It appears that access to the RootsTech Connect sessions yesterday was temporary. Perhaps they were testing the site.
The person whose post on social media about the access prompted me to visit the portal and watch a couple of sessions has now removed their post.
We’ll likely have to wait until February 25 as planned.
Update February 21, 2021: It appears access to the RootsTech Connection portal is not available today. When it was promoted on social media yesterday, I registered and watched a couple of sessions. It’s possible the access was available temporarily to test the site. I will provide an update when it becomes available again, probably on February 25.
The RootsTech Connection portal went live yesterday, making it possible to watch hundreds of recorded sessions and make a playlist. There are more than 1,500 sessions across nine categories.
Even if you previously registered, you’ll need to register again. I was instructed to sign in with my free FamilySearch account and then had to enter my contact name.
Once in, click on the Sessions tab in the menu bar across the top. Then you’ll be able to browse the sessions by topic, region, language, DNA and other categories.
Most of sessions, if not all, are 20 minutes or less. Since the conference is virtual the speakers were asked to keep their sessions to 10 to 20 minutes. RootsTech organizers said, “Let’s be honest: after 20 minutes, our attention is almost exhausted in a two-dimensional world.”
No time to watch today? Not a problem. The sessions have been recorded and will be available for a year.
The keynote presentations will be delivered live and begin February 25.
Some of the bijoux I discovered this week.
Blogs
Searching the 1851 Census of Canada West Agricultural Schedule – Ancestry Version, Missing images from the 1861 Census of Canada West on Ancestry? and Searching the 1851 Census of Canada West Agricultural Schedule – LAC Version by Ken McKinlay on Family Tree Knots.
The Wonder of Maps – Virtual Family History Travel by Jane Roberts on PastToPresentGenealogy.
Deciphering Foreign Language Records & the Appleton Public Library by Don Taylor on Don Taylor Genealogy.
More Tips and Tricks from FamilySearch . . . by Teresa Basińska Eckford on Writing my past.
Pondering by Marcia Crawford Philbrick on Heartland Genealogy.
10 Awesome Genealogy Finds at the Internet Archive by Lisa Cooke on Genealogy Gems.
Internet Archive Genealogy Collection – Who’s There? By Roberta Estes on DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy.
Family History With a Flourish: Video-Mapping Your Ancestors by Dr. Sophie Kay on The Parchment Rustler.
Haven’t Made a Photo Book in Years? We’ve Got Ideas to Kick the Mom Guilt! by Leanne Lobe on Organizing Photos.
Contract, not copyright by Judy G. Russell on The Legal Genealogist.
Better Living Through Statistics: What Are The Odds? on Legacy Tree Genealogists.
How to Use mtDNA Haplogroup Information in Your Family History Research by Robin Wirthlin on Family Locket.
How to Add DNA Matches to Your Ancestry Tree by Nicole Dyer on Family Locket.
Articles
How going virtual and free could be a ‘game changer’ for RootsTech Connect by Trent Toone, Deseret News, Utah.
How to find First World War records, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, Bristol, England.
Provincial archives completes 2-year move to new centralized location by Wayne Mantyka, CBC, Regina, Saskatchewan.
How a Black Abenaki man shaped U.S. history, and Akwesasne’s by Jordan Haworth, Whig-Standard, Kingston, Ontario.
Why a decades-old dispute over Algonquin ancestry is key to a city hall controversy by Jorge Barrera, CBC, Ottawa, Ontario.
Get all the stories you can, while you can by Laurel Beechey, Beacon Herald, Stratford, Ontario.
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.
Legacy Family Tree Webinars today will host the second free webinar in its monthly
O Canada Series that is new this year.
Janice Nickerson will talk about How to locate an ancestor in Ontario, Canada West or Upper Canada (when you don’t know where they lived) on Friday, February 19, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time.
This webinar will provide strategies and resources to help you discover where your ancestor lived in Ontario, Canada West or Upper Canada, when you don’t have a specific place of origin. These include the types of records you should search in your ancestors’ place of later settlement, as well as records that are specific to Ontario (which, depending on the time period, might be called Ontario, Canada West or Upper Canada) research.
As the focus here is on locating your ancestor, we will focus on province-wide records and indexes. We will not cover the many records and indexes that are useful to the genealogist once the place of residence is known. Handout materials for webinar subscribers will include references for specific publications and records.
