For more gems like these throughout the week, join the Genealogy à la carte Facebook group. When you submit your request to join, you will be asked to answer two quick questions about your family history research.
The online release of vital statistics on BC Archives’ website is coming, but not as early as in previous years.
BC Archives only received the new data from Vital Statistics BC this week.
Last year, the records were released to the provincial archives in May.
According to Dave Stewart, the head of IT and Digital at the Royal BC Museum, the British Columbia marriage registrations from 1945 and death registrations from 2000 will likely be posted on the BC Archives website in September.
The next time a new collection of BC birth registrations will be released is 2024 — 120 years after the 1904 births were registered. In 2004, the British Columbia Vital Statistics Act added an extra 20 years to the release of births, extending it to 120 years. Until then, researchers will have to be satisfied with the online birth records from 1854 to 1903.
Canadian Genealogical Virtual Research Intensive (CGVRI) has issued a call for proposals for 2022, 2023 and beyond.
Dates for CGVRI 2022 will be August 7 to 12 and August 21 to 26.
For next summer’s program, final decisions will be made in late November 2021.
There will be a minimum of four courses offered in total for 2022. Each course will consist of 15 sessions (three per day). Each session will be 90 minutes (55-60 minutes instruction, 30-35 minutes in-class activity/assignment, and discussion).
CGVRI is Canada’s only week-long genealogy research institute.
The courses for next year’s program will be announced in January.
Details about submitting proposals are available on the CGVRI website.
This Friday, August 20, is the third Friday of the month — and that means the Legacy Family Tree webinar will be one in the O Canada series.
The free webinar, Early Ontario Research, will be presented by Janice Nickerson, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time.
So you have traced your family’s history back to an ancestor who lived in Ontario (or its predecessors, Canada West and Upper Canada) before civil registration. Now what? This lecture provides an overview of the six key record groups for pre-civil registration research (before 1869), what information you can expect to find, and where you’ll find it.
Registration is required to watch the live presentation. A recording will be available in the webinar library for up to seven days afterward to watch for free. Subscribers will have unlimited access to the webinar and syllabus. In the case of this webinar, the syllabus is eight pages.
For one week only, AncestryDNA kits are on sale in Canada for $89 — $40 less than the regular price of $129.
Kits can be ordered from Ancestry where there is a $19.99 shipping charge or ordered from Amazon where the price is also $89, but shipping is included.
The sale ends Monday, August 23 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.
The Allen County Public Library has added six more videos to its YouTube channel to help family historians with their research. The videos vary in length from about 45 minutes to an hour.
To find videos about genealogy on Allen County Public Library’s YouTube channel, click on the magnifying glass next to About, and enter genealogy.
Finding ancestors in New York comes with some unique challenges. Luckily, the NYG&B is here to help! This session explores using the NYG&B’s online resources, including The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, religious records, online articles, and other collections.
Finding records for our destitute or poor ancestors can be a frustrating challenge, but sometimes all you need to do is think a little outside the box! Learn how to find, use, and decipher poorhouse records in the United States.
Discover the treasure trove of more than five million searchable items accessible online from The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Join us for a virtual tour of The Genealogy Center’s digital collections.
Anabaptists and Mennonites were a major early immigrant group in parts of Pennsylvania, and they brought their faith to many parts of the Midwest. Records can also be found in Canada and parts of Europe. In this talk, we will explore some of the books about Mennonites available in the Genealogy Center.
Do you have Quaker roots? Are you familiar with studying Quaker records in the United States, but haven’t broached crossing the pond into Ireland? If so, join us for an exploration of the Society of Friends movement in Ireland, how to access the Irish Quaker records on FindMyPast, and what these records can tell you about your ancestors using a 19th century Quaker couple as a case study!
Publishing a family history needn’t be a heavy lift. There are easier ways to share your research than a huge, formal genealogy. The most important thing is to share your stories! Using the fourteen books she’s written for her daughters as examples, Betsy hopes to inspire you to get started on a project that’s just the right size.
