Monday, December 6, 2010

New Issue of OGS Families


As the new editor of the Ontario Genealogical Society's journal, Families, I have had the pleasure of my first issue being recently released.

In this November 2010 issue, I covered the fact that 2010 was declared as the Year of the Home Child, and I published the following articles -

"Young Immigrants to Canada: The Children's Friend Society" by Marjorie Kohli. This article gives a history of The Children's Friend Society, and lists two pages of names of children who came to Canada from Britain in the middle 18th-Century. A typical entry reads, "Smith, Jesse on Active, house servant to Rev. Thomas B. Fuller of Toronto".

"The British Child Emigration Scheme to Canada (1870-1957)" by Perry Snow. Read about the legacy left by his father, Fred G. Snow, as he made his way to Canada as a Home Child. This article appears as a reprint courtesy of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society.

'The Diary of Reverend William Bowman Tucker, 1859-1934" is an except from a diary of a Home Child, one who later went on to found the Montreal City Mission. Glenn Adams, his grandson, gave me his kind permission to reprint a small portion of the diary.

"Discovering the Story of Father" by John Fielding is a heart-warming story of a boy, Leslie Fielding, and how he made a life for himself after he came to Canada.

In the next posting, I will continue with Part II, telling you about more articles in this issue of Families, plus a special article in the OGS NewsLeaf.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

OGS Provincial Office Reopens

From OGS Headquarters comes this news -

October 23, 2010


Provincial Office Reopens


The OGS Provincial Office is open for business once again. Our server, phones and fax machines are up and running and we have returned to our regular hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00am - 5:00 pm.


The incident that caused us to be closed happened around 12:00 on Friday October 8th. A worker renovating the library above the office drilled through the concrete floor and into a water pipe in the ceiling of our office. Water poured into our office and knocked out the power to our server and printer, also dumping water on parts of the machines. Sarah Newitt and Marsha Brown were the staff in the office that day and they worked quickly to remove as many objects as possible from the path of the flood that rapidly covered the office with an inch of water. Beyond some pamphlets and in stock OGS publications nothing was damaged that could not be repaired.


The building itself sustained the most damage and required that we empty and close the office so the bottom few feet of most of the drywall could be replaced as well as part of the ceiling. These repairs and the ensuing air quality check took longer than anticipated but are finally complete. Technicians have checked and reconnected all of our electronic equipment and found they were not damaged. The contractor's insurance will pay for the expenses incurred as a result of this.


If you have recently sent us an email that bounced back to you, please try again. The server was unable to receive messages during our closed period and we would like to make sure we do get your email.


Thank you once again for your patience and support during this period. We are happy to be returning to normal and look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at the office.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving

Visit our website, www.GenealogyCanada.com, for some great stuff on Canadian genealogy, history, and heritage.

We have an article on Canadian Thanksgiving -

1. http://www.genealogycanada.com/October_News_2006.htm (with dancing turkey)

And we have two articles on Thanksgiving on our blog -

1. Canadian Thanksgiving - http://genealogycanada.blogspot.com/2008/10/happy-thanksgiving.html (with football-playing turkey)

2. American Thanksgiving - http://genealogycanada.blogspot.com/2008/11/happy-thanksgiving.html

Enjoy the posts, and to all our readers, "Happy Thanksgiving!", no matter which one you celebrate!

Elizabeth

Friends of Laura Secord

(Click on image to make it bigger)

www.niagaraparks.com/heritage-trail/friends-of-laura-secord.html

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Workshop - The Women in Our Past

Elayne Lockhart reminds us of an upcoming workshop co-hosted by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society and the Canadiana Department of the North York Central Library.

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Hi everyone.

If you’ve been thinking of coming to the workshop on November 6th, The Women in Our Past: Strategies and Resources for Researching Female Ancestors, I’m happy to tell you that even though the end of September has crept up on you, you haven’t missed the Early Bird deadline. We have extended it to next Monday, October 4th.

We hope to see many members there. We know that our speakers are going to be providing some great strategies to help us all learn to research “outside the box”.

Elayne