Bourgeois Family/Histoire de Bourgeois

The website http://histoire-de-bourgeois.ca has developed a genealogical history, Histoire de Bourgeois - the genealogy and stories of Bourgeois' of Acadian descent. They are also have it on  Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=120627851304544

Marc Bourgeois has been working on the Bourgeois Family for the past ten years, and he started researching when his mother asked him if he could look into their roots.

Marc says that “Although it took me a while to discover my Acadian roots once I discovered them, I began a multi-year project (now eight years and still going) to document as many of the Bourgeois descendants of my Acadian Ancestor as possible and to make that research available to other family historians via the web”.

He goes onto says that “The result is the “the-bourgeois-story.ca” site (bilingual) which documents over 13,000 Bourgeois’ from across north America, descendants of Jacques Jacob Bourgeois and Jeanne Trahan, married in 1643 in Port-Royal, Acadia. The site now has over 330 registered users (growing daily), and gets over a thousand hits a week”.

This is a bilingual site (F/E), and as Marc can tell, it is “the largest and most well documents (over 160,000 citations) Bourgeois family related site available on the Internet”.

So if you are related in any way to the Bourgeois Family, use the contact page at http://histoire-de-bourgeois.ca/suggest.php.

Tomorrow's Blog - The Archive CD Books Project

Borders and Bridges:1812 to 2012 Conference

News Flash!

The program of the 2012 OGS Conference "Borders and Bridges:1812 to 2012" to be held in Kingston, Ontario the 1st to the 3rd of June has just been posted at http://www.ogs.on.ca/conference2012/program.

Details of the registration will be posted December 1^st.

Historical Online Newspapers in Canada

I was having an email conversation the other day with a friend out in BC, and she was saying what a nice newspaper collection that the University of British Columbia has accumulated.

It got me thinking about newspapers and their importance in finding out local history of a place. So I put together this list.

Here is my attempt at summarizing the sites of digitized newspapers on the Internet -

British Columbia Historical Newspapers Project - www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/11/07/historical-b-c-newspapers-digitized-by-ubc library FREE! The site contains more than 45,000 pages of 24 historical BC newspapers. The newspapers date from 1865 to 1924.

Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers Online - http://librariesns.ca/content/newspaper-digitization FREE! The Halifax at Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management, and in Sydney at the Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University has put on the Internet over 19,000 pages of digitized newspaper content from sixteen newspapers dating from 1769 to 1991.

OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers - http://ink.ourontario.ca FREE! Thirty newspapers are digitized, with a special emphasis on historical newspapers from Kingston, Ontario.

Peel’s Praries Provinces (Newspapers) - http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers FREE! Over 80 western historical newspapers have been digitized.

The Early Alberta Newspaper Collection - www.ourfutureourpast.ca/newspapr FREE! Our Future, Our Past: The Alberta Heritage Digitization Project is a project from the University of Calgary. The collection contains editions from 1880 to 1950.

Manitoba Newspapers - http://manitobia.ca/content/en/newspaperslist FREE!  Contains over 30 newspapers. You can search by years and months, with some newspapers going up to the present-day.

Connecting Canada: Canada’s Multicultural Newspapers Beta Website - www.connectingcanadians.org/?q=en/content/home FREE! The collection contains Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, and Lithuanian newspapers.

French-Canadian Newspapers: An Essential Historical Source (1808-1919) - www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/canadian-newspapers-french/index-e.html  FREE! These are 230 newspaper titles from French-Canadian communities across Canada.

Digital collection: Newspapers - www.banq.qc.ca/collections/collection_numerique/index.html?language_id=1&categorie=6 -
FREE! These newspaper are at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and are published in French only.

There may have been some collections that I have missed. If you come across some other collections that have been put on the Internet and are FREE!, please let me know at genealogycanada@aol.com.

Tomorrow's Post - Histoire de Bourgeois - the genealogy and stories of Bourgeois' of Acadian descent

New/Improved Canadian Websites and Blogs Week 13

Here are some of the websites and blogs that I have come across the week ending November 27, 2011 -

Welcome to Bill Gladstone - www.billgladstone.ca NEW! Bill Gladstone is a Toronto-based journalist, author, publisher, public speaker, and noted genealogist.

Oakville Memories - www.oakville-memories.info Although Bob Hughes hasn’t posted for a year, the posts that are online, and the names in those posts, may help someone with their ancestry.

Looking4Ancestors - www.looking4ancestors.com  Started by Kathryn Lake started in 2008, she blogs on a consistent basis about genealogy in general.

Murmurd's Franco-American and Québec Genealogy - www.murmurd.blogspot.com An "AMERICAN in QUÉBEC"!, the blogger has been actively researching her French-Canadian roots in Canada.

