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Showing posts from January, 2021

Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show aside to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her that one of those heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are al...
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Who's That Person in the Picture?

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Almost every family is bound to have a collection of pictures that nobody knows who the picture is of. I myself dealt with this very challenge when I inherited a collection of old photographs from my grandmother this past summer. I never had a chance to share my passion for genealogy with my grandmother, and consequently I never got the chance to sit down with her and learn about who the people in the pictures were. My mother did get the chance to see these pictures before but she remembers absolutely nothing from the conversation! When events like this happen, it is easy to loose hope that we will ever be able to identify the people in the pictures. Thankfully, the internet has made it a little bit easier to solve these mysteries. What type of picture is it? What I mean by this question is what material was the photograph printed on/how was it developed. Photography methods have rapidly evolved since the 1840's and so has the methods used to develop and print photographs. By ident...
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Was Your Ancestor Double Enumerated?

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Double enumerations are a rare but wonderful things to find when searching for your ancestor in a census. Often times this additional entry can tell us a lot about a person and their life at the time the census was taken. Determining if someone was actually double enumerated can be tricky but is definitely worthwhile.  What is a double enumerations? A double enumeration is a statistical error of sorts, on the enumerators part, where the same person is recorded two times in the same census. There are a few ways that this can happen, but the most frequent cause is that the person was living in two different places at the time. For example, a child in the household may have been living away at school but also have been recorded as living with the family back home.  How to tell if they are the same person? The more recent the census, the easier it is to tell if two entries are truly the same person. The reason for this is that more recent census returns offer more information abou...
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How to Write an Ancestor's Life Story

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Writing an ancestor's story is one of the best ways to not only document your research but also to share it with others. The challenge that many genealogists encounter is that the story doesnt fully capture the context of who their ancestor was. More often then not the story of their life comes off as a list of dates stating when and where they were born, who their parents were, when and where they got married, who they married, and when and where they died. I dont know about you, but there is a heck of a lot more to me than the birth, marriage, and death facts that I listed above.  So how do we write a story that captures their full life?  Step #1: Expand your research To fully understand a person's life we need to FULLY research their life from birth to death. This requires us to go deeper than the BMD and census records. Start by searching the military, criminal, immigration, and other collections available on sites such as Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, and Family Se...
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Angel Meadow: Britain's Most Horrid Slum

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Manchester has been described as the "cradle of the industrial revolution" and as the powerhouse of the cotton industry. As the cotton industry boomed so did the population. Nestled in amongst the mills, tanneries, gas works, and other industries, overcrowding was rife. What was once an upper class suburban settlement, had fallen so deeply into a state of disrepair that it no longer reflected the peacefulness conveyed by its name.  By the mid 1840's several slums had developed but none were more horrible than Angel Meadow. The slum itself formed around St Michael's Church and was bounded by Rochdale Rd, Miller St, Cheetham Hill Rd and Gould St. This brought the entire area of the 30,000 person slum to a mere 33 acres - that is equivalent to approximately 43.5 ft^2 (or 4 m^2) per person.  During the Victorian era, slums were often described as having two classes of people, and Angle Meadow was no exception. Of all the accounts given, Mercle held back the least when des...
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Helpful Tricks for Tracing Your Irish Roots

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I have read many times over the years that Irish genealogy is not for the faint of heart, and this statement couldn't be more true. After revisiting the same lineages countless times and performing extensive research, I have identified several helpful tricks for tracing your Irish roots.  There are several factors that make Irish research so tricky.  Obstacle #1. After arriving in the new country the exact county or town they come from is rarely given  Obstacle #2. The names are often quite similar as many families were large and chose to follow the                             traditional naming pattern.  Obstacle #3. Many Catholics were uneducated as a result of the Penal Laws  and poverty The point at which obstacles #1 and #2 are encountered vary based on the person you are searching for, but for the purpose of this post I will be talking addressing them in the order they are listed ab...
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Separating Family History from Folklore

