Finding Places in New Brunswick, Canada

One of the challenges you can run into when doing your research is finding out the "correct" spelling of a place and where it is actually located in the province. In my case I have a number of the family lines that settled in New Brunswick area in the late 1700 and early 1800s.

Buried within the web site of the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick is a very interesting page called "Where is Home? New Brunswick Communities Past and Present" found at http://archives.gnb.ca/exhibits/communities/Home.aspx. On that page you will come across the listing of the counties of New Brunswick and an ability to search for places. When you bring up the details on a community you will find a description of the place, several maps, and distances to near by villages and towns.

One of those maps of particular interest to those researching ancestors in early New Brunswick is the cadastral map. The cadastral maps show the basic features of the area along with boundaries, lot number, and grantee's name for land granted. For example, the cadastral map below is for the portion of Kings County that includes Norton.

Provincial Archives of New Brunswick [http://archives.gnb.ca/exhibits/communities/Details.aspx?culture=en-CA&community=2875]

Call For Speakers: 20th Annual BIFHSGO Family History Conference

20th Annual BIFHSGO Family History Conference

The British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa is seeking proposals for presentations at its annual conference, September 19 - 21, 2014, to be held in Ottawa at Library and Archives Canada.

Conference Theme

The conference will focus on three main topics:

• English family history
• Immigration from the British Isles, including Home Children
• Genetic genealogy

Proposals are also invited for other conference presentations likely to be of interest to BIFHSGO members and for pre-conference workshops or seminars.

Deadline

Please send proposals to conference@bifhsgo.ca before January 31, 2014.

Proposal Submission

• Each proposal should be written on one page and include:
• Your full name, postal address, telephone number, and email address;
• Whether the proposal is for:
• a lecture (or several lectures) during the conference, and/or
• a seminar or hands-on workshop on the Friday. Please indicate if the workshop will be a half day (3 hours) or a full day (6 hours);
• Presentation title(s);
• An abstract of up to 200 words describing each presentation;
• A one or two-sentence description of your talk(s) for the conference brochure;
• A 100-150 word biography;
• Your audiovisual requirements;
• Whether your presentation(s) would be aimed at those working at the beginner (general), intermediate, or advanced (specialist) level;
• Whether you will provide a two to four-page summary of your talk, including references and website addresses, as a handout;
• Whether you would be prepared to present remotely.

Coming To Your Census

With the advent of the digitization and indexing of the census pages from Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland and United States we have been spoiled in comparison to what researchers even ten years ago had to go through to find ancestors and relatives. Now we can visit many online sites that have made available those images and indexes. Some of those sites are free while others may require paying a monthly or annual fee to access the records. Even some of those pay sites may be freely available at your local archive, library or Family History Center.

Yet even with the indexes that are available some family members seem to be impossible to find in a census. There are many possible reasons they can't be found. Some of them are:

• the hand writing by the enumerator is atrocious
• the original microfilm was of poor quality
• the original pages were damaged
• the enumerator had no clue on how the name was spelled by the family
• the person of interest has left the country or has died
• the person's name may have changed due to marriage or due to "legal" issues

So what can you do to find them?

Some possible suggestions are:

• Search for the household as a group but leave off their surname. 
• Search for the youngest member of the household at the time of the census. Usually their age will be the most accurate.
• Don't include the age or birth year of the person. For some reason it is not uncommon for women to not be exactly truthful when answering questions about their age.
• Restrict the search to only a specific district, sub-district or town where they are believed to be living at the time of the census. This may reduce the number of possible names to look at to a manageable size.
• If all else fails a page by page examination of the digitized images of an area may be necessary. Sort of an old school/new school approach.

For example, I was looking for the family of Arthur Finnie and his wife Elizabeth Ann (nee McMullen) yet I couldn't initially find them in the 1921 Census of Canada that has been made available on Ancestry. In this case I knew that they probably lived in Windsor and most likely had their 3 year old daughter Margaret living with them. So for the search parameters on Ancestry I specified the following details:

First & Middle Name: Elizabeth Ann
Birth Year: 1881
Birth Location: Ontario, Canada
Spouse: Arthur
Child: Margaret
Keyword: Windsor  [Exact match checked]
Gender: Female

Note that in this case I left off the surname for Elizabeth Ann Finnie but I did include her known birth year. The first match returned was a transcription for the household of Arthur Francise with wife Elizabeth, daughter Margaret and lodger Thompson Officer.

This is why being able to examine the image of the census record in question is so important.

1921 Census of Canada, Ontario, district 77, sub-district 41, Windsor, p. 17, dwelling 182, family 193, household of Arthur Finnie; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 17 Nov 2013); citing Library and Archives Canada.

Looking at the image, at least to my eyes, the surname isn't "Francise" but is "Finnie", the family I am looking for.

So don't give up when searching for those family members apparently missing from the census. You may just need to be a little creative in your searches.

Stop, Pause, and Think

We've all heard of the expression "Stop, drop, and roll" to help put out flames if your clothing is on fire. I think there should be a saying "Stop, pause, and think" for genealogists that rely on other peoples work to fill in the blanks about their ancestors.

Recently I discover the name of my 6th great-grandfather, Jedidiah Fairweather, in the oath attesting to the marriage of his daughter Esther to Lt. Caleb Howe. You may want to see my recent posting for details of this discovery. Whenever I come across a new person on my direct line I usually search various online resources for other references to this "new" family member.