Registration is required to watch the live webinar. The recording will be available soon afterward in the webinar library to watch for free for up to seven days.
The University of British Columbia yesterday announced that Vancouver Island University Library has completed part two of its digitization of the Nanaimo Free Press (1874-1928) collection.
Nanaimo is the sixth oldest incorporated municipality in British Columbia and a key site of settler early industry as a mining town.
The Nanaimo Daily Free Press was founded by George Norris in 1874. It is the second-oldest newspaper on Vancouver Island. The Nanaimo Free Press’ first newspaper was published in April 15 of the same year. It started as a four-page paper, published each Wednesday and Friday in a vacated Hudson’s Bay Company log house on Front Street in Nanaimo’s downtown. On December 4, 1888, it expanded to daily publication,
The Nanaimo Free Press (1872-1928): Part II was digitized with support from the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre through its BC History Digitization Program.
For more information about the 2019/2020 BC History Digitization Program Projects, click here.
A few days ago, about 75 RootsTech ambassadors participated in a Zoom discussion with FamilySearch and RootsTech leaders about what to expect at the free virtual conference being held next week, and several posted on social media and wrote blog posts about what to expect.
In her blog post, Customize Your RootsTech Conference: 96 DNA Sessions to Choose From!, Roberta Estes writes, “The session format has changed this year. Most sessions are 20 minutes, not an hour. Think genealogy TED talks from your favorite presenters. There are a few advanced sessions that are an hour in length.”
Sue McNelly on KindredPast shares a graphic that lists RootsTech statistics, such as 11 officials languages and almost 315,000 registrants.
Ellen Thomson-Jennings writes in RootsTech Connect Is Going To Be Incredible, “There will be 746 classes and 280 tips and tricks for a total of 1026 things that will be available on-demand for one year. Just think of it like Netflix for genealogists. You’ll be able to search for speakers, and you’ll also be able to find categories for various topics.”
Ms. Thompson-Jennings also explains how the virtual marketplace will work. “The Expo Hall has 72 exhibitors and 20 sponsors for a total of 92 booths. There will be a button you can click, and you’ll be able to take yourself into the vendors’ booth and connect with them live if they are available. The vendor chats will only be available during the event from February 24-27th, but the vendor booths will be available even after RootsTech Connect is over.”
On Genea-Musings, Randy Seaver explains how the website, classes, keynotes, and Expo Hall will be organized. “The ‘Explore Sessions’ page will provide an index to the classes – by topic, by speaker, by region, and by language. All of the sessions are pre-recorded, but some will have a live chat schedule. There will be a link to all of the sessions, and each session will include a link to the syllabus for that session, if it’s available.”
Linda Stufflebean gives a good run-down of how the conference will be organized on her blog, Empty Branches on the Family Tree. “There are 72 Exhibitors in addition to 20 Sponsors, providing an excellent opportunity to view products, chat with vendors and make purchases.”
If you have Dutch ancestors, you’ll want to read Yvette Hoitink’s blog post, Quick Tip – Dutch Topics at RootsTech Connect.
James Tanner, in his blog post, How to participate in RootsTech Connect 2021: A Survivor’s Guide, writes that he thinks RootsTech will continue to be online after the pandemic. “My best guess is that the next conference (and all those hereafter) will be online. The economies of scale are too great and the number of people reached is way too big for RootsTech to regress and hold a live conference.” I hope he’s right.
If you’re curious about what the Canadian speakers’ classes, check out my blog post from last week.
There is plenty of information still to be added to the RootsTech website before the conference begins February 25.
The Niagara Peninsula Branch of Ontario Ancestors will host the free webinar, They Put Down Roots: African American freedom seekers and their Niagara descendants, presented by Rochelle Bush, on Friday, February 19, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time.
Ms. Bush will speak about the free Blacks and fugitive slaves who settled in Niagara in the 19th century and their descendants who remained in the area.
Ms. Bush is a trustee and the resident historian of the Salem Chapel, British Methodist Episcopal Church, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Site and the owner and operator of Tubman Tours Canada. She was born and raised in St. Catharines. Her maternal great-great-grandfather was the minister-in-charge of the Salem Chapel for a period in the 1850s when Harriet Tubman was a member.
Registration is required to attend this webinar.
A draw will be held for all attendees of the webinar to win the book, Slavery and Freedom in Niagara, by Michael Powers and Nancy Butler.
