Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to RB Digital eMagazines.
 
Inside this month's issue

• 2019 celebrities revealed!
  
  
  Say hello to the stars who will uncover their roots in WDYTYA? 2019 - including Kate Winslet and Daniel Radcliffe
• Discover childhood records
  How you can build a picture of your ancestors' early years at school, work and play
• Snapshots in the sun
  The stories behind your family's summer garden photographs
• Reader story
  DNA testing unlocked the mystery of David Cooper Holmes' ancestor - a career criminal and folklore heroine
• Scottish illegitimacy
  How records reveal the fate of unmarried mothers in Scotland
• Plus...
  The best film archive websites; finding your military ancestors in regimental histories; the history of prison reform; and much more...

Discovering Your Trade Union Ancestors

The scale of the British trade union movement is astounding. Tens of millions of people have been members, and 5,000 trade unions are known to have existed at one time or another.  The website Trade Union Ancestors can help you locate a specific trade union in time and place with the A to Z index of trade unions and trade union family trees. In addition, you can read about some of the events and people that shaped the trade union movement through 200 years of history in their trade union histories, trade union lives and striking stories.

The historic union records that  survive illuminate the working lives, daily concerns and political attitudes of our ancestors.  Trade Union Ancestors aims to help  family historians to identify the correct union, to discover the role their ancestor played in it, and to find out more about trade union history.

Website editor Mark Crail stresses that the site is far from comprehensive and he cannot guarantee it is mistake-free.  Also, while millions of people have been trade union members over the past couple of centuries, millions more working people were not. At the beginning of the 20th century, just one in ten working people were members. And though masses of union records have survived, much more has been discarded or destroyed down the years.

The site draws material from a range of sources. Among the most fruitful are:

• The first four published volumes of the Historical Directory of Trade Unions. These are a wonderful but incomplete guide to the development of the trade union movement published between 1980 and 1994 by Gower. The first three were compiled by Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, and the fourth by Marsh and Ryan with the help of John Smethurst. Wonderful though they are, the series is incomplete and there are some rather obvious omissions as a result – not least the Transport and General Workers Union. Time has also moved on since they were published, with mergers and amalgamations taking place annually. There is now a fifth and a sixth and final volume available.

• The archive listings published online by Warwick University’s modern records centre. The centre has an unrivalled collection of original trade union papers, including the archives of many long since defunct trade unions deposited by their modern successors.

• A variety of published sources including the potted histories that some unions include on their websites, the books that unions have produced down the years about their origins and developments, and the many general union histories published since Sydney and Beatrice Webb originated the genre with their History of Trade Unionism, first published in 1894 and revised in 1920.

• Government papers and public records – some of them published (such as Labour Market Trends, from which data on this website is extracted) and some stored away in the National Archives waiting for someone with the time and interest in the subject to come along and find them.

New Records on FamilySearch

Free family history website FamilySearch has added a several new collection this month.  They include 594,707 Herefordshire bishop’s transcripts (1583-1898), 109,010 Scottish Presbyterian and Protestant church records (1736-1990) and 1,125,332 records of passenger arrivals at New York City, primarily dating from 1944-48, although some cover the early years of the 20th century.

Each Church of England parish was required to create copies of its registers to send to the local bishop, known as bishop’s transcripts.  These records are therefore a good alternative source for Herefordshire baptism, marriage and burial records where the originals are lost, although there may be occasional errors.

The Scottish Presbyterian and Protestant records also cover baptisms, marriages and burials in different Scottish religious dominations.

The New York arrival records include images of the original passenger cards, potentially including the passenger’s age, place of birth, occupation, marital status, last permanent residence, destination, purpose in coming to the USA and even physical descriptions.

The Herefordshire bishop’s transcripts are transcribed from original documents at Hereford Record Office. The Scottish Presbyterian and Protestant records are from the National Records of Scotland. The New York arrival records are from the American National Archives and Records Administration.