In addition to Google searches and checking FamilySearch.org for other online trees, articles and books I also check Ancestry for their record collections and public trees. Now I don't link to any of those public trees (part one of my genealogy research motto ... "Trust no one"). Instead I review what others have found for possible clues regarding potential records and other family members. Yet I often come across records and family members in those public trees that make me stop and wonder, "What were they thinking?

Here is one of the Ancestry tree hint records for Jedediah Fairweather. Can you see at least one possible problem with his family?

A hint for you ... Look at the date of death for his spouse and then look at the date of birth of the youngest child listed.

Do you see it now?

In this tree Benjamin, the son of Jedediah and Deborah, was born after the date of death of his mother. Yet this isn't the only tree for Jedediah Fairweather that this error occurs in. Several other trees have this same Benjamin being born in 1762 which makes a bit more sense. The "1792" could be from a simple typo when the first person entered in the information but this mistake has now been propagated on Ancestry and who knows where else. All because the people with this error didn't pause and take a moment to think about the information they were blindly adding to their family tree.

I'm not picking on this tree or on Ancestry since I've seen this problem occur many times in other online trees. And if truth be told, when I was first starting in my adventures in my own family tree I did this too. Yet if you just click to add a record or details about a family member without thinking about what you are adding then you might just be compounding and propagating a mistake.

So in the future, when consulting work compiled by others:

Stop, pause, and think!

Never Forgotten - Ronald "Red" McGregor Warrener

Ronald "Red" McGregor Warrener

"Dog" Company, 48th Highlanders of Canada

11 Jun 1913 - 25 Jul 1943

Died in the hills near Nissoria, Sicily, Italy

"The most gallant fight by 48th Highlanders on a day that was to be recalled with grimness, was the inspiring charge on a pinnacle on the ridge-top by 4 men of Dog Company. Only 8 Germans were holding it, and if there was room to deploy and flank it, this was not tried. The 4 Highlanders attempted to capture the hump of high ground in a gallant, but hopeless straight dash. L/Cpl. Dan (D.J.) Murray was killed on the lip of the first slit trench; he had almost reached the Germans. The body of Pte. Red (R.M. ) Warriner was found three feet away."
"Dileas: History of the 48th Highlanders of Canada, 1929-1956", Kim Beattie, published by 48th Highlanders of Canada, 1957

Never Forgotten - Samuel McKinlay

Samuel McKinlay

'A' Company, 2nd Infantry Battalion, C.E.F.

2 Mar 1891 - 22 April 1915

A casualty of the Second Battle of Ypres

Widow's Pension Application = One Less Brick Wall

On June 11th, 2013 Ancestry included in their collections for Canada a set of documents they titled "Canada, Pension Applications For Widows and Family of British Military Officers, 1776-1881". This collection is from The National Archives in Kew, Surrey, England and is described in the TNA database as "WO 42 - War Office: Officers' Birth Certificates, Wills and Personal Papers". So why am I so happy to find this collection? This is set of papers includes the applications by widows of men that served in His Majesty's military during the time of the American Rebellion and subsequently settled in that part of North America that remained loyal to the Crown (what later became known as the country of Canada).

Now I am a proud descendant of the Loyalist Lt. Caleb Howe of the Queens Rangers and one of my brickwalls has been "What is Esther's, his wife, maiden surname and also when and where were they married?" This questions has stumped experienced researchers that have been looking into this family for far longer than I've been doing my research. There were guesses as to Esther's maiden surname but no proof to back them up.

A search of this collection revealed that Esther had in fact applied for a widow's pension since Caleb died in 1810. Ancestry only took me to the first page where Caleb was mentioned so I brought up the web page for The National Archives and looked for the WO 42 collection. From the page displayed on Ancestry I knew the documents were in the WO42/61 set. A quick search revealed that I could freely download (I like free) the complete WO42/61 collection of documents. Now I could have just moved forward in the Ancestry collection page by page to find all the documents preserved pertaining to Caleb and Esther but it was just going to be easier to download it all in one bundle as a PDF. I started reading through those pages for any additional clues and then it was in front of me ... that document we have all been looking for ... my Howe Holy Grail ... an oath by someone stating Esther's maiden surname AND the month, year and town they were married.

WO/42/61 document 182, p. 1

Transcribed it appears to reads:

Jedediah Fairweather and Samuel Fairweather at present
of the Parish of ____ in the County of Kings and Province of
New Brunswick - make oath - that they were present at the
marriage of Caleb Howe, - who was a Lieutenant (during the Amer
ican Rebellion) in His Majestys Service in the Provincial Regiment
called the Queens Rangers, and who at the close of the Rebellion - placed
on the Half Pay of _ Regiment, - with Esther Fairweather - Daughter of 
Jedediah, - and that the Marriage was performed & solemnized - between
the said Caleb Howe and the said Esther Howe in the then town of 
Parr, now the City of St John, in the Month of January 1784 by the
Reverend John Beardsley a Missionary of the Church of England.

One mystery after many years of searching as been resolved. All due to keeping an eye out for new collections and constantly revisiting those problem ancestors.

Tip for today: Keep your eye out for new collections and sources of information. You just never know where you will find that next clue.

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Update 1: Correction to the date when the collection was released on Ancestry
Update 2: Minor corrections to transcription