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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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Brick Wall Strategies: Assumption Breaking

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The genealogical term "brick wall" is often used to describe challenging research questions which appear to have no answer. In some cases, our own assumptions create these brick walls. We make assumptions based on our existing knowledge because we believe that this will make our research easier (and often times we are right about that). However, in some cases these assumptions prevent us from finding the information that we are looking for. They cause us to narrow our scope so much so that we manufacture our own brick walls. In this post, I'm going to explain how reviewing and challenging an assumption can help us break down the brick wall.  For the past two years I have been working on the rather large and challenging project of naming every person in the old pictures that I inherited. The task itself has presented many challenges as my ancestors rarely recorded any information on the back of pictures, and when they did they often failed to include the names. The smaller...
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Nature vs Nurture: What Kind of Parents were your Ancestors?

When I was growing up my mother used to tell me that "Life is like a lottery. We dont get to choose who we are born to". This sentiment has been true for as long as the concept of subjectively "good" and "bad" parents has existed. Phycologists have spent decades trying to figure out exactly what makes somebody a "good" parents and have went so far as to theorize that behaviours can be acquired either through nature or nurture.  When I reflect on my grandmother's life, I am taken aback by one thing that she told me when I was in my late teens - she didnt learn by example how to be a "good" mother, but rather by the absence of one. Her mother did not fit the mould of a stereotypical mother from the 1940's; instead she was more akin to someone trying to remain in the carefree 1920s.  Aside from her father, her face only lit up when she talked about one of her aunts. This particular aunt had no children but loved my grandmother as h...
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Identifying Unknown Pictures: A New Approach

After my grandmother passed two years ago I inherited boxes of old family pictures, however almost none of them had names on the back. It had always been my intention to go through these boxes with my grandmother, but Covid and cancer had other plans. In my grief, I made it my mission to put a name to EVERY face in the box. Yes you read that right - EVERY face. The task has been a daunting one and had quite a few challenges, but at the same time it has been incredibly rewarding. Along the way I discovered a few tips and tricks. Generating a list of names was an important first step. If I had no idea who the people could be, it would be near impossible to identify them. To do this, I established a FAN club using a series of records. In my case, the records included a memorial book, newspaper articles, and an a personal notebook.  1. Correlation of frequency and close relationships One of the first things that I noticed while going through the box was that the same faces kept reappea...
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Finding Distant Relatives Using Forums

I have always wanted to connect with a distant relative. Deep down I have always hoped that one branch of the family tree may have done a better job of keeping the oral history alive than mine did. As I discussed on here several times before, the topic of family history was more or less off limits on my mothers side of the family. Even from a young age I understood that I was not to ask my Gram about her father (who died in a tragic car accident when she was about 13). The accident changed the entire trajectory of her life and left behind a grief that I dont think she ever fully recovered from. She only spoke to me one time about her father's side of the family and even that was on a high level. She told me the names of her aunts and uncles and that she had one childless aunt who cared for her grandparents. My gram used to go over and cherish how her aunt doted on her. By all accounts this aunt was the one who taught her how to be a good mother. She described her grandparents as ...
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Conversations from the Grave?: My first time using MyHeritage DeepStory

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I've heard lots if interesting things about MyHeritage's new AI technology and figured I would try it out to see if it could live up to all the hype.  How does it work? 1. Choose a picture I chose to use the highest quality head-on image in my digital collections, which happened to be of my 2x great grandfather Herbert Morris Proctor.  I have not colourized the picture so I just used it in the original sepia tones because why not? The video did automatically crop to focus on his face so if you are using a full body shot (like the one below), I'd recommend using a higher quality image. It does slightly enhance and restore the image however that is often not enough to compensate for a blurriness or graininess.  2. Enter their name I entered his full given name in the first name box. 3. Start writing out the events of their life  There are a number of things that I enjoy about the life story builder. First off, it is very customizable. You have the options to write what...
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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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