Ancestry DNA

AncestryDNA has unveiled an updated service offering county-level ethnicity results in the UK for those who have tested with them.  As part of the update the company increased its UK Genetic Communities from 18 to 73.

AncestryDNA’s results reveal customers’ ethnicity within the past 1000 years. The new Genetic Communities technology then analyses their origins in the past 300 years, including specific groups they’re related to, where those ancestors lived and the migration paths they followed – to county level in the UK.  The results can also be cross-referenced with Ancestry’s family history records.  Genetic Communities are groups of AncestryDNA members who are most likely connected because they share fairly recent ancestors who came from the same region or culture. These groups identify areas where your ancestors may have lived more recently. Regions with a dotted circle are based on Genetic Communities.

Russell James, family historian and DNA expert at Ancestry, called Communities “an incredibly valuable tool for those wanting to discover more about their DNA and family history”.  The 55 new UK communities will automatically be added to the results of existing AncestryDNA customers.

Ancestry has also increased its global number of communities to 225, covering France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, further improving the ethnicity results for its customers.

So if you have taken an Ancestry DNA test, it might be time to revisit your results and check out all the new information that is waiting for you.  There might even be a new cousin or two!

Alice Pummeroy - Another Piece to the Puzzle

A short time ago I posted about my great aunt Alice May Pummeroy, who eluded me for some time until I discovered she had emigrated from Victoria, Australia to New Zealand where she married as May Alice to David Moorhead.  I traced her through the census in New Zealand before she moved back to Victoria with her husband, where he died in 1951.

Fellow genealogist Clare has now sent me another piece to the puzzle, with a death notice and cemetery record which shows May Alice Moorhead died 1st September 1989, age 92, in Salisbury North, South Australia.  She was cremated at Enfield Memorial Park, SA.

Why she chose to move from Melbourne, Victoria to South Australia I don't know - possibly she had children who settled there and she moved to be closer to them.  All her siblings lived and died in Victoria - she was the one who travelled away.  This just goes to show that people can change their names, move to places you don't expect, and you just need to keep looking and broaden your search if you don't find them where you expect them.

A fresh pair of eyes doesn't hurt either.  Thanks Clare!

RootsTech From Afar

I have been watching with interest the developing program for RootsTech London 2019, coming up this October.  Living in Australia, the time and cost of travelling to Salt Lake City or London for the RootsTech conferences has thus far been beyond me, and I know I will not make it to London 2019 either.  Thanks to technology, however, I have had another option to at least partially participate in these wonderful meetings by watching the videos of presentations from home.

While there really is nothing to equal actually attending these conferences - meeting fellow genealogists, chatting during breaks and visiting the exhibition hall - being able to watch a selection of the presentations at least allows me to participate, to learn about the databases, the resources available and how best to access them, and it is always exciting to hear about new developments and upcoming digitization projects.

So if, like me, you cannot make it to RootsTech, don't despair.  Have a look at the video archive of past presentations and see what they have to interest you.  You might even like to join the discussion with others unable to attend - there is even a hashtag #notatrootstech.

Arolsen Archives

The Arolsen Archives, formerly known as the International Tracing Service, has announced a name change and the online release of over 13 million records of victims of Nazi persecution.

The free database consists of records from Second World War concentration camps, including prisoner cards and death notices.  In total, they contain the names of over 2.2 million victims from across Europe.

The Arolsen Archives are an international center on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. The collection has information on about 17.5 million people and belongs to the UNESCO’s Memory of the World. It contains documents on the various victim groups targeted by the Nazi regime and is an important source of knowledge, especially for younger generations.

To this day, the Arolsen Archives answer inquiries about some 20,000 victims of Nazi persecution every year. For decades, clarifying fates and searching for missing persons were the central tasks of the institution, which was founded by the Allies in 1948 as the “International Tracing Service”.
Research and education are more important than ever to inform today’s society about the Holocaust, concentration camps, forced labor and the consequences of Nazi crimes. The Arolsen Archives are building up a comprehensive online archive so that people all over the world can access the documents and obtain information.