Getting back to Ireland

 

                                                                              Boyne Valley, Ireland

Most of my family lines lead back to the UK. They are predominantly English and Scottish but include a smattering of Irish. It's that smattering that I'd like to put some shape to. My goal is to take it back to some particular place in Ireland. The Irish genealogy experts say that finding your family's records is a matter of finding out the particular place they come from. Finding out the county is good but getting them down to their townland is better.

This last point was emphasized in one of the talks at the BIFSGO online conference, Irish Lines and Female Finds, which I signed up for. It's an interesting mix of talks about researching Irish and female ancestors. Both strands of talks deal with particularly challenging areas of research. Areas that can benefit from accessing records beyond the top genealogical sources. Perhaps one of the presentations will point me in the direction of something that can help me.

My problem is that my Irish immigrated to England. I can trace my Irish line back in time in London but have been unable to find out where they originated from in Ireland. If it wasn't for the surname, I wouldn't know they were Irish at all. But unfortunately, it isn't one of those surnames that can take you back to a particular area of Ireland. The name Cavanagh can be found all over Ireland. Or perhaps that should be Kavanagh. Once, when my father registered at a hotel in Dublin, the receptionist told him that his last name should be spelled with a "K".

I had hopes that DNA would be able to pinpoint where in Ireland my Cavanaghs came from. DNA certainly seems to work that way for other people. Unfortunately, that doesn't work in my case. My portion of identifiable Irish DNA isn't large enough to trigger breaking down the regions down further. Either that or, like my English ancestors, my Irish ones didn't stay in any one place for long. So it's back to plodding through the records and listening to talks to see if there is something that can help me find that illusive place of family origin in Ireland. 

Research: lost or missing?

 

                                                                  War of 1812 monument on Parliament Hill

This week I was exchanging information with a fellow researcher. We're not looking in the same family lines but looking in the same area around the same time frame; early Ontario in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At that time the area was known as Upper Canada. My suggestion to her was to look for family members in the muster rolls for the war of 1812. I can distinctly remember begin able to look up my Tripp family in a book that contained the names of the sons of the original settler who had taken up land in the township of Percy, county of Northumberland in 1797. When I later found out that Charles Tripp, the family's original settler in Canada, had fought for the patriots in the American Revolution, it seemed rather ironic that his sons fought for the Canadian side in the war of 1812.

Strangely, because I generally keep copies of everything, I don't have a copy of the muster roll. It's a reminder of my lack of organization when I first started family history research. Sometimes I thought I would just remember things or that they were too mundane to note down. But I still have scads of information, so I obviously thought some things were worth saving.

All of the documents and paperwork pertaining to my research need to be put in better order. A daunting task but one that I hear other genealogists are doing by scanning and digitizing everything. I haven't come up with a solution about my storage problem as I still use the binder system. Until I find another system that works for me, I'll still consult my family binders when furthering my research or writing my stories. In the meantime, I need to track down those 1812 muster lists. Maybe I don't need to find the book in the library as there appear to be lots of sources online. This time I'll remember to save the information I find!

Image:

War of 1812 monument on Parliament Hill By Jeangagnon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51188874

Reminded about a clue

 

                                                                   Some books with information about Tom Thomson

I read a lot. While devouring books I own that are related to my family's history, I often leave bookmarks between the pages to note where there is a relevant passage to be found. It will be somewhere in the text on the two pages flagged by the bookmark. At the time, I promise myself that I will follow up on the information later. But do I?

My intentions are good. My follow through, not so much. I was reminded of that when reading Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. I bought the book in the hope that it would cover the life and influence of Tom Thomson. He wasn't actually one of the Group of Seven so it was not a given that the narrative would include him. But there he was at the beginning of the book.

Also included was the information that his mother was related to Sir John A. Macdonald. It was a distant relationship and one I'd heard rumours of before. Having recently read Reunion: A Search for Ancestors in which the author, Littrell, finds out that his MacDonald line goes back to the MacDonalds of Glencoe, I was intrigued to be reminded of this potential Macdonald family link. Did our Macdonalds also go back to the Glencoe line? Maybe the book about the Group of Seven would provide more information about Thomson's Macdonald link, which would also be my own link.

Checking the notes in the back of the book about the Group of Seven, I was surprised to see that the information about the Macdonald link came from The Thomsons of Durham, another book on my shelves and one that had a few bookmarks sticking out from its pages. Not only did the book about the Thomsons provide more clues about the Macdonald connection but those bookmarked pages showed me a few more clues to family records I hadn't followed up on. Maybe its time to do that now.

Change and deadlines

 

                                                         There used to be a townhouse complex on this corner

This morning, I could feel the change in the air when I took my morning walk. There was a definite chill in the breeze and, when I headed east, the sun was low and shone in my eyes at a time that, in the height of summer, it would be a lot higher in the sky. Change is all around as people get ready for the school year to begin after Labour Day. It's a time that many look forward to, conditioned by years of new beginnings and the pristine potential of brand new school supplies.

My thoughts of change were probably echoes from the PoCo Genealogy Zoom meeting I attended last night. After a demonstration of how to use various DNA sites, the general chat took a turn to the challenges of record keeping and media changes and how to transfer data from one type of media to another. I'll have to get on that when I have some time to spare.

It doesn't look like that will be any time soon. I'm currently writing text for PoCo Heritage, converting the F Words story from the text on the graphic novel pages from the exhibit panels and comic book, to text for a digital exhibit which will eventually appear on https://www.digitalmuseums.ca/funded-projects/ as one of their community stories. There are many stories on the Digital Museums Canada website already, a rich resource for those doing Canadian research. Working on the text is interesting, reminding me of the story of Port Coquitlam's early years and how we portrayed them. The past will also be related to the present in the digital story text and it is interesting to see how we initially coped with the pandemic and how our responses and interactions have changed since then.

