Sunday, December 4, 2011

Guild of One-Name Studies

The Guild of One-Name Studies (GONS) was started in England a number of years ago, and has steadily grown to where it is today - "the researching of all occurrences of a surname, as opposed to a particular pedigree (ancestors of one person) or descendancy (descendants of one person or couple)".

This can be the surnames that are derived from a geographical area, or from an occupation, or a patronymic-type surname, such as Johnson.

On their website, they have 7850 surnames which you can check to see if your name is there, a Member's Room which you can use when you become a member, and a webpage on which the members can give the surname that interested them, the variants of the surname, origin of the surname, the frequency of the name, data (in what countries the surname appears), DNA project, and the contact details if you want to contact them.

In Ottawa, we are are very fortunate to have a good genealogist in Elizabeth Kipp, who is the Eastern Canada Regional Representative for the Guild of One-Name Studies.

She has the latest knowledge about the one-name studies, has been to England on countless occasions, and if you have ever had the opportunity to read about her research trips to Salt Lake City, and other research facilities throughout Canada, the US and the UK, like myself, you would have to agree that she has a complete understanding of an organization such as the Guild of One-Name Studies and how they can help you to understand where your surname originated.

Elizabeth's email is kippeeb@rogers.com. She also has her own website on the Blakes at www.one-name.org/profiles/blake.html as well as a blog, English Research from Canada, at http://kippeeb.blogspot.com.

I guess I will have to rectify the omission of my two surnames in the study because they are not in the database – BARCLAY of Scotland, and BLADES of England.

The website of the Guild of One-Name Studies is http://www.one-name.org

Tomorrow's Post - New/Improved Canadian Websites and Blogs Week 14

Saturday, December 3, 2011

BIFHSGO's Great Moments in Genealogy


On Saturday, December 10th, from 10:00 am to 11:30 a.m. at the Library and Archives Canada, BIFHSGO (British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa) will present their annual "Christmas gift" for everyone - they will have four different topics presented by four different people.

The topics will be -

"How I Found 'Uncle Effie' While Helping to Research a WWII Pilot" by Mary Anne Sharpe

She will talk about how she was contacted by a genealogy researcher who was helping a Belgian man contact the families of several RAF airmen so he could round out the stories of the men who are buried in his local cemetery in Kaggevinne, Belgium.

Mary Anne will explain how she found out about the shooting down of a young WWII pilot from Sault Ste. Marie, the involvement in the search for information about the death of a man Mary Anne had always known as "Unle Effie", and how she found that both men were her cousins!

"Professor Robinson – Where did you come from?" by Roberta Kay

Professor William Robinson was the founder of the Department of Engineering, Mining, and Textile sections of the University College of Nottingham, England. Hear how she pieced together the life of her ancestor with a variety of resources, and which methods were used to uncover William's birth place.

"Revelations in a Paper Bag and a Shoe Box" by Anne Sterling

See how the discovery of inherited family photos and newly-found ones led her to meet various third- and fourth-cousins, and then do further research of a family in Fitzroy Township, Carleton County.

"Fun Boy, Fly Boy, My Reclusive Uncle" by Ted Lawrence

Kenneth Lawrence, born in 1918, was a fun-loving gregarious youngster, a practical joker, partier, and sports enthusiast in his high school years, and an inspired and courageous pilot during WWII.

This meeting is FREE, and if you haven't gone to a meeting before, BIFHSGO members would love to see you there. They are great people, and are eager to talk genealogy to you at the drop of a hat.

For more information, go to http://www.bifhsgo.ca/events.php

Friday, December 2, 2011

York Ancestors Newsletter

The November 2011 edition of the newsletter of the York Branch of the OGS, Ancestors, has been published. It continues with "The Udell Family of Markham, Pickering and Uxbridge (Part 2)" in which Walter Udell continues the story of the family through the middle- and late-1800s.

If you are interested, a website has been developed at www.udellfamily.ca.

At September's meeting, Rich Roberts from Global Genealogy talked about the latest edition of Family Tree Maker, and at the October meeting, Wes Playter talked about the Roadhouse & the Rose Funeral Home in Newmarket.

A Special Note: The York Branch will be celebrating their 15th year celebration in June. They are asking that if you have family history or photos that you would like to have featured at the party, email barbara.barr.ogs@gmail.com.

You can go to their website at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~onyrbogs. The York Region covers the former York County minus the City of Toronto.

If you are interested in joining Ontario Genealogical Society and the York Branch, go to www.ogs.on.ca/membership.php.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Archive CD Books Project


I have just received "The Archive CD Books Project" newsletter that Malcolm Moody, and his wife, Chris, send out each month. I look forward to seeing where they have been, what books they have scanned lately, and what events they will attend in the future. Their website is www.archivecdbooks.ca.

