Do you have Canadian roots? Then Canadiana should be on your list of online resources searched regularly for family history information.
Recently Newswire.ca described Canadiana as “a digital initiative of extraordinary scale,…a joint effort of 25 leading research institutions, libraries and archives working together with the goal of creating Canada’s multi-million page, comprehensive online archive.” Its digital collections chronicle Canada’s past since the 1600s and most of its content is free.
What we especially noticed in a recent peek at this enormous Canadian digital archive:
The Héritage Project. This FREE resource “aims to digitize, preserve and make accessible Canada’s archival materials for Canadians and the world. Héritage is also a pathfinder project to determine the best ways to organize and fund ongoing efforts to make all of Canada’s remaining documentary heritage accessible online.” Their large collection of genealogy materials so far includes immigration records, church records, land records, family histories, voters’ lists and more. Military history, government documents and aboriginal records are also well-represented. Tip: check back often! More is coming, like local and regional newspaper digitization and records of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces.
The Canadiana Discovery Portal. This gateway to digital collections from 40 repositories points to 65 million pages! Sample subjects include Ontario genealogy and War of 1812 campaigns. This portal is also free to use.
Early Canadiana Online, with 5 million images already and expected to grow to 16 million. This part of the website requires a subscription ($10/month or a year for $100) This is “a full-text collection of published documentary material, including monographs, government documents, and specialized or mass-market periodicals from the 16th to 20th centuries. Law, literature, religion, education, women’s history and aboriginal history are particular areas of strength.” The site describes itself as “the most complete set of full-text historical content about Canada, including books, magazines and government documents.” Tip: scroll down on the home page to click the Genealogy and Local History portal, but don’t ignore the rest of the site!
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Every Friday, we blog about new genealogy records online. Do the collections below include your ancestor? Don’t forget: tomorrow is Lisa Louise Cooke’s FREE live streaming class on using Google Tools to Solve Family Mysteries–use them to find more records like these! (Details below.)
This week: Irish newspapers, London electoral registers, Ohio naturalizations and Virginia vital records (through 2014!).
IRISH NEWSPAPERS. Subscribers at FindMyPast can now access over a million newIrish newspaper articles. These eight papers have updates: Cork Examiner, 1841-1896, Derry Journal, 1825-1950; Freeman’s Journal, 1820-1900; Roscommon Journal and Western Impartial Reporter, 1828-1864; Saunder’s News-Letter, 1773-1864; Ulster Gazette, 1844-1871; Waterford Chronicle, 1827-1870 and Waterford Mail, 1824-1870.
LONDON ELECTORAL RECORDS. Nearly 3 million indexed records have been added to the free England, London Electoral Registers, 1847–1913 database at FamilySearch.org. The overall collection contains more than 660,000 digital images of electoral registers filmed at the London Metropolitan Archives.
OHIO NATURALIZATIONS. Over 80,000 indexed names have been added to the US, Ohio, Southern District Naturalization Index, 1852–1991.This database covers a prime migration route: north of the Ohio River (records include courts at Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and Steubenville). The index points toward records that can traditionally be tough to find because people could naturalize at any court.
Here’s a tip: Harness Google’s power to search for specific record sets in which your family may appear. Watch Lisa’s free live streaming class TOMORROW, June 6, “Google Tools and Procedures for Solving Family History Mysteries.” Click here for details. Can’t watch tomorrow? You can still register to watch the class in the SCGJ archive through July 5.
Imagine taking a standard U.S. census form, translating it into Spanish, administering it to a newly-American population whose racial identity is highly politicized, translating the results back into English and trying to make sense of them 100 years later.
That’s what happens when you’re looking at 1910 census in Puerto Rico.
I stumbled on this story when my dad, a FamilySearch indexer, called my attention to a current project to index previously-missed parts of the 1910 census. A lot of the missing data was for Puerto Rico. The forms are in Spanish. My dad asked my help translating some of what he was reading, since I speak some Spanish. He was concerned that the computer was interpreting some of the abbreviations in English when they were likely Spanish abbreviations. I looked into it and what I found reminded me of these lessons:
From “The US Census and the Contested Rules of Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico,” by Mara Loveman, in Caribbean Studies, 35:2 (July-Dec 2007), 3-36. Click image to go to the paper.
Always read the record itself and seek to understand it. Don’t just rely on the index! The published images of this census on Ancestry interpret “B” in the race column as “Black,” but a little research (thank you, Google Scholar!) reveals that the census takers entered the race in Spanish–so “B” was for “blanco” (read about it in this academic paper).
When you see someone’s race change over the course of a lifetime, consider the historical context. Puerto Rican census data from the early 1900s “show a population becoming significantly whiter from one census to the next” because of “changes in how race was classified on census returns,” says the same paper. Not only were there changes in the official instructions, but the enumerators increasingly didn’t follow them. In fact, on several thousand census entries in 1910 and even more in 1920, “individuals’ racial classifications were manually crossed out, and a different ‘race’ was written in. These post-enumeration edits, it turns out, were done by a select group of Puerto Ricans hired to supervise and ‘correct’ the work of fellow Puerto Rican enumerators.”
This little historical trivia is not so trivial if you’re wondering why your ancestor may be identified by a different race than you expected. Learn more about finding academic papers like the one quoted here in The Genealogist’s Google Toolboxby Lisa Louise Cooke. Her book shows you how to search Google Scholar for gems like this that make your family history more clear!
Do you have Canadian roots? Then Canadiana should be on your list of online resources searched regularly for family history information.
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