Genealogy à la carte

Since the live tour of the Great Famine Voices Roadshow has been postponed due to the spread of COVID-19, the organizers are presenting a series of online programs that will be available to view at home.

Today, Sunday, April 26, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time (7:00 p.m. in Ireland), the documentary, The Famine Irish and Canada’s First Responders, will be discussed by the filmmaker Kevin Moynihan, Professor Mark McGowan (University of Toronto), Professor Christine Kinealy (Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute, Quinnipiac University), and special guests Fergus Keyes and Victor Boyle from the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation.

Released in 2017, the film is about Canada’s compassion in welcoming the 109,000 Irish emigrants fleeing the Great Famine in 1847. The film visits Grosse Île, Montreal and Toronto to understand how the memorials to the Irish Famine help tell the story of courage and compassion on the part of Canada’s first responders of the day — doctors, orderlies, nurses, religious women, clergy and politicians.

The 60-minute film can be viewed here and watched before the online discussion, and perhaps afterward. (Update: It appears this film is no longer available to watch through the link I provided.)

Instructions on how to watch the discussion via Zoom are here.

There’s good news and bad news for genealogists.

First, the good news.

The Toronto Public Library has extended its free at-home access to Ancestry beyond the original April 30 deadline. The library now says Ancestry will be available at home while the branches remain closed.

Other libraries are following suit. For example, Vancouver and Calgary public libraries have extended their at-home access to Ancestry until May 31. The Halifax Public Library is making Ancestry available from home “during COVID-19 related Library closures,” suggesting the free access won’t be over soon.

In Kitchener, Ontario, the library says it will remain closed up to and including June 30, but makes no specific mention about the access deadline for Ancestry.

For a partial list of libraries, see the blog post, Free at-home access to Ancestry’s Library edition — Update 3.

There are likely more libraries offering the at-home access to Ancestry. If unsure, send your local library an email to find out.

So, what’s the bad news?

It may be a longer than we had hoped before our libraries re-open.

If social distancing is the price for free at-home access to Ancestry, it’s higher than any of us ever expected or wanted to pay.

Be well. Stay safe. And research your family history.

For a limited time, Ancestry is offering free access to more than 450,000 yearbooks in the United States, Canada, and England, and MyHeritage has opened up access to its US yearbook collection.

Until Sunday, April 26, you can view Ancestry’s yearbook collection by visiting Ancestry.com/Yearbooks. Ancestry’s collection is called U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-1999, but there is a significant number of books from most Canadian provinces, and I also found some from England. Given the name of the collection, it is safe to assume the majority of yearbooks are American.

MyHeritage has gone a step further by opening up access to its United States yearbook collection, from 1890 to 1979, until May 23.

In addition, following the successful release of MyHeritage In Color™ (10 million photos were colorized in the first three months), one of the ideas raised by the MyHeritage team was to apply this technology to records, in cases where black and white photos are abundant and colours could enhance the records. They focused their attention on the US yearbook collection, so you can now view the entire collection of US yearbooks in colour.

Anyone can access the yearbooks on MyHeritage for free, without even having to sign up.

Anyone who shares a MyHeritage yearbook page on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram with the hashtags #LookingGood and #FreeYearbooks and tags @MyHeritage will enter a draw. Each week we’ll select one lucky winner who will receive a free MyHeritage Complete subscription. 

The National Archives announced yesterday it is making digital records available on its website free of charge for as long as the Kew site is closed to visitors.

Registered users will be able to order and download up to 10 items at no cost, to a maximum of 50 items over 30 days. The limits are there to try and help manage the demand for content and ensure the availability of the digital services for everyone.

You will be able to download records digitized by The National Archives and published through Discovery, the online catalogue. These include:

• First and Second World War records, including medal index cards
• Military records, including unit war diaries
• Royal and Merchant Navy records, including Royal Marine service records
• Wills from the jurisdiction of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
• Migration records, including aliens’ registration cards and naturalisation case papers
• 20th century Cabinet Papers and Security Service files
• Domesday Book

A full list of digitized collections can be seen here, although note that it includes collections available on other sites, such as Ancestry, Findmypast and The Genealogist, that may charge for access, and are not included in this offer.

To access the service and download for free, you will be required to:

• Register/sign in to your Discovery account before adding items to your basket (maximum ten items per basket)
• Abide by the terms of the fair use policy
• Complete the order process to receive a download link, which will remain active for 30 days. (The link will also be saved in ‘Your orders’ in your account for 30 days.)

Learn more about how to access the digital records in The National Archives’ news release.

The next meeting of the Ontario Genealogical Society’s Toronto Branch will be on Monday, April 27, starting at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time. As they did in March, this meeting will be entirely online due to COVID-19 restrictions — and open to all.

The meeting features Lynn Palermo, also known as The Armchair Genealogist, who will talk about Habits of a Highly Organized Genealogist and how to set up a file system.

If, like many genealogists, you find it a challenge to keep your family history organized, this talk is for you. Lynn will show how to control the clutter, keep consistent records, and avoid repeating research you’ve already done.

Also on the agenda is a short presentation by Janice Nickerson, entitled Daily Life 100 Years Ago, as told in a mother’s letters to her son.

You must register to attend the webinar. After registering, you’ll receive an email message with a link to join the webinar. This link will be unique to your registration. Join early to grab your virtual seat.