They have oodles of CDs for sales. They are not only very nice people, but are quite knowledgeable about Canadian and United Kingdom genealogy.

The project began in the United Kingdom in 2000, and Malcolm started the Canadian branch in 2003. They have been open for business since March 2004.

The newsletter is FREE (with lots of news), and you can subscribe at books@archivecdbooks.ca. They also have a Facebook page, where you can view pictures of the Kitchener Public Library’s First (Annual) Genealogy Fair - www.facebook.com/pages/Archive-CD-Books-Canada/99339348650.

Disclaimer: This is a business site, and while I have never received payment nor special consideration for this blog, I should mention that I have known Malcolm and Chris for a number of years, having attended the same conferences together, and as a customer.


Tomorrow's Post - The York Branch "Ancestors" newsletter

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Bourgeois Family/Histoire de Bourgeois


The website http://histoire-de-bourgeois.ca has developed a genealogical history, Histoire de Bourgeois - the genealogy and stories of Bourgeois' of Acadian descent. They are also have it on  Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=120627851304544

Marc Bourgeois has been working on the Bourgeois Family for the past ten years, and he started researching when his mother asked him if he could look into their roots.

Marc says that “Although it took me a while to discover my Acadian roots once I discovered them, I began a multi-year project (now eight years and still going) to document as many of the Bourgeois descendants of my Acadian Ancestor as possible and to make that research available to other family historians via the web”.

He goes onto says that “The result is the “the-bourgeois-story.ca” site (bilingual) which documents over 13,000 Bourgeois’ from across north America, descendants of Jacques Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan, married in 1643 in Port-Royal, Acadia. The site now has over 330 registered users (growing daily), and gets over a thousand hits a week”.

This is a bilingual site (F/E), and as Marc can tell, it is “the largest and most well documents (over 160,000 citations) Bourgeois family related site available on the Internet”.

So if you are related in any way to the Bourgeois Family, use the contact page at http://histoire-de-bourgeois.ca/suggest.php.

Tomorrow's Blog - The Archive CD Books Project

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Borders and Bridges:1812 to 2012 Conference


News Flash!

The program of the 2012 OGS Conference "Borders and Bridges:1812 to 2012" to be held in Kingston, Ontario the 1st to the 3rd of June has just been posted at http://www.ogs.on.ca/conference2012/program.

Details of the registration will be posted December 1st.

Historical Online Newspapers in Canada


I was having an email conversation the other day with a friend out in BC, and she was saying what a nice newspaper collection that the University of British Columbia has accumulated.

It got me thinking about newspapers and their importance in finding out local history of a place. So I put together this list.

Here is my attempt at summarizing the sites of digitized newspapers on the Internet -

British Columbia Historical Newspapers Project - www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/11/07/historical-b-c-newspapers-digitized-by-ubc library FREE! The site contains more than 45,000 pages of 24 historical BC newspapers. The newspapers date from 1865 to 1924.

Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers Online - http://librariesns.ca/content/newspaper-digitization FREE! The Halifax at Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management, and in Sydney at the Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University has put on the Internet over 19,000 pages of digitized newspaper content from sixteen newspapers dating from 1769 to 1991.

OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers - http://ink.ourontario.ca FREE! Thirty newspapers are digitized, with a special emphasis on historical newspapers from Kingston, Ontario.

Peel’s Praries Provinces (Newspapers) - http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers FREE! Over 80 western historical newspapers have been digitized.

The Early Alberta Newspaper Collection - www.ourfutureourpast.ca/newspapr FREE! Our Future, Our Past: The Alberta Heritage Digitization Project is a project from the University of Calgary. The collection contains editions from 1880 to 1950.

Manitoba Newspapers - http://manitobia.ca/content/en/newspaperslist FREE!  Contains over 30 newspapers. You can search by years and months, with some newspapers going up to the present-day.

Connecting Canada: Canada’s Multicultural Newspapers Beta Website - www.connectingcanadians.org/?q=en/content/home FREE! The collection contains Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, and Lithuanian newspapers.

French-Canadian Newspapers: An Essential Historical Source (1808-1919) - www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/canadian-newspapers-french/index-e.html  FREE! These are 230 newspaper titles from French-Canadian communities across Canada.

Digital collection: Newspapers - www.banq.qc.ca/collections/collection_numerique/index.html?language_id=1&categorie=6 -
FREE! These newspaper are at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and are published in French only.

There may have been some collections that I have missed. If you come across some other collections that have been put on the Internet and are FREE!, please let me know at genealogycanada@aol.com.

Tomorrow's Post - Histoire de Bourgeois - the genealogy and stories of Bourgeois' of Acadian descent