Links Family History Blog

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...

A Complete Surprise. In building out The French Side of my family tree, there was a knowledge gap around the maternal ancestors of my 2nd great-grandmother Marie Olivine Trial (grandmother of my maternal grandfather). This was due to the fact that her mother died shortly after Olivine was born, Olivine being raised by her father and step-mother. For the longest time, all I knew was Olivine's mother's name: Hermine Champagne .  The surviving records about Hermine Champagne were few and far between. And because she had died so early in life, no family lore from her side of the family survived. So it came as a complete surprise to me one day to discover that: Hermine Champagne was a direct descendant of founding Acadian settlers at Port Royal-Annapolis Royal in what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia;  some of her family had survived the Great Deportation of 1755 and re-settled in Québec years later; and she was the last in my direct family line to bear the Acadian na...