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Showing posts from March, 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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Geographic History and Genealogy

When I start researching a new place, the geography is one of the first things I look into. I find that the more I know about an area's geography, the easier it is for me to verify records. Until recently, I never realized how important it is to understand how the population of a community varied over time. Im not just talking about when the area was settled, but more so how the demographics shifted every 5 or 10 years.  What can be learned? There are many things that can be learned from studying the geographic history of a region, but I only plan to focus on the four main ones. 1. Border changes Over time the borders of parishes, communities, counties, and even countries are subject to change. These changing borders can make it confusing to tell if you have the right person in every record. What I like to do is save a few different maps showing the borders so that I can quickly reference them. I also like to draw a rough sketch of the map on a post-it note and plot out the communi...
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Why you ARENT Finding the Records you are Looking for

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At one point or another every genealogist is bound to hit a brick wall. I previously wrote about 7 brick wall busting strategies. These strategies have helped me greatly, but what has helped me the most is understanding how to properly conduct a search. If you want to know if you really have hit a brick wall, its time to start looking at if your behaviours are the cause.  1. Your filling in too much information When we use a site such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc. we are met with these digital forms of boxes. As tempting as it is to fill in everything you know, dont do it. Stop and think about what you want to find. Ask yourself what the goal of the conducting the search is. Once you know what it is you want to find, employ the degrees of freedom approach. I previously wrote two posts ( here  and  here ) explaining how to use this method.   2. Your search is too specific When searching it is easy to want to enter the specific BMD information, however th...
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Language and Genealogy

When it comes to research, we encounter many different languages that we dont understand. If your just starting out that might mean its technical terminology. For more experienced genealogists this might mean performing research in a foreign language. Much like starting genealogy, delving into foreign research can seem like a daunting and confusing task. To date I have conducted research in English, French, Latin, and Gaelic. Each time I attempted a researching in a new language, I found myself becoming increasingly more comfortable and proficient.  Leverage Technology For languages that we have a vague familiarity with, it is much easier to being this journey. As someone who has deep roots in Quebec, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I was forced to recall what I had attempted (and failed) to learn many years ago in school. Lucky for me, there is technology that can help bridge the language barrier.  Depending on what you are researching, you will realize t...
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How to Make a FAN Club Table in Excel

FAN club research is one of the most valuable types of research that a genealogist can perform. It can help breakdown brick walls and give you a better idea of what a person's life looked like. One of the main challenges we face when attempting this type of research is how we want to organize our information. In a previous post I explained how I use a network diagram to illustrate these relationships. Although this is a great way of interpreting the FAN club, it often lacks the space to properly record all of the information. I like to use a combination of a table and the network diagram.  How to Create the Table Sortable tables are a great way of displaying genealogical information in Excel. When they are created correctly, they allow you to quickly locate and/or group similar pieces of information. The tutorial on the Microsoft website provides a good walk through of the process.  Selecting the Headers The main focus of creating this table should be the headers. You want t...
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How to Create an Interactive Family Tree in Powerpoint

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When it comes to sharing your family history, one of the first things that people ask to see is the family tree. Of course there are great online family tree builders (such as Ancestry, FMP, and My Heritage) but that often involves family members having to create their own account. Creating a free account on Ancestry can be quite frustrating (Im not even sure how I did that a decade ago...). There are many other reasons why someone may not want to share one of these online trees. For example, I have chosen not to because I explore many theories in my trees, I dont always keep them the most up to date with all my knowledge, I know some of my family members would struggle with the technology, and I still want to maintain a little privacy within my research. For all of those reasons I chose to go the more simple route and create an interactive tree in Powerpoint. (Yes I do realize that this is significantly more work than updating my tree! But I dont care!).  Why Powerpoint? I chose t...
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Googling your Ancestors

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I was first introduced to the idea of Googling my ancestors many years ago when I first began my research. Almost a decade ago Ancestry had a feature on the ancestor's profile that allowed you to have Ancestry conduct the Google search for you. I dont know when or why they got rid of this feature, but regardless it taught me a lot about how to use Google for genealogy. The pattern that this feature used when conducting searches was what made it so valuable. What Ancestry had managed to have this feature do was insert Google search operators around the information that you already had entered in your tree. When this is done correctly, you are left with a small handful of relevant results.  What are Google search operators? Google search operators are a set of characters that can be placed between and/or around your keywords. When used correctly, they can require or exclude certain terms from your results, restrict results to a specific type, limit a year range, etc. There are a wide...
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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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