Ancestry adds more Irish medical practitioner records

Following on from last week's release of the UK and Ireland, Medical Registers, 1859-1943 collections (see http://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2023/04/ancestry-adds-uk-and-ireland-medical.html), Ancestry has added a further collection of medical practitioner records from Ireland:

Ireland, Kirkpatrick Index of Physician Biographical Files, 1826-1952
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/62262/

Source: Kirkpatrick Index of Biographical files. Dublin, Ireland: Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

About Ireland, Kirkpatrick Index of Physician Biographical Files, 1826-1952

This collection includes biographical information about members of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. The collection contains images of the original records that include personal and professional information about each physician. The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland began as an educational institution and a professional society dedicated to the improvement of medical care and the licensing of physicians in Ireland.

Using this collection

Records in this collection may include the following information:

• Name
• Maiden name
• Alias
• Birth date and place
• Marriage date and place
• Age at marriage
• Spouse name
• Parents’ names
• Place of residence
• Education year
• Death date and place
• Age at death

This collection can be used to confirm that your ancestor was a physician and a member of the Royal College of Physicians at a specific point in time. The records also may allow you to compare your ancestor’s birth, marriage, and death information with other vital records.

For further details on the collection, click on the link above.

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Pen and Sword book discounts until April 13th

Pen and Sword currently have a book offer, with some serious discounts, 30% on all titles. Most of my Scottish and Irish family history titles are reduced from £14.99 (RRP) to £10.49, whilst my Sharing Your Family History Online title is dropped from £12.99 to just £9.09. Postage is on top of this. It's not just my books though, all of their family history and military titles are similarly on offer, and there is a fair range there!

Elsewhere, I finally received my author's copies of Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors (which is included in the offer), and am delighted with how it has been laid out. Very excitingly, it got to number 2 this week on Pen and Sword's best-sellers list, but I am also delighted that my re-released Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd edition) has also hit the top ten again, at number 9! A huge thanks to all of you who have purchased copies of these and my other titles (see below), and as always, I hope they help!

Remember, the Pen and Sword offer sale ends April 13th!

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The S'cottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

East Galway headstone inscriptions added to RootsIreland

Some 2785 headstone inscriptions have been added to RootsIreland (www.rootsireland.ie) for the following graveyards:

• Abbey: 1078 records;
• Ballinafad: 406 records;
• Ballygar: 714 records;
• Boyounagh: 587 records;
• Total: 2785 records

(With thanks to Roots Ireland via email)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

TheGenealogist releases Police Gazette editions

From TheGenealogist (www.thegenealogist.co.uk):

Over 56,000 individuals and 20,802 further aliases from The Police Gazette have been released by TheGenealogist covering the years 1901, 1911, 1921 and 1931 and are now available to Diamond subscribers in their Court and Criminal Records Collection.

Searchable by name, alias, offence among other keywords, these records have been transcribed by volunteers from UKIndexer to provide an effective resource for discovering descriptions of our wayward ancestors. 

These newly released Police Gazette records (sometimes known to researchers by its historic name of Hue and Cry) are a part of the MEPO 6 criminal records on TheGenealogist that also include Habitual Criminals Registers and Miscellaneous Papers.

The images of the pages from the Police Gazette publication on TheGenealogist were originally published by the Metropolitan Police and circulated to Police forces in the British Isles. They include a number of portraits of the offenders and always give descriptive written details of the individuals. Expect to see the names of persons charged who were known but not in custody, and also the description of those who were not known, their appearance, dress, and every other mark of identity that could help identify the person. Also included in the Police Gazette were the names of accomplices and accessories, with every other particular that may lead to the apprehension of the individuals.

Read TheGenealogist’s featured article where a search of the MEPO 6 Criminal Records discovers female gang leaders known as the Queen of the Forties: https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2023/the-queens-of-the-forties-1683/

(With thanks to Nick Thorne)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Parts of Rootsweb to be retired and migrated to new homes

From RootsWeb (now part of Ancestry):

RootsWeb was founded in 1996 and has had an extraordinarily long and successful run, outlasting nearly every other website originating in those early days of the internet. RootsWeb has far exceeded its founders' expectations regarding longevity and its central role in creating an online genealogy community, but maintaining RootsWeb forever is not a viable long-term solution. We recognize the valuable genealogical information RootsWeb offers and are working to keep that community knowledge alive by migrating it to Ancestry and other places throughout 2023.

