52 Ancestors: Week 41 - Finding Context with BC Newspapers

The prompt for Week 41 of 52 Ancestors is "context". Sometimes its not enough to know the specific events of your ancestor's life. You also have to look at why they did what they did. My future great great grandchildren will probably wonder how I ended up in my new home province. Now, as a good family historian, I will be leaving them the reasons why. Unfortunately our ancestors weren't so accommodating. It's up to us to make educated guesses, and look into records that us some context about what their world was like.

A great way to find out about the social history of our ancestors is through newspapers. If you have British Columbia ancestors, you'll want to bookmark the University of British Columbia's BC Historical Newspapers website.

https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcnewspapers

One of the UBC's Open Collections, the site has had over 10 million image views and over 240,000 downloads. It has 51,093 digitized copies of 168 different newspapers that cover most of the province. I was happy to see some Northern BC historical papers in the collection, as the north of the province is often ignored here. The majority of the newspapers cover the south of the province.

I have a half great uncle, Robert Simpson Douglas. Born 1905 in Scotland as Robert Simpson Herd, he was a son of the first marriage of my great grandmother Mary Black McArthur. He emigrated to Canada as a British Home Child and ended up reuniting with his mother in Canada. He took the last name Douglas from my great grandfather James Henry Douglas, who seems to have unofficially adopted him and his brother, another British Home Child. A mining engineer, Robert ended up migrating from Ontario to British Columbia. He passed away in Vancouver in 1975. I decided to look into the newspapers available to see if I could find mention of him, his wife Matilda "Tilly" Patton, or his son George Robert Douglas. there are several ways you can search.


General Search
I used the general search first. The trick with the general search is to use quotations. Just typing in Robert Douglas will give me results showing all papers with both Robert and/or Douglas. By using "Robert Douglas" I can narrow down the results considerably. Robert moved from Ontario to BC sometime between 1937 and 1953. His son George was born in Kirkland Lake Ontario in 1937, and I first found Robert in BC Voter's Lists in 1953. I then filtered the results further by newest to oldest. You can do this by using the filter just to top right of the results:

https://open.library.ubc.ca/search?q=%2522robert%2520douglas%2522&p=0&sort=0&view=0&circle=n&dBegin=&dEnd=&c=6&collection=bcnewspapers

Now in the results, you don't want to click on the title of the paper. That will take you to the first page of that particular issue. What you want to do is click on the Show Details button. This will give you more information and the page that the result appears on.

https://open.library.ubc.ca/search?q=%2522robert%2520douglas%2522&p=0&sort=6&view=0&circle=n&dBegin=&dEnd=&c=7&collection=bcnewspapers

Then click on the page number. This will then take you to the page the result is on. You can zoom in and out, and you can also download the image to your computer.



Search by Newspaper

https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcnewspapers

As you can see from the map above, there is an interactive map on the website to help you narrow down which newspapers they have from your ancestor's area. You can either click on the newspaper name, or click on one of the location pins. A window will pop up with the name of the paper. Then click on the explore button to go to that paper's search page.

I chose The Mining Review out of Sandon BC. I did not expect to find information of my great uncle because of the publication dates. However, it might give me some insight in the history of mining in the province. Once I went to The Mining Review page, you have two options. You can use a search term in the box at the top of the page:

https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcnewspapers/xminingrev

Or, you can scroll down and browse by individual issues. Just click on a year, then one of the highlighted boxes for an individual issue:

I used search first. I used the term engineer. The search results page works exactly the same as I described above when using the General Search. What I found in the "Mines and Mining" column on October 27 1900 was a tidbit about mining engineer Alex Sharpe. He was in the area looking over operations on behalf of the Burns-Wilson syndicate. But what I found farther down the page was really interesting:

"...The Noonday mine at Silverton, another property that paid the large wage for the short day during the lockout, and whose manager used to say could do it with profit, is in serious financial difficulties; and it is a question if the ownership is not changed all around before all is over..."

Now for me, the mention of a lockout is interesting. If I had a mining ancestor in that area and time period, I would want to research that lockout. To be honest, I want to anyway.


