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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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Genealogy on a Budget: How to Take Advantage of Ancestry Free Weekends

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  When I first started genealogy I was a broke student (and in many ways I still am) and didnt have the budget for a fancy subscription to ancestry or a similar site. So how did I manage to further my genealogical work without ever spending a cent? I took advantage of as many free resources as I could - one of the most important ones was Ancestry free weekends. I will write a post later on explaining some of the other strategies and techniques that I used to perform my free genealogy research.  Despite Ancestry widely  advertising their paid subscriptions they also offer free accounts. The regulars functions of a free account are quite limited. You can build a tree, receive hints, comments on message boards, and view free collections. You are only able to view the paid collections on ancestry free weekends. This is a prime time to check all the hints that are waiting to be reviewed in your tree. If a record is a match make sure that you not only attach it to the person bu...
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In Search of "Black Sheep": Victorian Criminals in the Paper

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If you look hard enough, your bound to find a black sheep or two in every family tree. In my case they were hiding in the places I least expected to find them. My grandmother was one of the most proper and well mannered women I have ever met. I'm pretty sure she is the closest thing I will ever meet to a saint, however not all of her ancestors shared these traits. One woman in particular was foul mouthed and not shy of throwing a fist (or two). To be honest, after reading of her fights, I think she could have held her own against one of London's prized fighters. This woman's name was Mary Ann Daniels (nee Taplin) - I spoke of briefly in a previous article  here . When I began performing FAN club research on her children I discovered that she had given birth to a son named Alfred during 1880 in the HM Westminster Prison! (Yikes! That is NOT a birth certificate I would ever want to have!) Of course this raised a number of questions for me: why was she in the prison? Why was s...
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Father Put Me in the Boat: The Story of the Northfleet Disaster

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Ever since I was a young child I have been terrified of sailing on large vessels. There was no good reason for this as I had never had any bad experiences on ships or even with water. The origin of this phobia was unknown. It wasnt until s everal years ago while performing my genealogical research that I realized maybe my phobia of sailing was not completely  unfounded. As I began to trace the lives of one family   I noticed something strange - almost everyone died on the same day. They were the Taplin family - comprised of John, Caroline (nee Holton), Emma , Mary Ann , Sarah, Maria and Carrie (twins). John was a navvy. He spent much of his adult life travelling across England working on the railways. By late 1872 he had a new offer of employment, this time it would not be in England. He, along with his wife and three youngest children, were going to move to Tasmania so he could help construct a railway that would connect the now Australian state. The two eldest daughters...
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A Great Big List of (Mostly) Free Canadian Genealogy Websites

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One of the main reasons why I started this blog is because I noticed that there were few sites that focused on Canadian genealogy. Over the years I have amassed quite the list of resources. Some cover the entire country while others focus on specific areas that I'm researching. I have organized the list below by location and as always I have identified paid resources with ($).  Nationwide Canadian Genealogy Resources  I have provided more detail about the following resources on my Canadian Resources page.  Library and Archives Canada   Provincial Databases (some $) -  Familysearch Wiki - Canada Internet Archive Familysearch ProQuest  ($) Canadiana Military Resources I wrote a post on military resources and loyalists which can be found  here  and  here .  Database: WW1 Service Files Database WW2 War Dead Service Files The Commonwealth War Graves Commission Veterans Affairs Canada Wikipedia WW1 CEF Battalions Canadian Great War Project A S...
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Get to Know bac-lac: Canadian Census Records (Part II)

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In my previous post ( here ) I wrote about the Canadian census collection featured on Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac). Although understanding where to find census information and what parts of it are important can be a challenge, the most challenging part by far is performing a successful search that yields a manageable number of results. As much as I LOVE to conduct searches using a Degrees of Freedom analysis (which I wrote about here ), the limited number of search fields on bac-lac makes this a near impossible task. To further complicate things, bac-lac does not perform "fuzzy" searches meaning that it does not search phonetically or for names with similar spellings. This can be especially challenging for names that have many variations or that were abbreviated on the census return. For surnames that contain a prefix this adds another level of complexity as the prefix may be placed at the end of the surname. For example the surname "O'Reilly" may have ...
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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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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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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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