Tag: archives

52W Mark III – Week 31: End of the Line

Summertime means reruns (does Gen Alpha even know what a “rerun” is?), and since I’ve been on vacation, I thought I’d rerun a post from last year.

“Endling”: a perfectly cromulent word that should be adopted by genealogists to describe someone who is the last of a family line.

At the monthly general meeting of the BC Genealogical Society in December 2022, the guest speaker was David Landers. He gave a fascinating talk on the topic of the last of a family line, which he termed an “endling”. The discussion after his talk proposed applying “endling” to other genealogical ends, such as when a senior branch of a family dies out, leaving only the cadet lines, or the end of a surname, such as when a family only has daughters.

Mr. Landers acknowledged that he had not come up with the term, but he certainly was a strong advocate for adopting it. He even applied the term to himself, as he did not have children, and his family line was ending with him.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything online regarding Mr. Landers or anything relating him to the topic. I only have my recollection of his presentation to rely upon. What I do remember was that he identified the source of the term as it relates to genealogy. In particular, I remember him saying that the original proponent of the neologism wrote to a magazine to advance the cause of employing “endling”.

While it might not be the same place where Mr. Landers discovered the word, I was able to find this article at The New Yorker, What Do You Call The Last of a Species?, which fits my recollection of Mr. Lander’s talk. The article credits a physician in Georgia, Robert Webster, with coining the term.

Dr. Webster contacted Merriam-Webster to propose adding “endling” to its dictionary, but was told a word would need to regularly appear in print before it could be considered for inclusion. Taking up the challenge, Dr. Webster took out an advertisement in a medical journal to suggest adoption of the term. Later, Dr. Webster and a colleague wrote a letter to Nature, arguing the “need for a word in taxonomy, and in medical, genealogical, scientific, biological and other literature, that does not occur in the English or any other language.”

One final note. If you are an endling with no siblings, nibblings, or cousins to pass your work on to, you might consider donating your material to an archive.

The Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands in The Hague. I wish I had known my hotel was two blocks away before I arrived in the city!

52W Mark II – Week 52: Me, Myself, and I

After posting last week’s entry, in which I wrote about being my own cousin, I realized that it very well could have fit in with this week’s theme of “Me, Myself, and I”. However, to mark the last (!?!) week of Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2023, the thing I will share about myself is how I have used the challenge to the fullest.

I wrote a family history book!

I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.

Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!

For years I had vaguely pondered a genealogy blog, but really couldn’t think of a niche that wasn’t already being addressed by dozens of other genealogy blogs. However, the 52 Ancestors Challenge was the catalyst to creativity that I needed. So a quarter century after blogging was cool, I created this blog as a means of participating in the challenge.

At the same time, I set up a second Twitter (I refuse to use the “new” name) account that would only be used for genealogy, also named Deck of Ancestors. I’ve since created namesake accounts on Mastodon, the now defunct Pebble, Mastodon, and Bluesky. I’ve largely abandoned Mastodon. I’m active on Bluesky, but it doesn’t seem to be gaining the traction I thought it had when I first joined.

It was hard at times, but I was successful in posting something for all 52 weeks of the challenge. With this post, I’ll be successful for a second year in a row. The second year was more difficult. It felt harder to come up with something I hadn’t written about before and some of the weekly prompts were not easy for me. Nevertheless, I persevered! I’ve signed up for the challenge again for 2024. Looking at the prompts, it looks like it will be another difficult year, but I will try to rise to the challenge.

However, what I’ve always wanted to do is create some sort of family history book. However, I was reluctant to churn out one of those dry tomes that’s just a bunch of pedigree charts and a BMD narrative. I’ve started and stopped all sorts of drafts and have the works in progress still sitting in a folder on my computer.

My real first genealogy book!

Moreover, like a lot of family historians, I had lots of ideas for genealogy-related Christmas presents, but kept putting it off until it was too close to the holiday to get it done.

Thanks to the 52 Ancestors challenge, I inadvertently hit upon what I thought was a winning solution – the blog posts were essentially a book! I had the foresight to start working on this project in the summer, which began with reformatting the blog entries into a book format. The other problem was figuring out how to print it.

Luckily, this year I discovered Lulu, an online self-publishing site. I had used others before, but none worked for this project. In September I ordered a test copy. It passed muster, so I ordered enough copies for my Christmas gift giving – my parents, our kids, my siblings, and my nibblings, plus copies for the Library and Archives Canada. (It may be nerdy, but I was really excited to get an ISBN for the project!)

A Stack of Ancestors!

So here it is, my family history book, A Deck of Ancestors, consisting of my 52 posts for the first year I participated in the 52 Ancestors Challenge. One of my sisters and her kids opened theirs early, as they went overseas for the holidays. I just made it a Hanukkah gift instead. The reviews were great. On Christmas Eve, my sister-in-law sent me photos of my father reading the copy I gave my parents. Seeing that was really special. While my father used to be a voracious reader, he doesn’t really read much anymore since his vision has deteriorated terribly over recent years. What I was most excited for was to see our kids open their copy. I was happy to come downstairs on Boxing Day morning to see our eldest engrossed in his.