All in all this is a great site. It is very user friendly. As well, the images are very clear and crisp. I looked through several papers, and I did not find a bad image once. Underneath the images are the metadata information. You should have no problem doing source citations from the information given.

52 Ancestors: Week 40 - Harvesting on Peel's Prairie Provinces

Week 40 of 52 Ancestors has the prompt "harvest". One of the biggest reasons for migration to Canada and then west across the country was the chance to own land and farm. So this post I decided to take a look at what a search using "harvest" on Peel's Prairie Provinces would turn up.

I've mentioned what a great resource this website is in the past. It's a partnership between several different corporations, institutions, and the Canadian government. The site focuses on Western Canada research, and has a variety of material that would interest genealogists and historians.

When I did a search on their site using the word "harvest", I got some really interesting results. I've broken the results into their four categories of records.


Bibliography

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/search/?search=raw&pageNumber=1&field=body&rawQuery=harvest&index=peelbib

A search of he bibliography section resulted in 1838 publications. Just click on the link of the publication, and then just to the right of the title you'll see FlipBook view. Click on that, and it will open a new window to look through the publication. I found some real gems in this section:

• Manitoba, the Canadian north-west: A record of the results of the harvest of 1887: With maps and valuable information respecting the country and its lands; advice how and when to settle upon and cultivate them; capital required, &c. &c.: Compiled from letters from actual settlers. Winnipeg: Canadian Pacific Railway Co, 1888. This publication lists the names and answers of farmers in the area. You can find out what they grew, how big their farm was, how much fencing they had. The farmers themselves gave opinions on soil, climate, how good their area is for animal husbandry. It's a great insight into your ancestor if he's listed.
• Manitoba and the North-West: The land of immeasurable promise: Happy homes for the millions secured by tickling the rich prairie soil: Facts from actual settlers: What the men who have been there say. Winnipeg: Daily Sun, 1880?. This booklet is another one that lists hundeds of farmer's names under different categories. You can find out how long they've been there, and the improvements they've made to the lands. It gives details of their farming efforts, and their opinions of living in Manitoba.
• Recent Canadian West letters (historical and descriptive). [Brantford, Ont.: Hurley Printing Co, 1912]. Rev. R.G. MacBeth was an Ontario pastor who was born in the Selkirk Colony on the Red River. This book is a compilation of letters he wrote to a local newspaper. They not only talk about his boyhood, but of the changes he saw when he made visits back there as an adult.
• Retrospect and prospect: The silver cord and the golden chain. [Saskatoon: s.n, 1939]. A publication by the Saskatchewan Homemaker's Club that gives great insight into the lives of the rural women.
• Pioneer historical number. Grande Prairie, Alta.: [Grande Prairie Herald], 1934. A history of the Grande Prairie and South Peace area. Of particular interest are lists of the first settlers and their stories.

Newspapers

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/search/?search=raw&pageNumber=1&field=body&rawQuery=harvest&index=newspapers

The search through newspapers resulted in 41,393 hits. Don't be daunted though. By using the filters at the right of the screen, you can narrow the search. As you can see from the screen shot above, you can narrow by date, year published, language, and/or by publication. Here' a sampling of some of the interesting things I found

• The Strathmore Standard, August 20, 1942 - an article on the town meeting held  few days earlier. The meeting was to discuss how to handle the upcoming harvest with so many men gone to war.
• The Edmonton Bulletin, August 1, 1921 (CITY EDITION) - an article discussing the recently mandated $4.00/day harvester wage
• Northern Tribune, August 31, 1933 - this particular edition of the regular column Wapiti News mentions a few men that had traveled to other areas to work on farms. It even gives the farmer's name of where they went to work.
• Crossfield Chronicle, October 13, 1932 - an article about a transient worker by the name of George Morden, who had been writing fraudulent cheques to local businesses
• The Calgary Weekly Herald, February 22, 1888 - a letter to the editor written by 7 local men. These men were disputing the findings of a Professor Sheldon about the unsuitability of the Canadian West for farming.