Webinars about research in a specific country are always great, but every so often we need a webinar that focuses on methodology, and there’s one this week.
Legacy Family Tree Webinars in collaboration with the Board for Certification of Genealogists will host the free webinar, Standards for Genealogical Documentation, presented by award-winning genealogical researcher, writer, editor, and educator Tom Jones, on Tuesday, August 17, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.
Genealogy Standards spells out eight documentation standards, which give genealogists guidance for documenting genealogical writing. They also provide guidance for citation content, while allowing flexibility in the sequencing and structuring of citations supporting genealogical statements. This presentation will review the standards and provide examples of applying their principles.
Mr. Jones is the author of the textbooks, Mastering Genealogical Proof and Mastering Genealogical Documentation.
Registration is required to watch the live presentation. A recording will be available in the webinar library for up to seven days afterward to watch for free. Subscribers will have unlimited access to the webinar and syllabus.
For more gems like these throughout the week, join the Genealogy à la carte Facebook group. When you submit your request to join, you will be asked to answer two quick questions about your family history research.
The 11-minute video is “For those starting out… and those who started from the wrong place,” and it includes links to about 30 online resources.
Mr. Grenham recommends starting genealogy research by talking to a member in your family where you’ll probably learn more facts and stories than you’d find in the records.
He says, “In most families, there tends to be one or two people — a second cousin, maybe a third cousin out there — who has specialized in keeping track of everybody and is only too delighted to pass the information on.”
Presbyterian records There are more than 30 videos on Mr. Grenham’s YouTube channel, including one on Presbyterian records that was added a week ago. The videos vary in length from about five to 25 minutes.
Don’t condescend to your ancestors One video that stands apart from the others in the online collection is Never condescend to your ancestors. It’s a five-minute (gentle) rant during which Mr. Grenham says our ancestors had the same emotions and feelings that we experience. Their societies may have been different from ours, but they were just as complicated and complex as they are today.
He says, “One of the things that genealogy really does teach you is that you cannot condescend to your ancestors. Your ancestors are your equals, if not better.”
In a blog post on the same topic about not thinking our lives are superior to those of our ancestors, Mr. Grenham wrote: “You can’t think of them as quaint, fixed to the one spot, sepia-toned. They moved and worried and loved and lied, and they were just as uncertain about their futures as we are about ours.”
Season eight of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is set to premiere in January 2022 on PBS.
The series will feature 21 guests in ten new episodes.
Among the guests are stars of the stage and screen Amy Carlson (Blue Bloods), Terry Crews (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Tony Danza, Raúl Esparza (Law & Order: SVU), Kathryn Hahn (Wandavision), Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Passing), Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo, Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton), and Melissa Villaseñor (Saturday Night Live); multi-hyphenates Pamela Adlon, Lena Waithe, and Regina King; filmmakers Lee Daniels (Empire, Precious) and Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, Lost); fashion legend André Leon Talley; journalist Erin Burnett; talk show and radio host Mario Lopez; restaurateur David Chang; and activists Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Anita Hill.
Host and executive producer Dr. Gates said, “Our guests – and their ancestors – embody what Finding Your Roots and the American Experience are all about. America is a nation of immigrants, willing and unwilling, but at the level of the genome, despite our apparent differences, we are 99 percent the same. Each of us is complicated in our own unique ways, but each of us descends from ancestors who have a story to tell and the goal of Finding Your Roots is to allow them, at long last, to tell those stories. At a time when our country has witnessed so much strife over the last year, it is so important to remind our fellow citizens of how much we share in common.”
Assembling the extensive family trees and ancestral narratives alongside Dr. Gates are DNA expert CeCe Moore (founder of The DNA Detective and host of ABC’s The Genetic Detective) and genealogists Nick Sheedy and Kimberly Morgan.
