A few notable news items about resources have come to my inbox from genealogy newsletters.
- Ontario Ancestors announced in its eWeekly Update (Ontario Genealogical Society) that Vernon’s City Directories for Ontario are being digitized.
- John D Reid in Canada’s Angle-Celtic Connections provided an update about the remarkable Statistical Accounts of Scotland and news about additions to Newspapers.com.
- Dick Eastman in Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter highlighted the discovery that some books published between 1924 to 1964 may now be in the public domain and online.
Vernon’s City Directories – https://ogs.on.ca/vernons-directories/
Ontario Ancestors, Family Search International, and Library & Archives Canada have begun a joint project to digitize editions of Vernon’s Directories to Ontario municipalities 1897 to 2014. These were compiled for various years for many cities including Owen Sound. Barrie, Belleville, Brantford and a couple of other cities are available now through FamilySearch records search.
[Added 9 Aug 2019: Good posting by Alan Campbell at Ontario Ancestors on “Using City Directories in Your Genealogical Research” https://ogs.on.ca/using-city-directories-in-your-genealogical-research ]
Newspapers
The best site for listings of online newspapers in North America is Ancestor Hunt (http://www.theancestorhunt.com/newspapers.html) — I’m always dismayed that Ontario newspaper collections are so fragmented and incomplete and that there are none for Owen Sound. However, we can always hope. Newspapers.com, owned by Ancestry and accessible through its premium account, has been adding several Canadian papers – mostly in the West – as described in this posting .
Statistical Accounts of Scotland
The Old Statistical Account (1791-99) and the New Statistical Account (1834-45) are marvelous sources of information about Scotland for those periods. John D. Reid tells us that the website will be fully free for the next two years (starting August 2019) – no registration required. Delve into Statistical Accounts in all their glory at https://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/home
More books online
Books in the public domain (pre 1923) that are online are gold to the family historian. Google Books has some titles, Internet Archive has more, and Open Library is another good source. This posting by Dick Eastman alerts us to Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain . These are books published between 1924 and 1964 for which the copyright has expired. However, they aren’t all in one place as explained by Matthew Gault at Motherboard – you might try Hathi Trust or Standard E-Books.
I hope you will find something of interest in this list. Please comment or recommend others.
