Warm Weather, Wednesdays, and Webinars

Screenshot from "Canadian Port of Entry, Passenger Lists, and Boarder Crossing" webinar
10 July 2013

Depending upon where you live in the US, it has probably been really hot or terribly humid.  Yesterday's local weather made it a great time for me to stay inside and increase my knowledge of genealogy resources by viewing of one of the free Wednesday Webinars hosted by Legacy Family Tree Software.

The webinar I attended was on Canadian Ports of Entry, Passenger Lists, and Boarder Crossings.  It was lead by Kathryn Lake Hogan who has written the Legacy Quick Guides for all of the Canadian provinces, so it had a lot of good information.

The screenshot shown above shows how I attend a webinar.  On my desktop monitor, I join the webinar (on the left), keep the webinar dashboard open on the upper right so I can ask questions, see what others had asked, view links mentioned, etc., then open Evernote for any notes I want to take.  The webinar and Evernote slightly overlap, but it is simple to click back and forth for notetaking.  All of my webinar notes are kept in a "Webinar" folder with the webinar's title or description added.

For me, the really helpful part of this particular webinar was seeing a much more skilled researcher using the various databases related to Ports of Entry, Passenger Lists, and Board Crossings available for free on the Library and Archives of Canada web site.  I had noticed in prior visits to the Library and Archives of Canada web site that there were a number of different immigration databases but not never realized that most were due to the different types of paperwork in use during a specific time period.  Because of this, the databases related to immigration are not all searched in the same way.  Some are searched by name, others require dates or the ship's name.  Now that I know they aren't all searched in the same manner, I just try another search method if my first instinct won't provide any results.

Second, I appreciated Hogan's brief overview of Canadian immigrant and migration patterns.  It helped me see how my grandparents, Michael and Gertrude Myren, fit into the larger scheme of things.

Each Wednesday Legacy provides a different free webinar.  If you cannot view the webinar at the original air date, it is archived by Legacy for free viewing through the next week.  For a list of upcoming webinars and registration information visit the Legacy Family Tree Webinars website.  Check out their list, and you will see a lot of pertinent topics as well as knowledgeable presenters.

Sitting comfortably inside with the AC running, sipping some iced tea (after all, I do live in the South), listening to thunder rumbling in the distance, and learning something new - pretty good way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.

"O, Canada ..."

Manitoba Welcome Center

July 1 is Canada Day.  Because my grandparents lived in Canada, I grew up knowing about this holiday, hearing early on that it was much like the Fourth of July here in the USA.   At one point, Grandma Myren tried to teach me the words to "O, Canada", the national anthem.  Just check out the Canada Day at Canada Place web site for some of the activities planned to celebrate this holiday.  For me, today is an appropriate time to look at some of the online resources I have used to learn more about the Myren family and their life in Canada.

The first Canadian resource I turned to was the Library and Archives of Canada.  Its genealogy and family history section has links to census, land, immigration, and those other records we research to learn more about our family's history.  Through their digitized records, I've learned where Grandpa and Grandma Myren lived during the 1911 and 1916 censuses as well as information about my grandfather becoming a Canadian citizen.  I also stumbled upon the arrival date at the Port of Quebec for my Great Grandfather Peter Myren, after he left Norway and was heading to Wisconsin .  It is easy to see why I've listed this resource first as well as referring to it in two of my previous blog posts, Maybe There's Another Way and Coming to "Amerika".

For information about specific Canadian provinces, I've use Dave Obee's detailed list of links to provincial resources on CanGenealogy's web site.  Some of the links refer back to the Library and Archives of Canada web site, others to Ancestry.ca (paid subscription needed), when others are to various government agencies.  It is helpful to have links to all the provinces in one place.

One of my favorite web sites for browsing is Peel's Prairie Provinces, a project of the University of Alberta.  They have a great vintage postcard and photo collection online.  I love looking at the pictures of places I remember visiting in Manitoba as a child as well as comparing postcard images with things I saw on a trip to Manitoba several years ago.  Another great resource here is their digitized books and newspapers from the prairie provinces, some of which are in French.

The Manitoba Historical Society provides a number of helpful links on their web site.  Lately, I've been skimming through their collection of Manitoba History journals to learn more about the areas where my grandparents lived.

Maybe today will be the day the 1921 Canada census is released to the public as Lynn Palermo suggested in her recent blog.  If so, I'll have another resource to use for learning more about my family and their years in Canada.

Maybe There's Another Way ...

Flag of Canada (Creative Commons)

My mother was born in Canada, and through the years, her family lived in several places in the province of Manitoba.  Two years ago I had found the 1911 Canadian census which listed my Myren grandparents and my uncle using the free online databases of the Library and Archives of Canada.  I had found some good information about where they lived in 1911, but now I was wanting to know more about their life after 1911.

Information from the 1916 Canadian Census of the Provinces was proving more difficult to find. I have an US subscription to Ancestry.com, but all I could find through Ancestry was that the family was living in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1916, nothing more without purchasing a World Explorer subscription which would include Canadian databases.

Next stop was back online at the Library and Archives of Canada.  By this time, the 1916 Census had been fully digitized but had no index  The listings for Winnipeg, Manitoba showed 33 sub-districts, most with 30-40 pages per sub-district and 50 names per page.  Finding my family among my estimate of nearly 60,000 names seemed almost impossible.  (It reminded me of looking at the 1940 US census when the digital images were first released in early April 2012.)

On a whim, I simply googled the term "1916 Canada Census" and quickly found a link to that 1916 census on FamilySearch.org.  Using FamilySearch's web site, I find they had indexed the 1916 Census but had no images of those census records.  Using the Winnipeg district and sub-district numbers from the FamilySearch.org index, I was able to locate the exact census page on the Library and Archives of Canada web site, print it out, and finally learn more about my grandparents, uncle, and mother.  Putting the index from FamilySearch.org and the digitized images from the Library and Archives of Canada together, I finally found more information.

There are times that it seems as if we will never be able to find what we're looking for.  Maybe we just need to take another approach.  For me, thinking like the middle school students I worked with for years, led me to simply google the research question I had.  I was reminded by googling that there were other web sites that just might have the information I was seeking. 

If all else had failed, I could have added "check 1916 Canada Census" to my research goals and waited until I finally broke down and purchased that World Explorer subscription to Ancestry.  Or, I could have checked at my public library to see if the 1916 Canadian Census of the Provinces was included in their Ancestry Library Version.  Or stopped by our local Family History Center to look through their resources.  Or ...

As my dad used to say, "There's always another way to skin a cat."