OGS Conference 2014

The OGS Conference 2014 will be held at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario (near Niagara Falls) May 1^st to May 4^th. It will be sponsored by the Niagara  Peninsula Branch OGS.

And already there is a video on the site www.ogs.on.ca/conference2014/index.php, and you can see what is available in the immediate area.

Watch for more news on the conference. It sounds as if it is going to be exciting! 

Brant OGS Golf Fundraiser

This is a really neat idea!

On Saturday, August 31, 2013, there will be a golf fundraiser held at a local club called Fescue’s Edge, 18 Hagan Rd., Brant at 11:00 am Shotgun Start.

The cost will be $80 and it includes cart, lunch and donation to Brant OGS (Receipt for donation will be provided), and the deadline to register will be August 20, 2013.

You can contact brantogsgolf@gmail.com, or go to the web site at www.ogs.on.ca/brant

UPDATE: TONI (The Ontario Name Index)

Since last reporting on TONI (The Ontario Name Index) earlier this spring, nearly 2 ½ million entries have been added.

TONI, as an index, is FREE for everyone the world over. In order to access information found in the databases you must pay a small fee. All proceeds from those fees support Ontario's heritage community.

Go to www.ogs.on.ca/integrated/toni_database1.php to read more about TONI, and to see if the name who are researching, is there.

Quinte OGS Branch Meeting

On 15 Jun 2013 at 1:00 pm, the Quinte OGS Branch will present the talk Why Can't I Find It Online? Other Resources to Help with Your Search. The talk will be presented by Ruth Blair, from The Passionate Genealogist blog.

A good deal of research can be done online, and many believe this is all we need, but only about 1% of genealogical data has been digitized and been made available on the Internet. Great strides are being taken to get more data online, but it is a costly process and sometimes what is available is only a small reference to a certain record group, and not the actual image.

Libraries and archives are still the main sources of information for the genealogical researcher, especially when you want to dig deeper. Ruth Blair will present case studies using such resources.

The talk will take place at Quinte West City Hall Library, 7 Creswell Drive, Trenton, Ontario

The Quinte OGS Branch web site is at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canqbogs/index.htm

The Passionate Genealogist web site is at http://blog.familyhistorysearches.com 

Spirit Walk at the Crown Cemetery

A Spirit Walk will be held on Tuesday June 11th at 7 p.m. at the Crown Cemetery at Aberfoyle, Ontario.

Join them as they tell the life stories of five people buried in Crown Cemetery

two pioneer settlers

a World War Two soldier

a travelling music teacher

a  pioneer storekeeper in Morriston

A 'tailgate lunch' will follow, and you are asked to meet at the rear entrance to the cemetery off Nicholar Beaver Road (at Tim Hortons on Brock Road), Aberfoyle, Ontario.

The web site for the Puslinch Historical Society is at www.puslinchhistorical.ca/Mtgs.shtml

History and Importance of the Duff-Baby House

The Essex Branch of the OGS will be held on Monday June 10, 2013 from 6:00 pm at the Windsor Public Library, 850 Ouellette Ave., Windsor.

The talk will be entitled History and Importance of the Duff-Baby House, and the person giving the talk will be Evelyn McLean.

The meeting will be Free, and you can go to www.essex.ogs.on.ca for up to date info the meeting.

The Buff-Baby house was built between 1792 and 1798. It is considered to be the oldest building in Windsor. The house was built by Alexander Duff as a fur trade post, and bought in 1807 by James Baby. It  and was used as the headquarters of U.S. General Harrison. The British ravaged the building during the War of 1812.

The Duff Baby House is also one of the best-preserved and oldest Georgian-style houses in Ontario. Today the building is owned by the Ontario Heritage Trust and houses government offices.

Niagara Peninsula Branch Indexes Updates

Steve Fulton U.E., Chair of the Niagara Peninsula Branch OGS, tells us about the following indexes on the web site -

Surname Index - Contains over 24000 Pedigree Charts

Morse & Sons Funeral Home Records - Contains 19229 Funeral Records from 1828 to Sept 1963

Neff Young Index - Contains 19136 records of family histories, notes, newspaper clipping and memorabilia from Welland County

*NEW* Branch Publications Index - Contains 7998 various publication records for the Lincoln/Welland Area

Please check back often as indexes are being worked on.

Canadian Headstones Project - The Niagara Peninsula Branch continues to work on photographing headstones in the old Lincoln/Welland Counties. Just recently we crossed over the 20,000 mark and the number is continuing to climb.

Please visit http://canadianheadstones.com for your old Lincoln and Welland research needs.

