Missing Home

I often wonder what it was like for my ggg grandfather Thomas Halls (and his brothers) to leave England and come to Canada.  I don't mean the sea voyage, which I understand could have taken up to three months, I mean adapting to a new land.

In many ways it must have been reasonably familiar.  They had many family members living nearby, as well as other people from Devon, and many of the place names were from England.  Thomas lived in the community of Lambeth, southwest of London, in the county of Middlesex.  London was on the Thames river.  A little further away was the community of Stratford, on the Avon River.  The newspapers would have had both local news, as well as news from England and the Empire.  He would have sent letters back and forth to his brother William, who had remained behind, as well as his sister Charlotte.

All in all, there would have been a great deal of the feeling of home in the areas where Thomas and his brothers lived.  And yet.  And yet it would have been very different.  First, there would have been the wilderness, literally dark, almost impenetrable forest.  The woods would have been full of animals that were large, and often dangerous, animals that certainly would not have been in Devon - moose, wolves, cougars, and bears.  Many other animals had familiar names, but in many cases that would only have drawn attention to their differences, animals like robins, jays, and badgers, and plants like chestnut or beech.

Did Thomas (and his brothers) suffer from homesickness?  Did they regret coming to Canada, or would the freedom to make their mark in the world have made up for the hardships and loneliness?  I don't know, and never can know, much to my regret.

Regardless, all the Halls brothers did well in their new homes.  Their children were successful, their lives were full, and they were successful too.  It was not a story without sadness, and sometimes tragedy, but I think that in the end they did not regret the choices they had made.

Surviving the Heat

On the Thursday, July 21st evening as I began this post I was sitting on my front stoop, trying to stay cool, and doing an ok job of it if I say so myself. There was a very nice breeze, and I had a cool drink, so I felt pretty good.

The temperature Thursday was 34C, and that night it only dropped to 25C, plus humidity for both temperatures. Not at all comfortable, but at least I had a ceiling fan.

This got me to thinking about how our ancestors beat the heat prior to air conditioning. In some ways, in much the sames way as I do now. Find somewhere in the shade, with a breeze. Keep the doors and windows closed during the heat of the day. I can't close the shutters (don't have any), but I could install awnings to keep the sun out. Today I went to the beach with my family, and we all swam. That was nice. We took the car, 100 years ago we would have taken the train, but that is a detail, the broad outline was the same - picnic lunch, bathing suit, beach umbrella, and away we went.

So much for the happy view of dealing with the hot weather. The big advantage we have that our ancestors did not can be summed up in two words - Air Conditioning. When the heat simply becomes too much to bear, we can go to a mall, museum, cinema, or even mostly retreat to the comfort of our own homes. Prior to the 1920's (and the steadily increasing numbers of cinemas with air conditioning) the public had no escape as only the most specialized buildings and workplaces had any air cooling system at all.

Imagine living in a city in 1900 with temperatures in the low to mid 30's, plus humidex. The smoke in the air from coal fired water heaters and cook stoves. The smell of the increasingly common automobiles mixed with the horse dung and urine on the roads, and you live, like most people, in a two to five storey walk-up with no air conditioning or electricity. Add, on top of all that, the formality of the age when in public all the men were expected to wear long pants, a jacket and a hat at the least, and women were expected to were long dresses that went up to the neck and down to the wrists. At the very least one would be less than comfortable. If you were elderly, very young, or had breathing problems, an extended period of heat meant death.

Wonderful and idyllic as the past may seem to us now, it was by no means a bed of roses. While I do not have air conditioning myself, I am deeply grateful for the ability to escape to a mall, cinema, or museum when the heat becomes intolerable.

Google Streetview

You might think that talking about something like Google Street View would have nothing to do with genealogy, but you would be wrong. The range of places that Google Street View has made available to people is staggering. While the coverage varies from area to area, it is still quite impressive.

One of my favourite Street View pastimes is to wander the country lanes of north Devon. You can see old buildings and churches, often the inscriptions on the sides of buildings are visible, as are road signs, addresses and so on.

I took me a while, but I found Barland House in Dolton, Devon, on Google Street View. It's not that the image wasn't on Street View, but that I didn't know exactly where in Dolton Barland House was.

Here is a picture of Barland House taken circa 1900











Here is a Google Streetview picture of Barland House taken in the past few years, but from Rectory Rd.

If you click on the image you can see the sign on the fence in the lower right of the picture, it says "Barlands".

You can find Street View in Google Maps just look for the little gold coloured man in the upper left corner. Not every place has been "Street Viewed" by Google, but lots have. If you haven't tried Street View yet to see places your ancestors lived, you definitely should.

Who's that Girl, or Facial Recognition of Relatives in Old Pictures

I had a brain wave a few days ago, and wondered what sort of facial recognition software might be available for genealogy.

A quick survey of the web didn't reveal anything right away that was specifically dedicated to genealogy, but a couple of options presented themselves. The first was to use Google's Picasa Web albums. Upload your photos, ensure that name tagging is enabled, and away you go. After a few pictures are identified it will start to make suggestions based on previous name tags you have assigned.

The other possible option is Facebook, which automatically tags people in pictures, and there is no reason not to use that ability for figuring out who is who in old picture. Once again, all you need to do is tag the first few occurences of a persoon, and after that Facebook starts doing it for you for any other occurrences of that person.

