phase
Adding environmental and astronomical information to your family history would be easy to overdo, like too much salt in the stew. I had not known I was born under a new moon until I thought to check at www.moonpage.com/.

Urban Centres Database
From the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission's science and knowledge service a new database provides detailed information on cities location and size as well as characteristics such as greenness, night time light emission, population size, the built-up areas exposed to natural hazards, and travel time to the capital city. For several of these attributes, the database contains information recorded over time, dating as far back as 1975. The database covers over 10,000 cities worldwide.

America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’
60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.
An area is in the order of 56 million hectares, close in size to a modern country like France previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and the ground repossessed by forest and savannah. This scale of regrowth is figured to have drawn down sufficient CO₂ to contribute to the Little Ice Age cooling.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47063973

Trace your Fenland family history back to the 16th century 
Cambridgeshire Family History Society has teamed up with the Wisbech and Fenland Museum - where the registers of 32 parishes are lodged for safe-keeping - to get them scanned and digitised.

Talk Genealogy Podcast: Episode #36 The Cartularies
How the archive of old charters and deeds relating, especially, to priories and minsters can help the family historian.

Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development records: Estate files
A blog post from Library and Archives Canada.

Library and Archives Canada enters negotiations with preferred proponent for second preservation centre in Gatineau
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has completed the proposal evaluation process and identified Plenary PCL Properties Gatineau as the preferred proponent to build an ultra-modern preservation facility adjacent to its existing Preservation Centre in Gatineau, Quebec.
The project will result in the construction of the first “net zero carbon” building dedicated to the preservation of archives in the Americas, the first Government of Canada building built to the requirements of Canada’s Greening Government Strategy, and the world’s largest preservation facility equipped with the advanced technology of an automated storage and retrieval system for archival materials. The vaults within the existing Preservation Centre will also be reconfigured as part of this project, to further optimize LAC’s collection storage capacity.

Global Genealogy Sale - Act Now

There's 20% off all products on the Global Genealogy website -- only until 4 February. That includes popular publications by:
 
   Chris Paton
   Thomas MacEntee
   OGS - Ottawa Branch
   Paul Milner
   Ron W. Shaw
 
Kyla Ubbink.
Gavin K. Watt

Findmypast in a New York State of Mind

While there is one UK addition to Findmypast this week it's so obscure that you're more likely to find a relative in the New York Catholic records added

New York Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms
Over 329,000 additional baptism records have been added to our collection of New York Roman Catholic Sacramental registers. The new additions cover nearly 60 parishes across the diocese and span the years 1787 to 1916.
The collection currently consists of transcripts taken from over 200 New York parishes. The amount of detail listed in each transcript will vary, but most will include a combination date of birth, place of birth, baptism date, baptism place, the names of their parents and first language.

New York Roman Catholic Parish Marriages
Over 95,000 Sacramental register entries from 65 New York Catholic parishes have been added to the collection. Spanning the years 1819 to 1916, these new marriage records will reveal the names, birth years, occupations, residences and parents' names of both the bride and groom as well as the date and location of their marriage.

New York Roman Catholic Parish Congregational Records
Hundreds of new records have been added to the collection of New York Roman Catholic Parish Congregational Records. The new additions cover the parishes of SS Joseph & Thomas in Richmond County (1910), St Columba in Orange County (1895 – 1915) and St Peter in Ulster County (1860).
Congregational registers incorporate sacramental records other than those pertaining to baptisms, marriages, and burials, such as communicants (those who received Holy Communion), confirmations (those who received Holy Confirmation), sick calls (those who received the Anointing of the Sick), and first confessions (those who received Holy Reconciliation). You will also find records of people who converted to Catholicism as well as those who chose to rent specific seats from their local chapel. Another register type you will discover is status animarum, Latin for 'status of the souls'. These records noted the names and addresses of all the Catholics in the area.

The English title is 500 additional images added to the collection of Lincolnshire registers and records. Specifically it's "Visitations of Religious Houses in the Diocese of Lincoln, Volume II" published in 1919 documenting visitations of monasteries by Bishop Alnwick in the 15th century.

Also noted in the company weekly update are additions to the British Newspaper Archive, accessible through a Findmypast subscription, notably editions of the Sunday Independent (Dublin) and Sunday World (Dublin) post 1994.

Home Child James McCabe, CWGC Beechwood

Private James McCabe (410827) who served with the 38th Battalion, Canadian Infantry was born 27 July 1881 in Glasgow, Scotland. He had come to Canada in 1886 with a group from the Quarrier's Orphan Homes of Scotland.
He served in Bermuda, England and France.
He died 2 February 1919 of pneumonia while returning from Europe on the ship RMS Grampian docked at St John, NB.
The funeral procession was estimated at 300 with the chief mourners his wife Jeannie McCabe of 336 1/2 Elgin Street, Ottawa, two children, Stanley and Viola and foster parents Mr and Mrs Thomas Chilcott.

UK child migrants sent to Australia offered $36k compensation

An article in The Guardian reads in part:

"On Friday, in a letter seen by the Guardian, the government said it would give former child migrants £20,000. It said the compensation scheme was open to any former British child migrant who was alive on 1 March 2018, or beneficiaries of any former child migrant who was alive on 1 March 2018 but had since died...
The claimant must have been sent by a church, state, voluntary or other organisation … and must not have been accompanied by an adult family member, or sent to live with a member of their birth family,"

Although the focus is Australia, where child migration continued much later than to Canada, there are a few living in Canada who would qualify.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/01/uk-child-migrants-sent-to-australia-offered-just-20k-compensation

Thanks to Charles Godwin for the tip.