If your ancestors came from Scotland, you’ll want to look at Scottish Indexes’ new free web section, called the Learning Zone.
The section was created to help family historians learn from experts, discover the archives, and learn new research skills. It includes more than a dozen topics, such as civil registration, kirk session records, paternity cases in sheriff court records, prison records, and the register of deeds.
The Learning Zone includes a beginner’s guide to using High Court records.
There are links in the Learning Zone to free online indexes and several video tutorials, including one on kirk session records from the National Records of Scotland.
Today is World DNA Day. To celebrate the day, FamilySearch and the Family History Library on Monday, April 26 will sponsor six beginner DNA-related classes. Classes will be taught via Zoom and broadcast live to RootsTech.org. Additional DNA classes and resources will also be highlighted.
The day of classes begins at 9:00 a.m. Mountain time and ends with the last lecture beginning at 3:00 p.m.
Amie Bowser Tennant has all the details, list of classes, and schedule on her blog, The Genealogy Reporter.
Black history enthusiast Rachel Décoste used AncestryDNA to discover her ethnicity estimate and find new details about her family history. The results of the test inspired her to go on an inspiring odyssey to Africa, which she recounts in her new audiobook, “Year of Return: A Black Woman’s African Homecoming.”
Like many descendants of enslaved Africans, Ms. Décoste had been unable to pinpoint her origins.
During the 400-year history that started with a slave voyage over the Middle Passage, enslavers did not regularly keep records of where each African person was taken captive and the few records that did exist were destroyed. This made it challenging for Afro-descendants like Rachel to trace the areas in African that they descended from. Since tests like AncestryDNA have become widely available, new possibilities exist in helping to ease the process for these searches.
Inspired by her DNA results, Ms. Décoste visited five countries in as many months, with each place holding the key to a different part of her lineage.
From Senegal to Ivory Coast to Bénin, she made connections with her people and her history, finding delight in the commonalities between the locals of her ancestral home and herself, while also paying respect to her ancestors.
On the anniversary of the first meeting at Bois Caïman – the birthplace of the Haitian Revolution, Ms. Décoste traveled to Ouidah, Benin, the longest running slave export centre in the world where she is almost certain her ancestors were held before they were forcibly transported to what is now Haiti.
Ms. Décoste said, “With the advent of affordable DNA tests, African-Canadians can now pinpoint their origins and make it a pilgrimage to reconcile with a painful past. By tracing my DNA, I was able to fulfill a journey of self-discovery connecting my identity with my roots.
“Black Canadians often get questions like, ‘Where are you really from?’. After 40 years, you get the message that this isn’t your real home, even if it’s your birthplace. Where can I go so that my skin colour, my curves, my kinky hair, my taste for spices, rhythmic music and colourful clothes aren’t an outlier? After this DNA test and subsequent journey to Africa, I no longer have to wonder where I’m from. I know where I can go to see myself reflected in all walks of life. I know where home is. It’s no longer a question mark.”
$50 off AncestryDNA kits To mark DNA Day, AncestryDNA kits are on sale in Canada for $79 — down from $129 — plus shipping, until April 30. Kits are available for the same price at Amazon.ca where shipping is free.
Genetic Mapping by Emma Gilchrist, Maisonneuve, Montreal, Quebec.
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.
It is possible once again to submit photos of grave markers to CanadianHeadstones, following a long down period while the technical side of the website was being worked on.
Ontario Ancestors Past-President Steve Fulton prepared a short video to show how to upload photos to the CanadianHeadstones website. The society hosts and manages the site.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is photos submitted to the database will not appear online for a while. The tech team wants to make sure all is working correctly. (Update: The delay for photos appearing online seems to be faster than previously indicated. A CanadianHeadstones Facebook post last yeesterday said, “(Photo) submissions have a 24-hour hold as the system is watched for issues.”)
The other bad news is that ads still clutter the pages.
The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) yesterday added ten more videos to its YouTube channel. These latest videos are online presentations, lasting from 45 minutes to an hour, that were delivered between November 2020 and March 2021.
Two of the presentations will be of particular interest to family historians: Researching Presbyterians in Ireland and Key Sources for Genealogy The Tithe System & Tithe Applotment Books.
From Gunner to Guerrilla – Tom Barry’s Road to Rebellion Gerry White, chair of the Cork Branch of the Western Front Association talks about IRA leader and former British Army serviceman, Tom Barry. Barry was one of the most significant and controversial figures on the republican side during the Irish War of Independence. As commander of the Flying Column of Cork No. 3 Brigade of the IRA, he conducted a number of operations against the forces of the Crown. However, Tom Barry was an unlikely rebel. The son of a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Barry joined the Royal Field Artillery in 1915 and fought in Mesopotamia. In his account of his guerrilla campaign publish in 1949, Barry stated that it was the reports of the 1916 Rising he read while in Mesopotamia that led him to join the IRA. However, the story is more complex than that. As Mr. White shows, Barry’s service with the British Army and post-war experience had a major part to play in his transformation from a gunner to guerrilla. The Antrim & Down branch of the Western Front Association (WFA) and PRONI hosted this presentation.
The Dead of the Irish Revolution Professor Eunan O’Halpin, one of the authors of the publication, the Dead of the Revolution, is interviewed by Dr Darragh Gannon, research fellow, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. The Dead of the Revolution aspires to be the Lost Lives of the period from April 1916 to December 1921. It identifies a total of 2850 deaths arising from Irish political violence between those months (504 in 1916, 2346 from 1917 to 1921). Organised by day, as well as listing and describing each death consecutively, it provides analysis by location (county), by responsibility, affiliation, religion, and gender of the fatality.