The deadline for writing the text for the digital story is tomorrow, after that I'll have two weeks to deal with the edits. While feeling the pressure from those deadlines, I've also been altered by one of my travel partners that it is probably time to book travel arrangements for our 2022 trip. It's an overseas trip we had planned for 2020, which we postponed to 2022. It seems that next summer is not too far away to start arranging bookings for, another change to wrap my head around. 

Pursuing directory entries

 

                                                                       The Hudson's Bay Downtown Victoria

In-person research has been missing from my life for a while, so when a recent trip offered a chance to see if two places mentioned in a 1948 directory still existed, I dragged my friend off on a walk to find out. We were in Victoria, a place where my mother lived and worked in the late 1940s. I knew that she and her parents had left the UK in 1946. Passenger lists confirmed this part of the family story. They only stayed in Canada for a few years but had intended a permanent move. It was a sojourn that would have lasting consequences for the family. More on that later.

I was happy to track down the Victoria address where my mother was listed as living in the 1948 directory. It was worth the walk. It even looked like the house which currently holds the address would have been the same building as the one in 1948, at least to my eye. You can see it below. 

As we were staying downtown, there was very little walking involved to track down the address of my mother's former place of work. She was a saleswoman at Hudson's Bay. That building still stands on Douglas Street. I'm sure there have been a lot of changes since she worked there but it was a kick to see the building and translate the directory entry into reality.

Finding the places where my mother had been all those years ago, reminded me that her parents were in Canada at the same time. I just didn't know where. Perhaps it's time to check some directories to see if I can find their whereabouts for the same time period. The search this time could be done online, not trawling through the directories in the Vancouver Library's Special Collections where I had found the entry for my mother so many years ago. But were they in Winnipeg, where my grandmother's sisters lived or in Vancouver, closer to their daughter? 

An internet search brought up a few places to search like the Can Genealogy site at https://www.cangenealogy.com › manitoba-directories or, if looking for Vancouver addresses, I could look through https://bccd.vpl.ca › index.php › browse › title › 1948 Many sites give access to Canadian directories for free and many are searchable by surname which would be a plus except the name I'm searching is Chambers which brings up all sorts of government and other types of chambers. I'll see how I get on.

Organizing my search

 

                                                               Some of the World War 2 books from my shelves

Doing the research and writing about my mother's Land Army experience was relatively easy as most of the information I had was already compiled. I also have a few books about the Land Army but when I actually read them, they were short and gave a general picture about what life would have been like for Land Girls. My mother's war story lent itself to being a self-contained narrative. The rest of my WWII research looks more daunting.

As you can see by the picture of the books up above, I have a few tomes to read through and those are just a sample of the WWII books on my shelves. I've been collecting books like these for ages with a view to reading them someday. Well, that someday has come but it's going to take me quite a while to read all the relevant books on my shelves. It doesn't help that I can't resist buying new books on the subject either. A case in point, I just received the book on the top of the stack, Land Girl: A Manual for Volunteers in the Women's Land Army 1941, in the mail.

While I continue to read and research, I want to keep writing WWII stories for my blog so I'm going to have to be more systematic about this. That means writing lists and outlines of the family members I am following up on so that I don't miss any interesting stories along the way. Some people are natural outliners. I'm not one of those. I do like writing timelines, however. Maybe timelines of the families I'm following might throw up some useful hints of where to find those stories. 

Newspaper clues to a Land Army past

 

                                                                    A Land Army girl on a Fordson tractor

Finding out more about the Women's Land Army experience in Hertfordshire gave me a better idea of what my mother had gone through when she was part of the WLA in that county. Between that and the WLA Alphabetical Index Card that I found, I have sketched the parameters of her service which I interpret as starting May 1, 1942 and ending with her resignation August 12, 1945. But I wanted a clearer picture.

The sites I had visited gave me a general idea of what the Land Girls did and the book, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, supplied photos of many of the activities. What I wanted was to know what my mother's actual duties had been. I turned to the newspapers to see if there was any mention of my mother which would throw light on her war experience.

Unfortunately, when I tried to apply filters down to the county level to get the news for Hertfordshire where she was stationed, the British Newspapers on Find My Past didn't have any newspapers for that area. But my mother and her parents had emigrated from Manitoba. My search through Newspapers.com was much more productive. It yielded a clipping which merited a photo of my mother on a tractor at the West Hertfordshire District Agricultural Competitions Association's ploughing match just after the war. The story was carried in the Winnipeg Tribune and gave the name and address of her grandmother who lived in Winnipeg.

With family in different places, it's surprising where news will turn up and I wonder who supplied the newspaper with the photo. Perhaps the grandmother named? Interestingly, the article appeared in the paper in January of 1946 although the competition had been held in October of 1945, just months after my mother had resigned from the WLA. The article contains many clues to follow up on but, after the research I've already done, I now know more about my mother's experience in the Land Army.

Through my research, I know that driving a tractor required specialized training and not every Land Girl did it. My mother would have gone through that training and must have been using her skills for a while to be proficient enough to enter a competition. My increased knowledge gives me a greater appreciation for her war experience. 

Sources:

Find My Past https://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers

Newspapers.com https://www.newspapers.com/

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott. The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Ministry of Information official photographer - http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//36/media-36219/large.jpg This is photograph D 128 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30861464