The Kelowna & District Genealogical Society - www.kdgs.ca Their blog has been online since 2008, and they regularly update their upcoming events, as well as changes in their resources.

Welcome to the Library and Archives Canada Blog! - http://thediscoverblog.com NEW! A four-month trial blog has been initiated by the LAC for the staff to post articles of interest to all researchers.

Recipes and Recollections: Treats and Tales from Our Mother's Kitchen - http://staffordwilson.com
NEW! Arlene Stafford-Wilson is an author who grew up in Lanark County, and has produced a book about her mother and the recipes she used in the home where Arlene grew up.

The Jehan and Perrine Terriot Family Website - www.terriau.org A bilingual site (F/E) that is the website of the Terriot Acadian Family Society.

Welcome to the Leaves of my Tree - www.robinsancestry.com Robin Wallace has created this most entertaining website where she list over 2500 names of ancestors.

SaskResearch - www.saskresearch.com $ This website will help you to find your Saskatchewan ancestors.

Tomorrow Post: Historical Newspapers in Canada.

Tweedsmuir Histories – Elgin County

Over the past number of years, Elgin County Archives has been digitizing the Tweedsmuir Histories of Elgin County.

When they first started at the Archives, there were 27 Tweedsmuir History volumes containing about 5000 pages. As they continued, the number of volumes increased to 50, covering over 7000 pages.

The people of the individual Women’s Institutes became the “unofficial archivists” of Ontario counties and districts. They constructed “scrapbooks”, and they present information about oral histories and photographs.

Looking at these books, there are “Family Trees”, “Pioneer Histories”, the history of schools, churches, businesses, and individual family histories. I don’t think that there are any such histories in the rest of Canada that can come up to this level of history written by ordinary people. It is, as their website says, “an outstanding resource on the history of rural Ontario”.

The counties covered are - Aldborough, Dunwich, Southwold, Yarmouth, Malahide, South Dorchester, Bayham, East Elgin, and West Elgin.

You can read them at www.elgin.ca/ElginCounty/CulturalServices/Archives/tweedsmuir/index.html.

There is also a Photo Gallery at www.elgin.ca/ElginCounty/CulturalServices/Archives/tweedsmuir/aldborough2.html

It was announced early in November that the Elgin County Archives received a donation of $6,000 from the Elgin County Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. This donation will help complete the project, which is expected to be completed between January and May of 2012.

Tomorrow's Post - New/Improved Canadian Websites and Blogs Week 13

“Past Tents” – November Newsletter

“Past Tents”, the newsletter of the Thunder Bay Branch of the OGS, recently issued their November 2011 edition.

The Branch has a very interesting and eye-catching first page of their newsletter. Four times a year they highlight an “Ancestor of the Month”, and this month they are featuring Marion Belle Elliot.

Marion was born in 1898 in Morewood (near Ottawa), the daughter of Marion Henderson and Francis Elliot. She taught school in Thunder Bay, and although she wasn’t spoken of as a genealogist, she spent her summer going around Canada visiting relatives, and leaving the lists and pictures of their relatives.

The column, "Research Article", mentions going to a community called Tum Tum in Washington State where Paul McAlister found the tombstone of Robert Elsworth McAlistor. An interesting read!

In another article entitled “Why Mobert is Called Mobert”, we find out that the name is the contraction of C. S. Montizambert, a fellow who led men in 1885 Out West to help quell the Riel Rebellion.

You can go to their website at http://www.ogs.on.ca/thunderbay/index.html

If you are interested in joining Ontario Genealogical Society, go to http://www.ogs.on.ca/membership.php

Ottawa Speaker at NGS Conference 2012

While going around the Internet checking on blogs and conferences, I came across the NGS Conference 2012 speaker's list, and discovered one name which stood out - Ottawa's Alison Hare.

Alison is a member of both the Ottawa Branch of the OGS and BIFHSGO in Ottawa, and has given talks at both groups at their conferences on a number of subjects. This time, she will be part of a panel discussion being held on May 10th at 8:00 a.m., entitled "BCG Certification Seminar".

Other panelists include Laura Murphy DeGrazia, CG, and Thomas W. Jones, PhD, CG, CGL, FASG, FUGA, FNGS.

The NGS Conference will be held next year at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinnati, Ohio from 9-12 May. This year, the theme is "The Ohio River: Gateway to the Western Frontier".

If you are planning to go to the NGS Conference and take in the panel discussion, and you meet Alison, please say “Hello” to her from us at the GenealogyCanada blog! I am sure that she will represent Canada very well. She is a very popular speaker in Ontario, and I have had the pleasure of listening to her speak numerous times.

The Conference website is at www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/conference_info.