Photographs

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/search/?search=raw&pageNumber=1&field=body&rawQuery=harvest&index=postcards

 The website has 129 photographs tagged with the word "harvest". Here's a few I saw:

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/postcards/PC004662.html

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/postcards/PC003233.html

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/postcards/PC004448.html

Maps
I received no hits for "harvest" in their maps section. However, when I used the search word "farm", I got some results. here's an interesting one of St. Bruno farm in Alberta, about 1926

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/maps/M000565.html

52 Ancestors: Week 39 - Finding Maps on Internet Archive

Week 39's 52 ancestors prompt is "Map It Out". I love old maps. Finding Canadian old maps on line can be a little challenging sometimes though. I recently took a look at Internet Archive to see what they have, and boy was I happy!

If you've never used Internet Archive, you should start. Starting way back in 1996, this wonderful sites allows libraries and institutions around the world to upload materials to the site for FREE. According to their about page, this virtual library now holds:

• 330 billion web pages
• 20 million books and texts
• 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts)
• 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs)
• 3 million images
• 200,000 software programs

I like to regularly check on there to see what they've got relating to Canadian history and genealogy. I'm always finding something new. Genealogical Societies are jumping on the bandwagon too. They have been digitizing material and uploading to Internet Archive. One notable project has been the digitization of Toronto City Directories by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society (now known as Ontario Ancestors). To date they have digitized most directories from 1833 to 1969. They have a chart on their website with direct links to the digitized directories here. Check with your local society to see if they've been uploading to Internet Archive. If they haven't, speak to the leadership about starting a project to do so.

But back to maps. The drawback to Internet Archive is that because of the sheer volume of information available, it will take some searching to find what you want. You don't want to be too specific, but you also want to try and weed out as much as you can on the first go. For instance, I typed in "Canada Maps" and got 2966 results. I typed in "Newfoundland Maps" and got 148 results. I typed in "Newfoundland Land Maps" and got 16 results, but they may not be what I'm looking for. And it all depends how the uploads been tagged for the search engines. When I typed in "Atlantic Canada Maps" I got 132 results. Some pertained to Newfoundland and didn't come up in the searches using "Newfoundland". As you can see, you'll have to play around a bit.

Now some of these various results were maps. But some of the results were also voice recordings, videos, reports, non fiction books and novels. These other results can be interesting to look at too. But if you only want to focus on one thing, then your next step is to use the filters on the left side bar. Here's a screenshot of the results from the search term "Canada Maps".

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Canada%20Maps

Now if I filtered to just images, I get 65 results. But, not all of them are Canada specific maps.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Canada+Maps&and[]=mediatype%3A%22image%22

Now when I filtered to just texts, I found some interesting results. One was called Six manuscript maps showing places on Lake Ontario in southern Canada, the Niagara River and along the St. Lawence River. This was six hand dawn maps that were later included in a 1823 book called Travels through part of the United States and Canada in 1818 and 1819, volume 2, by John M. Duncan. What makes these manuscript maps so exciting is the notations at the bottom of each one. Here's a screen shot of map 2:

And here's a close up of the notations for map 2

Did you have an ancestor that fought in Flanders? Here's a map that is just one of many in the book Canada in Flanders (Vol 1) by Sir Max Aitken, with a preface by A. Bonar Law and an introduction by Sir Robert Borden.

As a side note, while I was flipping through pages I noticed many individual soldiers named. It's worth a look into the whole book.

I decided to filter by collection. I chose the collection Canadian Municipal Collection (Cities and Towns). I chose the rather dry sounding RESIDENTIAL AREAS GREATER WINNIPEG - PRELIMINARY REPORT, published in 1948. There's some rather interesting maps in there:

Judging from the report, Winnipeg had a housing crisis in the post WWII years. Included in the report are pictures of government housing areas. This report is a nice insight into the problems people had with adequate housing in post war Winnipeg.

Finally, here's a map from a pamphlet enticing wholesalers to come to Saskatoon. The map from the 1911 publication was made by the Saskatchewan Board of Trade.

And of course there are the maps on Internet Archive that one usually searches for, such as topographical and fire insurances maps. But what I really like about this site is that you will always find sources you didn't think to look at. Each I time I search on here I always find an unexpected source that leads me in a new direction.