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My Christmas break from blogging lasted a little longer than I initially planned, but now I am finally back (or at least I hope!). During my time off I had plenty of time to reflect on the events of my childhood, more importantly the time I spent with my recently deceased grandfather. He was a man that was an absolute legend in his own right. Grandpa was a gifted storyteller and had the innate ability to tell a story so that it remained captivating no matter how many times one heard it. As I remembered these stories I couldn't help but notice they all traced back to one thing - family. Every story he ever told was either about his life, one of his ancestor's lives, or was a story that one of his ancestor's had told him in his youth. This oral history of sorts always fascinated me. As I grew older though I began to question how much of them was fact and how much was fiction. Many of my  relatives said we would never know how much truth there was to the stories that he told, ...
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How to Analyze a Timeline Using Historical Context

In a previous post I explained how to construct a timeline using Excel. If constructed correctly a timeline can be used as an effective tool for analyzing major changes in a person's life. Major life events can be analyzed by adding historical context. This information can be found in a variety of different forms and does not have to mention your ancestor directly. I like to consider anything that related to: Their occupation Where they worked Who they worked with Where they lived (exact address, street, and community) Type of housing Who they lived with Occupations of people living nearby  Their religion Where they worshiped Their FAN club The legal system To properly explain how to use this technique I am going to use an example of someone that I am currently researching.  Case Study: David Sword David Sword was born in Dundee, Angus, Scotland during 1822. He was a skilled iron and brass founder in Edinburgh, but for some unexplained reason he moved his family to England. My...
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Ford's Folly and the Slum of Little Hell

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Battersea: The Sinkhole of Surrey During the Victorian Era, Battersea had gained the reputation as being “the sinkhole of Surrey” due to its widespread poverty and slum-like conditions. Many of the poor in Battersea were subject to irregular income from the building trades. For a family to scrape by in the winter they would have to apply thrift spending during the summer. This was often complicated by the reliance on alcohol which was used as a means of escape from the depression of living in such widespread poverty. The irregular income caused many of Battersea’s poor to frequently be on the move. On average a family lived in one place for less than two years before moving no more than a few streets away. After hopping from neighbourhood to neighbourhood the family would eventually return to where they were once exiled from, moving in only a few doors away from their former address. Ford’s Folly and the slum of Little Hell In Keith Bailey’s report Orville Road, Battersea: a Victor...
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Researching Addresses that no Longer Exist

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Ever since I was young I have said that I wanted to see the place where my ancestor's lived. I never cared if it was a castle or if it was a broken down shack in the woods. What I cared about was that feeling I get when I am able to stand somewhere that one of my ancestor's did many years ago. I spent the past four years researching where in England my ancestors lived with the hope that one day I will be able to go there and experience this feeling. Like many people, COVID had other plans. Its been a year since I initially was planning to take that trip and it seems like it might be at least one more before it can happen. In the mean time I have been revising my route and furthering my research. One of the first things that I do when I get an address for where one of my ancestor's lived, is search for it on Google Maps. Depending on where you are researching, the area may have changed so much that it is almost unrecognizable when compared to when your ancestor lived. For ex...
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Courting Disaster: The 1915 Niagara Trolley Accident

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The worst electric rail crash in Ontario’s history and the  3 rd  worst in Canadian history (at the time)  occurred at Queenston Heights in Niagara Falls on July 7 1915 . In total the crash of car number 685 claimed the lives of 15 people and was responsible for injuring 130 people.  To put the scale of the accident into context, more lives were lost and more people were injured during the 1915 trolley accident than British soldiers during the battle of Queenston Heights.  The main occupants of the trolley were members of Toronto’s Wood Green Methodist and St John Presbyterian Sunday school groups. The two church groups had organized a day trip to Niagara Falls for the approximate 1,100 parishioners (majority of which were women and children). The accident occurred when the two groups were on their way home.  All day the weather had been ideal for taking portraits and going picnicking, however towards the evening hours (approximately 7:15 pm) it began to ra...
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