Welcome
to our newest edition of our periodic feature Upfront Mini Bytes. In Upfront Mini Bytes we provide eight tasty
bits of genealogy news that will help give you a deeper byte into your family
history research. Each item is short and sweet. We encourage you to check
out the links to articles, blog posts, resources, and anything genealogical!
We hope you found
the past editions helpful. Use your
favorite search engine with “Upfront with NGS” “Mini Bytes” or use this Google search link.
Do you have
questions, suggestions for future posts, or comments? Please post a comment or send an e-mail to [email protected].
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Understanding of the
origin of a surname can be very helpful as we research our ancestors. If you are researching Ashkenazic Jewish
ancestry, consider reading Here's The Fascinating
Origin Of Almost Every Jewish Last Name (Business Insider).
If
you don’t read The Vault on Slate.com with posts by Rebecca Onion, you might want to add it to your list. It is a neat blog where interesting historic information is often posted – typically in the form of a visual graphic that tells a story. Some examples are: Some Everyday Words That Meant Really Different Things to Early American Colonists, Chart Shows Occupations
of Soldiers Most Likely to Be Rejected by the Union Army. (Sorry, Editors,
Barkeeps, and Tailors.), and A Map of Hundreds
of Noise Complaints in 1920s Manhattan, and Four Other Stupendous Digital
History Projects. You can access the blog version here, which gives you a sense of the
esoteric and interesting history tidbits shared.
Church archives and
their records are fascinating. For some
ancestors, early mentions in church records may be the only documentation of
their existence, especially if they were landless, female, or just generally
“under the radar” of who was documented.
If you had practicing Congregationalist ancestors who lived in New England in the Colonial Era, check out the Congregational Library & Archives History Matters digital collection.
British Army war diaries
(1914-1922) are online with more to be added. These are British Army unit war
diaries for both Flanders and France. Note that these are not personal diaries.
Though
the Google news archive of newspapers is no longer being added to, this doesn’t
mean that you can’t access its really neat historic archives. Go to this page and you will see a list of all
newspapers (or you can search for a title). Select a newspaper of interest and
then you can browse the available issues.
You can also search through the newspapers though I suggest you put the
name of the newspaper in quotes along with your search term. The absence of a result may not truly mean
that there is no matching content. Between the vagaries of the search feature
and OCR indexing technology, don’t completely trust the search feature!
If you want a view
of the Canadian Parliament in action, the historical debates (in English and French) of both the
Senate and the House of Commons from 1867-mid 1990s are now online. Who knows,
maybe a member of your family was a topic of conversation either directly or as
part of a group impacted by the outcome of a debated topic.
The
Maine Franco-American Genealogical Society has created a summary of American-Canadian
Marriages 1599-1984 that reflects “Marriages from Canadian Parishes with
American descendants.”
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