52 Ancestors: Week 38 - French Canadian and Acadian Research on migrations.fr

The 52 Ancestors prompt for week 38 is "cousins". My French Canadian/Acadian roots have given me a ridiculously large amount of cousins. So what better group to focus on when I'm trying to appeal to a wide audience.

http://www.migrations.fr/page%20d'accueil.htm

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a website called Migrations. This website has some great information on the early settlers of New France and Acadie. The website is in French but Chrome will translate it for you if your French isn't that great. Now there are lots of different sites out there for early research. The problem with most French Canadian and Acadian research is that once you hit that immigrant ancestor back in the 1600's and 1700's, you're at a bit of a dead end. Unless you're lucky enough to make a trip to France to do some research, the trail tends to end there.What makes this site stand out is that thanks to the France connections of the owners, you can get information that goes back to France.

Here's a sampling of some of their sections:

Soldiers of the Carignan Saliere Regiment

http://www.migrations.fr/regimentcarignancomplet.htm

• History of the regiment
• Biographies
• Index of soldiers
• Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials relating to the soldiers. 
• Details of the soldiers' lives and battles

The church records are accompanied by images of the original record.

Filles de roi and Filles des marier

• History of the girls and women sent to France for the specific purpose of marrying and growing the population of New France
• Baptism, Marriage and Death records. 
• Indexes of names

Original images of the church records are also included.

Acadians

http://www.migrations.fr/acadiens.htm

This section focuses on those Acadians that ended up back in France after the Deportation. Here you can find:

• Ship's lists
• Pension records
• Marriage and Death Records

Fishermen and Sailors
This section focuses on the genealogies of several families of the Gaspesie region. You can also find:

• contracts
• an index of names of  Navigators and Fishermen in New France and Mont-Louis 1753 to 1756 by Mario Mimeault
• a dictionary of French Naval terms
• photographs

I don't usually highlight websites that show non Canadian based records, but I was very excited to find information on the Maillet family. In fact there is a whole page devoted to some fascinating research done in France. It was a Google search result that this page came up and then I found all the other information available.

My maternal grandmother was Marie Anne Mallais from the Shippegan area of New Brunswick.  Through her is my 5x great grandfather Jean Baptiste Mallet. Here is my connection to him:

• Me
• Mary Jane Govereau
• Marie Ann Mallais
• Patrice Mallais
• Jean Julian Mallais
• Joseph Jules Mallais
• Joseph Julian Mallais
• Jean Baptiste Maillet

Jean, along with his wife Marie Josephet Dugay and her two brothers, were the first settlers of Shippegan. Jean was born in 1742 in the Gaspesie region, and was the son of Francois Mallet and Madeleine Larocque. Francois was born about 1700 in Normandy,France. For many years not much was known about him except an approximate birth year and the fact that he was born in France. The only reason why even this was known was because by some miracle his burial record is one of the few church records that survive from the Gaspesie region. But thanks to the diligent research of several people in France, those of us descended from Francois Maillet have been able to find out more about Francois. We know know he was from Bouillon France, and was a member of the French Navy.

A baptism was found for Francois. Not only have they provided an image of the record itself, but a transcription as well.

http://www.migrations.fr/francoismallet.htm

Using the baptism researchers were then able to go a further 3 generations back using church records,dispensations and notarial acts:

• Francois Mallet
• Jean Maillet and Jeanne LeGros
• Gilles Maillet and Michelle Hamelin/ Nicolas LeGros and Catherine Linois
• Jean Mallet, father of Giles, and Pancrasse Hamelin, father of Michelle Hamelin

The site also details Francois and his father Jean's career in the Navy. Through research they were also able to find siblings and half siblings of Francois. Each record regarding bsptism, marriage and death has images of the original record, as well as a transcription. If your grasp of French is shaky, the Chrome browser translation to English is quite good, as you can see from the screen shot above. The documents provided take the Maillet line back to a land transaction in 1671.

If your family is from the Gaspesie region, you'll definitely want to look at the other biographies listed.