Mailing Lists Archives (last updated in 2020) will be retired on 6 April 2023 and migrated to an alternative, free platform. Once migration is complete, we’ll provide a link to them on the RootsWeb home page.

WorldConnect family trees (last updated on 9 August 2021) will be retired on 15 April 2023 and migrated to Ancestry as a new free-access collection later in the year. For help removing a tree or its content, contact us.

Hosted websites will become read-only beginning in early 2024. At that time, all logins will be disabled, but hosted sites will remain on RootsWeb as static content. Website owners wishing to maintain their sites must migrate to a different hosting provider before 2024.

Frequently asked questions

How do I download my RootsWeb-hosted website?  Open an FTP client (like FileZilla) and connect to:

•         Host: sf​tp://sitesuser.r​ootsweb.c​​om
•         Port: 22

Enter your username and password and log in. Your username is the website name and can be found at the end of the URL (example: https://sites.rootsweb.com/~username/). For help with your password,  click here or contact us.

Use your FTP client to download your website’s files. See instructions for some popular FTP clients here.

Where can I find the Mailing Lists Archives?
The mailing list content will be migrated to an alternative, free platform for long-term access. When the migration is complete, a link will be posted to the RootsWeb home page.

Where can I find the WorldConnect trees?
The trees will be migrated to Ancestry as a new collection. The collection will be free to access without an Ancestry membership.

Source: https://support.rootsweb.com/s/article/Retiring-and-Migrating-Portions-of-RootsWeb

COMMENT: This is great news with regards to the mailing lists in particular, which I feared would be retired completely - there is a lot of useful genealogical information stored away on the site!

(With thanks to Debbie Kennet via Twitter @DebbieKennett)

Chris 

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the Old Parish Registers course starts May 8th

The next Scotland 1750-1850: Beoynd the Old Parish Registers course from Pharos Tutors (www.pharostutors.com) starts on May 8th. Taught entirely online, the course costs £58, and lasts 5 weeks. Here's the full description:

Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the Old Parish Registers

This is an intermediate level course in Scottish family history for those who are going back beyond 1850. You should have some experience with research in the Old Parish Registers (OPRs) of the Church of Scotland and in using major websites for Scottish research.

This course discusses sources that fill the gap when the OPRs are uninformative or missing, such as the kirk session and presbytery courts records generated by the Kirk (Church of Scotland), as well as the records of dissenting and seceding Presbyterian congregations. From the forerunners of Scotlands modern towns and cities are the administrative records of the burghs, and the trades incorporations and merchant guilds, as well as other professions, which can enhance our understanding of our ancestors lives. And in the final two lessons the course turns up a notch and tackles two areas where the Scottish records, as generated through the feudal system, are truly unique, namely the various registers of land records known as sasines, and the separate legal processes in Scotland for the inheritance of both moveable and heritable estate.

Whilst some of the records discussed in the course are available online, many are available only in the archives, or in private hands, and a strong focus of this course will be in how to successfully employ the relevant catalogues and finding aids to locate such treasures.

Whilst not compulsory, it is strongly recommended that you complete the Pharos course Scottish Research Online before studying Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the Old Parish Registers, as it will be assumed that you are already familiar with the more basic resources available online for Scottish ancestral research.

Lesson Headings:

* Kirk Sessions records and parish poor
* Burgh records and town poor
* Occupations, taxation and early lists
* Land transfer and the value of sasines
* Land, inheritance and estates

Each lesson includes exercises and activities; a minimum of 1 one-hour chat session per week. (See How the Courses Work at https://www.pharostutors.com/howcourseswork.php.)

Relevant Countries: Scotland
Course Length: 5 Weeks
Start Date: 9 May 2022
Cost: £58

Student feedback from the most recent run of the course in Noivember 2021:

"The exercises helped you to explore new lesson concepts right away. Especially by directing students to apply new research aids to their own work."