For more information, please go to Niagara Peninsula Branch O.G.S. at www.ogs.on.ca/niagara

Brant County Branch of OGS Monthly Meeting

On Sunday, May 26, 2013, there will be a General Meeting at 2:00 pm, the speaker will be Floyd Doctor, Smokey Hollow Estates, and he will speak about Chief Peter Green and his descendants. Come Early and Browse the Brant County Branch O G S Library.

There is Free Admission Everyone Welcome

And on Monday June 24, 2013, there will be a BBQ And Strawberry Social held at 6:00 pm Brant County Branch O G S, Library and Smokey Hollow Leisure Park, $12.00 per person.

Come Early and Browse our library.

This is our Annual Fundraiser!

The The Brant County Branch Library is at 114-118 Powerline Road, on the grounds of Smokey Hollow Estates, going east from the Wayne Gretzky Parkway, just outside the North-East corner of Brantford.

One thing to note is that they are having two reunions this year at the Brant County Branch premises.

The reunions are –

Haviland Family – July 9, 2013

Misner Family - August 17, 2013

The contact information is at www.ogs.on.ca/brant/reunions.html

The website of the branch is www.ogs.on.ca/brant

Call for Presentations - Tracing Forward - Searching for Relatives in Recent Times

This came in this morning from Gwyneth Pearce, the publicity person for the Toronto Family History Branch of the OGS -

"This is a quick reminder about a Call for Presentations issued by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society for our planned fall 2013 workshop titled Tracing Forward - Searching for Relatives in Recent Times. The deadline for proposals is Friday 31 May.

The aim of this workshop, to be held on Saturday 26 October, is to offer new ideas, skills or tools to help researchers trace members of their expanded family trees, people who might still be alive or recently deceased.

We are seeking proposals from professional genealogists, family historians, private investigators, legal experts and heir searchers”.

Go the Branch website at www.torontofamilyhistory.org

Welland Canal Workers’ Historical Exhibit

The following press release just came into the office –

“During the building of the Welland Canal from 1914-1932, 124 men tragically lost their lives while working in difficult and dangerous conditions. When the canal opened in 1932, the Federal Minister of Canals and Railways of the time committed to building a memorial to remember the sacrifice of those men. Unfortunately to this day, that memorial still does not exist.

Malcolm Allen – Member of Parliament for Welland is putting a call out to the community for photographs, letters, artifacts or historical pieces relating to the Canal workers. Items loaned to our office by community members/organizations will be displayed in our constituency office at 60 King St for the month of June in order to promote the need for a permanent memorial.

Your assistance or participation in the upcoming “Welland Canal Workers’ Historical Exhibit” is greatly appreciated.

For more information please contact Lisa Bastien, Constituency Assistant for Malcolm Allen at 905-788-2204”.

To read about the history of the Welland Canal, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welland_Canal

BIFHSGO Conference registration is now online

Brian Glenn tells us that the 2013 British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO) Conference registration is now open. Both the mail-in form and the online application are now online.

The conference theme this year will be Ireland, and there will be many speakers there, such as, Eileen Ó Dúill (an international probate genealogical researcher from Ireland), Linda Reid (a Canadian genealogists), and Lisa Louise Cooke (an American genealogist with knowledge of new technology is outstanding). There will be many topics presented which should be of interest to those whose research area is Ireland.

For information about the 2013 Conference to be held from Sept 20 to 22, you can go to www.bifhsgo.ca/cpage.php?pt=22

BIFHSGO Monthly Meeting

On Saturday, May 11, The Bitish Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa  (BIFGSGO) will hold a pre-meeting which will feature Comparing FTM, Legacy and Rootsmagic - An Overview which is a part of Before BIFHSGO Education Talks at 9:00 am, and it will be presented by Ken McKinlay.

The main presentation called Building a One-Name Study: The Influence of Computers, The Internet, and DNA will be held from 10:00 am to 11:30 am, and it will be presented by Bill Arthurs.

This presentation will feature the Titus One-Name Study from its inception before the era of computers, through its progression with the advent of the internet, construction of a website, and the use of DNA research.

You can go to and listen to Bill at http://bifhsgo.ca/cpage.php?pt=106 as he talks with Brooke Broadbent about his start in genealogy and One Name Studies.

If you are interested in certain surnames, you can check the surnames on http://bifhsgo.ca/surname.php. There are 1, 293 Internet pages onsite.

The website of BIFHSGO is http://bifhsgo.ca

May is Jewish Heritage Month in Ontario

The “Jewish Heritage Month Act” (Bill 17) was passed unanimously in the Legislature on February 23, 2012. JHMO provides an opportunity to appreciate and learn about the history and culture of Ontarians of Jewish heritage who have made an impact in communities across the province.

