Ancestry clues?

                                                        The White Hart Hotel, Port Ellen, Islay

A message I send on Ancestry got a response, well, actually two responses before I replied. That prompted me to look at my own family tree on the website. The link between me and the person I am corresponding with is far back at the fourth grandparent level on my tree, my 4x great grandmother, Janet McCuaig.

Although I haven't done much research on the McCuaigs, I recall exchanging emails with McCuaig researchers back in the day when email and online lists were the extent of genealogical research on the World Wide Web. But now we have super databases like Ancestry and it was throwing up hints on my own family tree linked to my Janet McCuaig. Maybe I could find out more about the McCuaig line. That way I would know more when I exchanged information with my correspondent.

There were two hints from different trees when I clicked the hint leaf for Janet McCuaig. Both listed the birth of my 3x great grandmother, Flora Gilchrist to Janet McCuaig. We all agreed on Flora's birthdate. It was looking good. One of the trees didn't have any further data about Janet. The other had much more information including Flora's marriage to Lachlan Hunter and the births of all of that couple's children. Everything on that tree looked good but what was this? The death date of Flora's husband, Lachlan Hunter, was listed as 1859. That didn't seem right.

Included in Flora Hunter's time line attached to that tree was a citation for the 1841 census. I checked my copy of that census. If the tree owner had looked at the census entry didn't they wonder why Flora and children were listed but Lachlan was not? A glance at the 1851 census would have confirmed that Flora Hunter was listed as a widow and their son, Hugh, was listed as a farmer of 20 acres employing one labourer. There is a lesson to be learned from this. It looks like I'll have to look closely at anything I find on others' trees and make sure of the research.

My foray on Ancestry hadn't given me much more information to share with my correspondent about the McCuaigs. For that I'll need to delve into the information in Hugh Hunter's will (the son who was listed as the farmer on the 1851 census) and the family connection to the White Hart Hotel in Port Ellen. Sometimes old fashioned research yields the best clues.

Sources:

Ancestry.ca family tree hints

FamilySearch 1841 census Scotland, Argyll, Kildalton film 1042720

FamilySearch 1851 census Scotland, Argyll, Kildalton film 1042355

Taming the magazine stacks

 

                                                                   Part of my genealogy magazine stash

I've always had a thing for magazines. Who could resist all those glossy covers at the newsstand promising glamour and hinting that they contained the secrets of how to live a life where you could have it all? I probably bought more than my fair share of lifestyle magazines. Then I discovered genealogy and found out there were magazines for that too.

Many of the family history magazines came from the US but even better were the British ones as they could have articles relevant to my search. My practice was to read each magazine from cover to cover folding down the corners of any pages of interest. My intention was to come back to those pages, make notes and add any web addresses to the bookmarks on my computer. I got hopelessly behind.

The problem was that, no matter how overwhelming the stacks waiting to be read became, those bright shiny magazines on the newsstand still enticed me with their promise of knowledge. I even thought that I might be able to write freelance for some of the magazines and had two articles published by Your Family History, a British magazine that is no longer published. The remuneration wasn't much, moreover my bank wanted a cut when they exchanged the pounds for dollars. It was a lot of effort for a slight return.

As time went on reading the magazines from cover to cover became more of an effort as well. Now I have glossy stacks of potential knowledge secreted in different places. It's time to do something about them. Who knows, as I go through the stacks I might find some gem that will take my research further. 

DNA update

 

I was attending the monthly BCGS meeting on Zoom a few evenings ago and idly checking out Ancestry on my other screen. As talk began about our upcoming anniversary cruise where well known DNA guru Blaine Bettinger will be our guest speaker, my thoughts turned to how I should be boning up on my own DNA research. So I checked out the DNA part of the Ancestry site. Interesting, there was an offer for me to learn more about my genetic makeup by adding Traits to my AncestryDNA results. I checked that out. (We were still in the business part of the meeting before the guest speaker started.) 

Traits looked interesting but so had the offer I'd received a few months before from Living DNA to find out if I had Viking DNA. That also had a small cost, similar to the Ancestry Traits offer. The Viking results hadn't told me much I didn't already know. I'm still on the fence over adding Traits on Ancestry.

Still thinking about the offer and still in the DNA part of the Ancestry website, I clicked on DNA Story. The recent addition of Ethnicity Inheritance which split the inheritance from parents into two so that it was possible to see which ethnicities came from Parent 1 or Parent 2 had fascinated me. What I had inherited from each parent mostly went back to UK populations but there was enough difference that, having taken their family lines back through documented genealogy, I was able to determine who Parent 1 was and who Parent 2 was. That was cool and looked like it should help in some way.

At the time I shelved that idea, thinking I would get to it later. Well, it looks like waiting was actually a good thing. Ancestry, which never before broke down the data into chromosomes, now had a Chromosome Painter in Beta. What's more, they had carried the ethnicities from Parent 1 and Parent 2 onto this chromosome chart so that you could see which region and which parent each of the chromosomes came from. I think I should explore this further. It looks like this could have amazing possibilities.

  

Sources:

https://www.ancestry.ca/dna Ancestry DNA – DNA Story

A virtual story

 

                                                                            The F Words comic book cover

Over the past few years more of our lives moved online as the days of casually going places as our means and inclination enabled us was curtailed drastically. Family historians were well placed to take advantage of this move to the virtual. The large databases we consult like Ancestry, Find My Past and Family Search already had a huge online presence. If we needed to find out more about a topic, webinars were available. Family history societies, having watched their attendance numbers dwindle in recent years, pivoted so their meetings were online. They saw the numbers attending their meetings grow.

Museums were not so well placed, at least not small museums like the one in Port Coquitlam, BC. It's run by PoCo Heritage which I volunteer for. In February 2020 we held the launch part for the F Words exhibit, the story of Port Coquitlam's early disastrous years told through exhibits and graphic novel style posters. Health orders closed our museum space to the public in March, less than a month after the exhibit opened to the public. The challenge then and now was how to get our exhibit seen. We needed to go beyond moving display items closer to the street front windows to catch the eye of people passing by.

The posters were turned into a comic book but that reach was limited. We were unable to sell the comic as we obtained a grant to pay for its development. What more could we do to get our exhibit seen? A search for grants turned up the Digital Museums Canada. A perusal of their website at https://www.digitalmuseums.ca showed stories from across Canada. Museums had gone virtual! Did we have a story they would accept for their virtual museum? We put in our application and waited. The news was that they had received many more applications than normal. Of course they did. Everybody was trying to go digital in any way that they could. How else could they get their stories seen if the physical doors to exhibit places were closed?

PoCo Heritage's F Words story was accepted! The story was adapted once again. Check it out at pocoheritage.org/fwords It's the tale of a city's disastrous founding years and the spirit that got them through. It's a story we can take strength from now.