In addition to the print version, I created an expanded digital edition (with its own unique ISBN, of course), which I sent to everyone after they opened their print copy. Among other things, I added an Ahnentafel, a 17-generation pedigree chart, and a full index. (I hate non-fiction books without an index!) It would have been extremely expensive to include all that in a print version. Plus, the digital version has all the hyperlinks, which are pretty hard to click in a print edition!

So thank you Amy Johnson Crow for creating the 52 Ancestors Challenge and helping me fill the one gap in my years of genealogy practice – writing!

52W Mark II – Week 30: In The News

One of the great things about conducting Dutch genealogy is the amazing array of resources that are available. While the adage “not everything is online” still applies, there are an incredible number of sources that are digitized and online – largely for free! For this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge theme, I want to focus on two sources I have relied upon the most for newspaper articles.

One great thing about old Dutch newspapers is that they usually published summaries of all the birth, marriage, and death registrations for the local village or town civil registers (“burgerlijke stand”).

The first is Delphler.nl, a partnership between numerous Dutch libraries and archives – over 200 institutions, according to the website. It is a central access point for Dutch historical texts from the digital collections of numerous scientific institutions, libraries, and heritage institutions.

Delpher is somewhat like the Internet Archive. It is a repository for scanned images of newspapers, magazines, and books published in the Netherlands. It even includes some publications from its former colonies, such as Suriname. It boasts over two million newspapers, 400,000 magazines, and 200,000 historical books.

Delpher has a rather good search engine; I’ve rarely had difficulty finding what I am looking for. The results provide you a link to the full page of the document with your search term. The search result also allows you to go through every page of the paper or magazine containing the page you were looking for.

What might be a downside for most North American users is that the site is only available in Dutch. The translate function of your browser can help, although the records you’ll find will be in Dutch. Luckily, my Dutch is good enough that I can navigate and search without much difficulty. For what it’s worth, “kranten” is “newspapers” and “tijdschriften” is “magazines”. It’s probably not much of a guess to figure out “boeken” is “books”.

I use Chrome, which has a translation function.

Another excellent source of newspaper images are the many local and regional archives throughout the Netherlands. I make use of several, particularly those situated in Leiden, Haarlem, and Alkmaar. Unlike Delpher, many Dutch archives have an English interface. However, some of them only provide English versions of part – but not all – of their website. Fortunately, the English interface is usually available for things like genealogy.

Alkmaar is very close to many of the towns and villages where my family has lived, so I have gathered a lot of newspaper images from the Alkmaar Archief. It has an online database exclusively devoted to newspaper images, Kranten Regionaal Archief Alkmaar (Alkmaar Regional Archives Newspapers).

Like Delpher, I find the Alkmaar Archief search engine works well. Like Delpher, the search result provides you with the full page of where your search term appears, with the ability to look at the entire newspaper that contains the page. However, unlike the main Alkmaar Archief, this database does not have an English interface.

I have had a great deal of success with the Kranten Regionaal Archief Alkmaar. Here are the clippings from the papers with the summaries of the birth registrations of my paternal grandparents:

“Adrianus Joseph, son of Johannes Albertus van der Fluit and Teetje Pater”
Schager Courant, 11 April 1923, page 8.
(“Gemeente” is akin to a municipal district)
“Christina, daughter of Adrianus Komen and Elisabeth Bakker”
Alkmaarsche Courant, September 10, 1923, page 6.

Donate Your Genealogical Material To The Archives

(Don’t Forget Family Search!)

While it might just be me, lately it seems that many archives are going out of their way to encourage donations. It even appears that they are targeting genealogists in these pitches. Even if an archive isn’t actively seeking donations, many archives’ websites provide information as to how to donate materials and published works.

Sure, the focus of this post is Canadian archives, but the last time I physically visited an archive was during my last trip to The Hague, where I popped into the Nationaal Archief.

What a great idea, particularly given how much I see on social media by genealogists pondering where their work will go, either because their children don’t care or because they have no descendants or nibblings to pass their work on to. However, even if you aren’t an endling or have someone would happily receive your genealogical materials, you should still consider what you might donate to an archive. If you’ve published a family history book, you should definitely consider it.

Don’t limit your thinking. Archives of all kinds accept donations: municipal, provincial, state, national, private, and institutional archives. Because I am based in greater Vancouver, Canada, most of the examples I am listing are Canadian. Here are but a few:

  • The University of British Columbia, my alma mater. I spent countless hours in its archives and special collections division for academic and personal research – little of which was genealogy related! “Donate“.
  • The British Columbia Archives: “Donating Records“.
  • Most other Canadian provincial archives have a donation page on their website. I’ll note two in particular. First, the Provincial Archives of Alberta. I note on their donation page, they expressly state that the kinds of records they are seeking include personal records of individuals and families: “Donate Your Records“.

Given that there are fifty states and countless other institutions in the US, I will leave it to readers to Google the American archives that might be suitable for their records donations. However, the Society of American Archivists provides a great overview on “Donating Your Personal or Family Records to a Repository“.

Another place to consider – which might seem obvious once you think about it – is FamilySearch: “How Can I Donate?” They accept: family histories; published genealogical books; published historical books such as local and county histories; periodicals; directories; indexes and transcriptions of records in book format; yearbooks; journals (over 70 years old); family bibles containing genealogical information; and autobiographies and biographies.

Donate materials to an archive for all researchers to enjoy and benefit from!