Links Family History Blog

Introducing the TULLY family. The TULLY family (on my father's maternal side) arrived in Canada - specifically Lower Canada - from Scotland around 1817. They settled in the region of Huntingdon, Quebec and were part of a migration of British immigrants to North America that took place over a number of years following the War of 1812. The Canadian founder of the TULLYs in my family was 5th-great grandfather James TULLY. He was born about 1780 in Morebattle, Roxburghshire, Scotland and died in Huntingdon, Quebec, Canada in 1856. His spouse, Newton Rebecca BUCKHAM (1782-1854), was also of Roxburghshire, Scotland. Two of their daughters married into two other Scottish-Canadian founding families in Quebec, the ELDERs and the TAYLORs; and two of their children (first cousins James Tully ELDER and Jane Alexis TAYLOR) married in Ontario, then later moved to the new province of Manitoba about 1883 to farm. My paternal great-great grandfather was their son William John ELDER (1874-1959). Res...

I appreciate your patience. After taking a months-long break from blogging to attend to some family issues, I will soon return from hiatus and begin posting new ancestor profiles and research insights shortly.  Preparing to break through some brick walls! Join me as I  continue to work on the Acadian, Cole FANs, DIY Genealogy, and Founder series;  the COLE Name Study; and  begin to dive into the use of new-to-me research methods such as location scans and using DNA to enhance my efforts.  I hope to see you soon as I continue to share my journey of discovery.

Step 2: Scan Letters and Envelopes. This post continues the Saving Letters mini-series that started with  Saving Letters - Why Do It?  followed by  Step 1: Cataloguing .  In this post, Step 2: Scanning,  I set out my considerations and the method I follow for scanning my letter collection.  While I don't want to over-complicate this step, it is also not quite as simple as it might seem. Things to think about and decisions to make about the scanned files themselves include: Equipment and setup to perform the scans. Computer (or other) storage capacity for saving scanned files. Quality and readability of the scanned images. Potential obsolescence of the scanned file format(s). Backing up scanned images. Subsequent steps, transcribing and filing the scans, will be the subject of future posts -- so stay tuned! Working through this process gave me: a better comfort level that the letters would be preserved even if the originals were lost or destroyed; confi...

Striking Gold at the Diocese of Toronto Archives. In a previous post where I introduced my Cole "FAN club," I wrote about Joshua Levi Cole who was the youngest known child of my Canadian Cole family founders Henry Cole and Elizabeth Churchill. Joshua Levi Cole In that post, I had listed his birth year and location as 1835, with alternate birth years of 1833 and 1834, in Streetsville (now in the Municipality of Mississauga, Peel County, Ontario, Canada). The sources for this data came from later census records and from his Find-A-Grave memorial, which cited his headstone located in St. Andrews and St. James Cemetery in Orillia, Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada. I knew that birthdates recorded in census records were not always accurate, that sometimes in records a baptism date was used interchangeably as a birthdate, and that headstones are made by those who survive the deceased (i.e., errors happen). So, I could not rest. I had to keep searching for confirmation of Joshua's...