Two of the many events taking place in Mat, include

May 5 at 11am (Est. Walk Time 1.5 hrs)

Jane’s Walk: A Sense of Spadina (Toronto, ON)

Did you know that Kensington Market, the epicenter of Toronto hipsterdom, was once a thriving Jewish village teeming with kosher bakeries, synagogues, and social clubs? Through the Ontario Jewish Archive’s “Sense of Spadina” Walking Tour, the Jewish life of the past—biographies of its former inhabitants; the sounds; the smells; Yiddish language; religious, social, and political attitudes—is brought to life.

And

Tracing Our Jewish Roots: Selections from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto Library Collection

Bathurst Clark Resource Library, 900 Clark Avneue W., Thornhill, ON

JGS Toronto’s Librarian, Elaine Cheskes, is curating a special exhibit on view for the entire month of May at The Bathurst Clark Resource Library.

For more information, go to http://jewishheritagemonth.wordpress.com/2013-events

Inheritance in Ontario: Estate Files and Beyond

On 27th of May 2013, at 7:30 p.m., there will be a meeting at the Burgundy Room, North York Memorial Community Hall, 5110 Yonge Street, Toronto, and the topics will be Inheritance in Ontario: Estate Files and Beyond, and the speaker will be Jane E. MacNamara.

She will review how to find an estate file and how it can lead to other, and she will explain sources both inside and outside the court system.

This will be a warm-up lecture to her workshop at the OGS Conference on May 31st staring at 9:30 Friday morning when she will talk about wills and her her new book Inheritance in Ontario - Wills and Other Records for Family Historians

There will be an additional short presentation by Jean McNulty A Photographic Puzzle

For more info, go to www.torontofamilyhistory.org

OGS Report 2012

For the first time ever (as far as I can remember), the Ontario Genealogical Society has put its yearly report online at www.ogs.on.ca/home/pdfs/OGS-Annual-Report-2012.pdf

It is a 44-page report which covers, in part, such subjest as Project Reports, Standing Committee Reports, Notes on Financial Statements, Financial Statements, and Where does your money go? It also includes Branch Annual Reports for 2012.

Some of the interesting things I noticed since I received the report this morning are –

An explanation of Where does your money go? The graphics used were confusing, and maybe better graphic could have been chosen. In the written explanation, they said that the operation costs each member $106.00 a year to support. We pay $60.00 per member right now. Is there an increase in dues going to be set for next year?

It looks like we will be changing to e-publication in the future. And it looks like the Publication Committee will be doing something for the First World War Anniversary in 2014, as they did with the War of 1812 Celebrations.

There will be the new website later this year, and many of the local Branches have put on new websites.

I would like to thank all of the people who put this report together, and who have made it available to everyone.

UPDATE: OGS Conference 2013

There are two updates to the Conference 2013 agenda, and they are –

There will be free access to online databases at OGS Conference 2013.

The OGS Conference is opening up three online organizations to research. They have agreed to allow OGS Conference registrants to access their databases free of charge in the Research Room during the conference.

These are Ancestry.ca, Find My Past, and the British Newspaper Archives.

And the second update concerns the workshops on Friday.

The workshop by Richard Doherty called The Scots-Irish: Origins, Emigration, Religion, and Research Sources to be held on Friday afternoon is full.

So, a second session will be designated as A-5, and it will be held Friday morning from 9:30 to 12:00. If you have already registers for Friday afternoon, but would like to change it to the afternoon, please e-mail the OGS Provincial Office at provoffice@ogs.on.ca or phone 416-489-0734.

The conference information is at www.ogs.on.ca/conference2013/home

Call for Speakers – OGS Conference 2014

The Conference 2014 at Niagara Branch are looking ahead to line up speakers for Conference 2014 in St. Catharines at Brock Universit. The conference will be held May 1st to 4th, 2014.

The conference theme will be GENEALOGY WITHOUT BORDERS.

They say, in part, that “Although borders are an important aspect in defining a country, they also often delineate an area of genealogical study. In the past, genealogists often had to travel across borders to complete family histories in their genealogical area. Today's genealogist can often cross these borders while sitting at a desk. We can trace the movement of settlers from European countries and from the American states and other provinces to Ontario. We invite seminar proposals with this theme in mind.

Our Saturday and Sunday, May 3rd and 4th seminar sessions are generally fifty minutes length with ten minutes for discussion. We also have workshops on Friday, May 2nd, which are of three hours duration. We invite lecture and workshop submissions on a broad range of genealogical topics which will help to solve family history problems by any of the following methods

Use of technology in genealogy (DNA, internet, software etc.)

