Irish Family History Day - Special Offer

FindMyPast has invited us to celebrate Irish Family History Day with a Special Offer!

FindMyPast has an excellent collection of Irish records just waiting for you to discover, including the following:

Birth, Marriage & Death Records 1845 - 1958

Irish Court & Prison Records

Millions of historic Newspaper Articles

Census & Land Records

And, they have a Special Offer for you: a 1 month World Subscription for ONLY $5.00 USD. Click here.

Hurry, this offer expires at midnight Jan. 27th!

The Write Stuff: Using Nonfiction Writing Techniques to Write a Better Family History

If you are an OGS (Ontario Genealogical Society) member, don't forget about the next webinar. Sign on to the OGS website, sign in to the Members Only area, then choose Webinars from the Members Only tab. If you have not already downloaded "Adobe Connect", go to the webinar page ahead of time to make sure you have the program installed before joining the webinar.

The Write Stuff: Using Nonfiction Writing Techniques to Write a Better Family History

Tuesday December 2, 2014 @ 7:00 pm Speaker: Lisa Alzo www.lisaalzo.com  As genealogists we often focus on facts and uncover so much that our research produces nothing but lists. But do you really know what happened between the dashes of your ancestors’ lives? This presentation will discuss how to using nonfiction writing techniques to produce a “can’t put down” family history that will keep the pages turning for generations. If you live in the Oshawa area, come to the Durham Region Branch of the OGS meeting on Tues, Dec 2 at 7 pm in the Basement Auditorium at the Oshawa Public Library, Bagot St, Oshawa (just south of the City Hall). We will be joining the above webinar from our meeting. After the webinar, we will be having a "Show & Tell / Bring & Brag" session, followed by "pot-luck" Christmas goodies. Coffee, tea and apple cider will be provided. Everyone is welcome!

The British Newspaper Archive reaches 9 million pages

There are now 9 million historical newspaper pages to explore at The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) after the website reached a major milestone this week. 

Product Director Ian Tester commented, ‘We’re thrilled to have reached 9 million pages and have already started chasing the next big milestone. Customers tell us that they’re making amazing discoveries every day, whether they’re researching their family history, the First World War or the history of their local area. Our focus on local titles means that you can find stories from all around the UK and with the recent addition of more Irish titles, we’re becoming a more useful resource all the time’.

The British Newspaper Archive has grown massively since it was launched in November 2011. 282 British and Irish newspaper titles are now online, covering 1710-1954.

45 newspaper titles added so far this year

Thousands of pages are added every week, so coverage will just keep getting better. More than 2 million pages and 45 new titles have been added to The British Newspaper Archive so far this year, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Record, Dublin Monitor, Lancashire Evening Post, London Evening Standard and Sports Argus.

Register for free at www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/account/register to receive monthly updates about what’s being added to the website.

Vote for the newspapers you’d like to see online

Is there something you’d like The British Newspaper Archive to digitise? You can now suggest titles and vote for other people’s suggestions on the website’s feedback forum:http://help-and-advice.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/forums/243704-newspapers-we-should-add-next

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The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership project between the British Library and Findmypast. From November 2011 to 2021, up to 40 million pages from historical newspapers across the UK and Ireland (spanning the period 1700 to 1954) will be uploaded to www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection.

Launch of Scottish Valuation Rolls 1875- free Index Search for 2014

Announced on ScotlandsPeople 

-- and you can search the index for FREE until Dec. 31st!

Among the hundreds of thousands of Victorian Scots who can be found in the latest year of Valuation Rolls to be released on ScotlandsPeople are two of the most celebrated sportsmen of the era, the golfers Old Tom Morris and his eldest son Young Tom.

Valuation rolls for 1875 covering the whole of Scotland have become available, enabling searches for property owners, tenants and occupiers across Scotland from 1875 to 1920, and often revealing valuable information about the inter-census years. The latest addition comprises over 900,000 index entries and almost 72,000 digital images taken from 141 volumes of Valuation Rolls.