"Very clear explanations of terminology and legal processes Really helpful exercises and comprenesive list of useful catalogues and other references Chat sessions very helpful and engaging."

"This being the second genealogy course I have taken, and the second with Pharos, I found these were detailed foundation courses which will permit me to search better and with less effort in my future research work."

"Great subject-matter and excellent tutor/written materials. It could not have been better."

The following video also gives a bit more of a flavour about what to expect:

(Available also at https://youtu.be/1vX6GZtwZJ0)

For further details, and to sign up, please visit https://www.pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=302.

I'll hopefully see you online soon! 

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

First look at £45 million refurbished Paisley Museum

The Herald newspaper has an article taking a first look at the refurbished Paisley Museum, a massive £45 million project currently underway.

You can read the article at https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23426005.first-look-inside-new-45-million-paisley-museum/. (You may find it behind a paywall, but the image shown in the free to access header is the only one in the piece!)

There's much more on the project at https://www.renfrewshire.gov.uk/article/2455/Paisley-Museum-Reimagined. The museum will re-open in 2024.

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Australia's TROVE platform saved for the future

The National Library of Australia's TROVE platform (https://trove.nla.gov.au) has been saved for the future. From the NLA:

The National Library of Australia welcomes the commitment made by the Albanese Government to provide $33m over the next 4 years to maintain Trove, with $9.2m ongoing and indexed funding from July 2027. We are delighted that Trove’s future has been secured.

Trove has a place for every story, with 14 billion Australian moments captured for future generations. It has a story for every place, with Voluntroves from Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory to Burnie in Tasmania. It is where old poetry is transformed into new lyrics, newspapers articles become historical fiction, and where Australian humanities research is powered.

Most recently, it has been a place for First Nations communities to continue to tell their stories, through our First Australians pages.

Trove is a place for all Australians, which is connected to all our places. It is a truly national treasure, and an international world leader. The overwhelming support we have received from the Trove community (both new and old) has been humbling. We take our role as the custodians of Trove, on behalf of the Library and our partner organisations, very seriously.

The certainty of this funding decision will allow the National Library to continue to provide this essential service, enrich it with new content, and stabilise and secure the platform, in line with the Trove Strategy. 

(Source: https://trove.nla.gov.au/announcement/2023/04/03/national-library-welcomes-announcement-ongoing-trove-funding)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Ancestry adds UK and Ireland, Medical Registers, 1859-1943

Ancestry has added a new UK collection, which may be of interest for those with medically trained ancestors in Ireland and Scotland:

UK and Ireland, Medical Registers, 1859-1943
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/62268/
Source: The Medical Register. Dublin, Ireland: Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

About UK and Ireland, Medical Registers, 1859-1943

General collection information

This collection contains published registers of medical doctors living in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The registers were published annually and served as directories for the medical profession. The collection includes images of the original registers.

Using this collection:

• Records in this collection may include the following information:
• Date of registration
• Name
• Residence
• Qualifications

This collection can be used to confirm that your ancestor was a doctor in the United Kingdom or Ireland at a specific point in time. The registers were produced annually, so you may be able to trace your ancestor's medical career over time. 

The following is the entry for my 5 x great uncle Dr William Henderson of Perth:

For further details, visit the link above.

Don't forget to also check the slightly more comprehensive (for biographical detail) UK and Ireland, Medical Directories, 1845-1942 at https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/61053/. The following is the equivalent entry in this for William:

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

Northern Irish GRO records site redesigned

The Northern Irish GRO records platform at https://geni.nidirect.gov.uk has had a slight redesign, and I have to admit, I'm not really sure what the point of it is. 

The functionality is virtually identical, but you now have to scroll down the relevant search pages and reveal the search field items by clicking on a small arrow at the relevant sections. In the previous version, everything was laid out in one very easy to see display. 

I can only assume GRONI has decided, like many Irish archives, that people no longer use home computers and have become perpetually intertwined with their mobile devices. For the record, I have not!

(With thanks to Allie Nickell, @alliethinks via Twitter)

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.