Records at a distance (especially Eastern USA and European)

War records, 1812, W.W. 1

Land Records, census, directories

Early Ontario records, prior to 1869 and their repositories

Proposals are also solicited for the broader genealogical categories including the histories associated with the War of 1812, methodology, analysis and problem solving used in genealogy

If your proposal is accepted, you will be notified early summer and we will request that you provide a 4 page summary of your talk or workshop for our syllabus by Dec. 31st, 2013. This should include references and web addresses mentioned, sample screen images etc. It will be submitted electronically (in Word, RTF or PDF format).

Please include your approximate travel costs, economy class to St. Catharines, Ont. Canada. Besides remuneration, food and lodging will be based upon the number of lectures given and transportation expenses will depend upon the speaker's home address. Workshop fees may be negotiated.

We are looking for speakers who would be open to being streamed out from the conference to those members who cannot travel but still wish to join us. As well we are looking for speakers who may be interested in speaking but cannot travel as we can stream you in to the conference”.

Questions can be directed to conference2014@ogs.on.ca

The website is at www.ogs.on.ca/niagara

GENWEB UPDATE: Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario Cemeteries

The Canadian GenWeb has issued an update to the Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario cemeteries as follows -

ALBERTA

Lacombe:

-  Bentley Cemetery

QUEBEC

Huntingdon County:

- Tallen Family Burial Ground

ONTARIO

Brant County:

- Farringdon Cemetery

- Mount Hope Cemetery

Bruce County:

- Douglas Hill Cemetery

- Queen Hill Cemetery

Elgin County:

- St Thomas Cemetery

Essex County:

- Victoria Memorial Gardens

Grey County:

- Cookes Presbyterian / Orange Valley Presbyterian / Old Presbyterian Cemetery

- Mennonite Brethren In Christ Cemetery

Lambton County:

- Hillsdale Cemetery

- Point Edward Veterans Memorial Park

Manitoulin District:

- Michael Bay Cemetery

Norfolk County:

- Barton Family Cemetery

- Bethel Brethern in Christ / Tunkard Cemetery

Peel County:

- Brampton Pioneer / Harrison-Hewgill Pioneer Cemetery

- Cheyne Cemetery

Simcoe County:

- St Mary's Catholic Cemetery

Wellington County:

- Abandoned / Old Anglican Cemetery

The Canada GenWeb have given it thanks to Alison Mitchell-Reid, Anne Chamberlain, Bonnie Lee Breadner, Brenda Marchese, Giselle Loder, Jim Anderson, Joanne Krywko, Kate Ford, Marilyn Whiting, Nancy Ross-Hill, Sharon Mattiuz, Tom Thompson, and William Cooke for help indexing, and to Alison Mitchell-Reid, Anne Chamberlain, Bonnie Lee Breadner, Carolyn Bechtel, Doug Tracey, Joanne Krywko, Kate Ford, Linda Doran, Marilyn Mallet, Nancy Ross-Hill, Penny Gallagher, Pete Carell, Sharon Mattiuz, Thomas Rowe, and William Cooke for photos of the cemeteries.

To view the site, go to http://canadacems.blogspot.com/2013/04/alberta-quebec-ontario-update.html

UPDATE: The Ontario Name Index (TONI)

The latest news from the Ontario Genealogical Society, and the people who are working on the TONI database, is that they have 1,813,773 records online. As they reach the 2,000,000 mark - they find that they need more coordinators.

Anyone can use TONI. It is open to members and non-members alike, and they would look forward to hearing from you.

So if you can help, that would be great!

The records are available through the website, and Pay-Per-View (PPV) at www.ogs.on.ca/integrated/toni_databasesearch.php

The person to contact is Mike More, TONI Provincial Coordinator at toni@ogs.on.ca

Quinte OGS Branch Meeting

Sher Leetooze will talk about Scottish Research when the Quinte OGS Branch has their meeting on Saturday at 1:00 pm on April 20th, 2013.

Sher has been working to get her family from Ulster back into Scotland and in preparation for that day, Sher went to see just what Scottish records would tell her. Today, Sher will share with us some of that information for the lowlands and borders of Scotland, how it is divided up, where the records are kept, and how to access them.

The meeting takes place in the Christ Church Hall (ample parking available) 770 Trenton Frankford Road, Glen Miller, Ontario.

The website is at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canqbogs

Sher will also be at the OGS Conference (May 31, June 1, 2 in Oshawa where she will give a talk on Saturday morning Building Yout Family Story Using Maps.

The OGS Conference site is at http://www.ogs.on.ca/conference2013/home