As Ontario eases health and safety restrictions, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) will resume its copy services and gradually reopen the research and consultation rooms located at 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa.
Beginning on February 22, you will be able fill in the online form to make new copy requests. To place a new order, follow this step-by-step process.
If you had submitted a request before January 11, you do not need to resubmit it. Requests previously submitted will be processed in chronological order.
Rush service, however, is still suspended and some delays may occur due to safety requirements around collection handling and because of the high volume of copy requests.
Book your visit in Ottawa
On February 22, you will be able to access the online booking system to make new reservations for the week of March 8. Researchers who had reservations in January that were cancelled due to the closure will be contacted shortly to reschedule between February 23 and March 5. For region-specific details and information on how to book your visit, consult the Reopening Library and Archives Canada web page.
LAC’s Halifax, Ottawa, Winnipeg and Vancouver offices operate independently and offer limited services at this time. Reference and genealogy teams are available to help researchers navigate the website and conduct their research using digital collections. Contact LAC by using Ask Us a Question or Ask Us a Genealogy Question forms, or by calling 1-866-578-7777 (option 8; toll-free in Canada and the United States).
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), with the assistance of two students Holly Miller and Nikita Tetarenko, has completed the Mount Hermon Cemetery burial registry database, Le registre d’inhumation du Mount Hermon Cemetery, 1848-1950., adding almost 5,000 names.
There are now 13,291 entries for the Protestant cemetery in Sillery, a borough of Quebec City, up to 1950. In all, more than 17,000 people are buried in the cemetery.
BAnQ’s Mount Hermon Cemetery registry contains several search fields: first and last name, date of burial, location, date of death, age, place of death, place of birth, religion, church, minister, profession, and illness or cause of death. From 1936, the date of death is indicated, and from 1941, the name of the church is noted.
The search fields are written in French and English. The information about the deceased is in the language of the original register, which is usually, if not always, in English.
Below the search fields is a lengthy description about the cemetery, written in French. To read it in English, copy and paste the URL into Google Translate and click on the translated link.
Even better, if you add Google Chrome as a browser to your computer, you can simply right-click to translate the entire page into English. The browser is free. You can continue to use your regular browser for everyday use.
Mount Hermon’s website provides a brief history of the cemetery and a map.
To find all the genealogy-related databases on the BAnQ website, click on the Collections tab, and then select Genealogy. Once on the Genealogy page, do not select English because it will remove all the content, which is in French. (Use Google Translate or Google Chrome.)
On a personal note, while attending university, I lived almost four years around the corner from this beautiful cemetery.
One of the things genealogists miss during the current pandemic is getting together with genealogists. We can attend a virtual event, but we miss out on getting together with old friends and making new ones.
The British Isles family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO) has been trying to re-create the in-person networking opportunities by holding virtual socials for its members.
Now, the society is going a step further by holding two virtual open houses this week for members, and they’re inviting non-members to join them.
While virtual socials and open houses can’t replace in-person get-togethers, they certainly make it easy for people who live far away to participate.
This Wednesday, February 17 at 7:30 p.m. and Friday, February 19, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, BIFHSGO will throw open its virtual doors to encourage genealogists to come together to meet, greet, and learn from the comfort of their home.
In it’s announcement, the society said, “Since COVID changed our lives a year ago, BIFHSGO’s board of directors has been looking for ways to connect with our members and help our members connect with each other.”
They added, “You’ve been to the big ‘Zoom room’ for our monthly presentations, our workshops and special lectures. Some of you have also attended our socials where participants enter smaller ‘rooms’ to chat for 25 minutes at a time. The open houses will be similar to the socials, but different.”
Here’s how each open house will work.
BIFHSGO has arranged a particular topic for each small room, and members and visitors will be able to choose which rooms you go to. Participants can go into one room, leave when they choose, then enter another room of interest.
So what will you find in these rooms?
You will be able to move freely from room to room, stay for a short time, or stay for the full 90 minutes. It’s up to you.
BIFHSGO is a welcoming society with an abundance of knowledgeable members, so you’re bound to find friendly discussions, useful information and answers to your burning questions in each and every room.
To attend, members and non-members need to register for this Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. or Friday at 2:00 p.m.
Also, if you usually sip coffee or wine when attending an open house, you’ll need to bring your own.