Researching Presbyterians in Ireland Dr. William Roulston, research director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, outlines the range of records relating to the various strands of Presbyterians in Ireland over the last four centuries. Attention is drawn to the documentation created by individual congregations, as well as the records created by the higher courts of Presbyterianism and the personal papers of Presbyterian ministers.
Neutrals, immigrants, aliens, evacuees the Irish in Britain during WW2 Dr. Jennifer Redmond, assistant professor in Twentieth Century Irish History in the Department of History at Maynooth University, looks at the experiences of the Irish in Britain during the Second World War, examining who they were, what they did, in what ways they were directly involved in the British home front efforts, and the challenges this poses to our interpretation of Irish neutrality.
The Golden Age of Steam Jim McBride explores the last days of steam in Northern Ireland from 1965-1970.
Key Sources for Genealogy The Tithe System & Tithe Applotment Books This talk by a PRONI staff member shows how to search and get the best out of Tithe Records.
Lost Potential? The Rejection of the 1923 Education Act Noel Lindsay talks about the development of education in Ireland following partition. By examining the Protestant and Catholic churches’ animosities towards the department of education’s attempt to introduce a non-denominational system of education throughout the 1920s, Mr. Lindsay’s work will contribute to the gap in the historiography of the decade under review. Using the 1923 Education Act, this paper will examine why the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches’ found it so objectionable, and how, through their rejection of it, they ensured that children in Northern Ireland would continue to be consigned to segregated education throughout their most influential and formative years.
Oliver Nugent & the Ulster Division: A Modern Major-General? PRONI and the Antrim and Down branch of the Western Front Association welcomed Nicholas Perry who gave a presentation to mark the publication of his biography of Major General Oliver Nugent. Oliver Nugent, a landowner and professional soldier from Farren Connell, County Cavan, commanded 36th (Ulster) Division from September 1915 to May 1918 through the battles of the Somme, Messines, Cambrai, and the German offensives of March 1918. This presentation, sub-titled ‘Infantry Divisional Command in the British Army in the first half of the twentieth century,’ looks at Nugent’s family background and the Farren Connell collection in PRONI before expanding on the theme of modernity by using Nugent’s experiences to compare the role of Divisional commanders in the First and Second World Wars.
Conservation & Collections Care: Preserving PRONI’s Archives PRONI’s Head of Conservation Sarah Graham explains the importance of preservation measures and appropriate document handling to ensure the archives are protected for generations to come. Ms. Graham introduces the role of the conservator and show examples of interventive treatments which have recently been carried out on collections at PRONI.
Word Choice and Religion in Early Modern Ireland Tardiness of Protestant translations of liturgical and scriptural texts into Irish is a commonplace of discussions of religious change in 16th and 17th century Ireland. The English and Irish languages tend to be examined as a binary without much reference to Latin and other European vernaculars known and used on the island in this period. This paper will attempt to suggest that complex trajectories and hierarchies were at play in language choice and that religious acts of all kinds, not just worship, offer opportunities for thinking about spoken life in Ireland during this time. The Ulster Society of Irish Historical Studies and PRONI hosted this online presentation by Professor John McCafferty.
THE Genealogy Show out of England has released its program of 48 hours of non-stop presentations, and the variety of topics looks good.
It takes place June 25 to 26.
The long list of speakers is filled with well-known speakers from Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, Canada, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. The Canadian speakers include Ruth Blair, Mags Gaulden, Lynn Palermo, and Diane Rogers.
For mere mortals who can’t stay awake for two days straight, there’s good news. Once a video has gone live on the main stage, it will be deposited into the on-demand section where you can watch the talk at a time that best suits you during a 30-day period.
The ticket price is a reasonable £20 (about CDN$35 or US$28) for the first 500 people to register. After that, the price will be £30.
The show includes an exhibit hall, one-on-one consultation, live chats, and games.
On John D. Reid’s newly designed and relocated blog, Canada’s Anglo-Celtic Connections, he yesterday shared the news that a one-year Legacy Family Tree Webinars membership is available for just US$25 — a 50 percent discount for new members only. The offer expires April 25, at 11:59 p.m.
From personal experience, I learned several months ago that Legacy Family Tree considers a “new member” to be anyone who currently doesn’t have a webinar membership, even if they had one as recently as a few weeks ago.
With a webinar membership, you’ll have access to all 1,500+ classes and 5,000+ syllabus pages, new webinars and syllabus pages, plus the members-only TechZone webinars every Friday.
Today, April 20, at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center will host the free virtual presentation, Using German Church Records: An Introduction, delivered by John Beatty.
This program for beginners will explore the value of German church records and how to uncover, interpret, and read them. We will look at the major online sources and discuss some techniques for researching them. Register here.
The library’s upcoming genealogy events are listed here.
If you have Irish ancestors, you’ll want to check out the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society’s webinar, It’s More Than Just Names: Finding Your Ancestors in Griffith’s Valuation, a free webinar from Wisconsin State Genealogical Society, delivered by Donna Moughty, today at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.
Fire and government destruction of early census records left a void for Irish researchers. Griffith’s Valuation is one of the only lists of where people lived before, during and after the Famine, however many researchers don’t understand how to use it. This lecture explains its importance to Irish researchers and explains how to use it. Register here.