All the Rolls are fully searchable by name and address, and researchers can investigate people living, working and playing all over Scotland – from country estates to city tenements, castles to crofts, and factories to golf courses. Researchers at the National Records of Scotland were particularly interested to spot 17 golf clubs and societies around Scotland – from Ayrshire to Aberdeen – plus three Golf Inns.

Tom Morris father and son were not only renowned professional golfers, but Old Tom was also a sought-after maker of golf clubs and balls at his shop in St Andrews, where he was helped by his sons. His family was also prospering. Young Tom was already a successful professional player, having won the Open three times by the age of nineteen, and was newly-married. In early 1875 his daughter Elizabeth also married, but the year turned out to be the family’s ‘annus horribilis’, when tragic personal loss followed professional success.

Using the newly-available Valuation Rolls, and records of births, deaths, marriages and wills that are already on ScotlandsPeople, archivists at the National Records of Scotland have pieced together the sad tale of Old Tom and his family. ‘Old Tom Morris’s Terrible Year’, a special display at the National Records of Scotland, enables visitors to learn more about this remarkable story of repeated family loss and extraordinary resilience as Old Tom outlived all his children and their spouses.Old Tom continued his business and designed many golf courses in Scotland and beyond. When this elder statesman of Scottish golf died in 1908 at the age of 86, as the result of an accidental fall in the New Golf Club in St Andrews, only his grandchildren, Elizabeth’s children, survived him.

Tim Ellis, Registrar General and Keeper of the Records of Scotland, said:“The Morrises helped Scotland’s golfing reputation to grow across the world, and we are using the outstanding historical resources of the National Records of Scotland to mark the Ryder Cup with a tribute to two remarkable Scottish sportsmen. The release of the Valuation Rolls for 1875 enables people worldwide to take a virtual peek into addresses throughout Scotland between 1841 and 1920 on the ScotlandsPeople website. This is part of the commitment of the National Records of Scotland to provide access to the key records that researchers want.”

The Valuation Rolls can be searched along with statutory registers, old parish registers, Catholic registers, census records, wills and testaments and coats of arms on the ScotlandsPeople website, at the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh, and at local family history centres in Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Hawick and Inverness.

Vital & Court Records for the USA

I just received notice about a website that helps people researching their family history/genealogy in the United States. The site is www.county-clerks.com and was recently updated to include the Official contact details for every single county clerk in the USA.

If you were not aware, researchers trying to learn about their family history in the USA need to contact a county clerk if they are in search of any court records as well as marriage, divorce, birth and death records (vital records). County-Clerks.com makes it easier for people to contact the county official they need to find for this research.

There are no other sites like it (vitalrec.com for instance hasn't been updated in years) and it serves as a valuable resource for people looking for archived records. This has the potential to be a valuable resource for US researchers.

Mocavo- free weekend access to Universal Search

What better way to top off Mocavo's Back to School Week than with an Open Access to Universal Search weekend? Usually you need to be a Mocavo Gold member to search all of our databases at once, but for this weekend only, you can search more than420,000 databases to your heart's content. Kick start your research today and see who you will discover.

Start Searching Now

The British Newspaper Archive starts digitising eight new titles

The British Newspaper Archive starts digitising eight new titles

More than 8 million newspaper pages from 1710-1954 are now available to search at The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

In the last month, the website has started digitising the newspaper archives of eight new titles. These cover England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and include the London Evening Standard, Glasgow’s Daily Record and the Northern Whig.

The first years from the following new titles have been added to The British Newspaper Archive:

·         Biggleswade Chronicle, covering 1912

·         Daily Record, covering 1914-1915

·         Lake's Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser, covering 1864

·         London Evening Standard, covering 1860-1862 and 1866-1867

·         Newcastle Evening Chronicle, covering 1915

·         Northern Whig, covering 1869-1870

·         Surrey Comet, covering 1854-1857 and 1859-1870

·         Watford Observer, covering 1864-1865, 1867, 1869-1870

You’ll find more information and links to these new additions at http://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2014/08/07/8-new-titles-including-the-london-evening-standard/

The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership project between the British Library and Findmypast. From November 2011 to 2021, up to 40 million pages from historical newspapers across the UK and Ireland (spanning the period 1700 to 1954) will be uploaded to the website www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive research collection.