Finally, there is also an Apple application, iPhoto, that has facial recognition built in.

Personally, I think I like the Picasa Web Albums better. It is in the cloud making it easier to share, it can be synced to your own computer, and because the pictures are web based, they are platform independent. Just make sure that you send the link of the album with the pictures to your cousins and contacts who might be able to help.

Halls in Peterborough, Ontario

A mystery was solved last week when I discovered, quite by chance, the whereabouts of Mary Halls.

Mary was one of the children of Philip Halls and Jenny Smith, and sister to my ggg Thomas. Mary married John Heard in England on April 3, 1842, in Devon. Then they vanished from the English records. I could not find any people that matched who they were, anywhere, that I was comfortable saying "This must be them". I resigned myself to never solving that mystery, and got on with what I could do.

Some time later I was doing a random search for a Halls family member, and a hint came up in Ancestry family trees that the mother of John Heard (junior) was surnamed Halls. based on the family tree, this set me on the trail for census records for family members in the Peterborough, Ontario area. I found that John junior had three siblings, Charlotte, Margaret, and Philip. Philip's death certificate also show that his father was John Heard, and his mother was Mary Halls. The 1851/52 Census of Ontario indicates that John came from England, and that his wife died of fever at age 35, so the birth date was right, too!

Happily portions of the Peterborough Archives are online, and they indicated that Mary Heard was buried in Wesleyan Methodist Cemetery aka Pioneer Park. The burial place makes sense because the Halls family was Bible Christian, an offshoot of Methodism. In addition there was a Charlotte Heard buried in the same place, daughter of John and Mary. Best of all, they both have tombstones. Sometime this spring I will be taking a road trip to Peterborough.

With this find I now know what happened to all of the children of Philip and Jenny Halls. All but two came to Canada. I wonder why?

Genetics and Genealogy Again

I decided to cut out most of the technical stuff, and go for short and simple. There are lots of technical articles about genetic genealogy, and they can explain it just as well, or better, than I can. See the bottom of the post for links.

So just how reliable is genetic testing for genealogical purposes? Well it depends on what you are after. Are you looking to establish a close relationship with someone from 600 years ago? Don't count on it. Are you looking to see if you have markers indicating that some of your ancestors came from a certain region or belonged to a certain group, more likely, but it is not an ironclad guarantee that you are actually from that region, or belong to that group. If you are looking to establish a relationship in the past few hundred years, that is possible, but the closeness of the relationship will not be included, i.e. you will know you are related, but not how closely. To establish closeness, you need a paper trail. On the other hand a genetic test can rule out relationship.

How does it work? It is actually quite straight forward. Our physical sex is determined by whether or not we have two X chromosomes (women), or an X and a Y (men). The Y chromosome is passed down through the male line exclusively. Women are a little different, as the mitochondrial DNA must be tested. The mitochondria are basically cells within a cell, and they provide energy to the cell. At any rate, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is transmitted from the mother to all the children. Both the Y chromosome DNA and mtDNA change at relatively constant rates, which allows us to test and determine a very broad level of closeness. Additionally, because the Y chromosome only follows the male line, and the mtDNA follows both lines, we can test for paternal and maternal origins.

For example, Y DNA changes at the rate of 1 mutation every 500 years on average, so you may find that you are related to someone sometime in the past 500 years, but it doesn't tell you how closely you are related, just that you are. If the test finds no commonality, then you are definitely not related. In addition, remember that the times span of the change is an average. The Y DNA may have changed between you and your father, or not have changed at all in the past 1000 years. We just don't know.

What happens if you get a negative result? There may have been an adoption. There may have been an illegitimate child. There may have been an error in the test. There may have been a name change. There may have been infidelity. Be prepared, none of us are (or were) perfect, and you may not like the answer you find.

So, I come back to the original question, is genealogical DNA testing reliable? The answer is yes, but within limits. It can determine if there is a relationship, but it cannot determine the closeness of the relationship. Alternately, it can prove that no relationship exists. Taken along with paper records it can be a valuable addition to your research. Genealogical DNA testing can also be used to help determine deep ancestry, in other words where in the world your ancestors are (mostly) from. Finally, remember there are no absolutes. Even the best genetic testing comes with a percent level of certainty, even if the level is 99% certain, there is always that 1% chance that the correct results are alternate to the main result.

If you do decide to have some sort of genealogical genetic testing done, look around, some groups will pay part or all of the test costs depending on your surname or ancestry.

There are lots of sources about genetic genealogy. Here are some I used:

• Genetic Genealogy: Using DNA Testing for Family Research
• DNA Testing by Ancestry.com

And the post wouldn't be complete if I didn't include a link about Devon - The Devon DNA Project - you will need a paper trail leading back to Devon in order to be allowed to submit a DNA sample to this project.

Genetics and Genealogy

I recently came across Family Tree DNA, a company that collects genetic data to determine paternal or maternal ancestry. Being the curious sort I am I decided to investigate exactly what it was all about.

The first thing I wanted to know was whether or not they share the information they collect? The answer was no, they do not share the data from the genetic testing.

Then I decided to see if they were a reliable organization, or would they just take the money (or information) and run. So I did a web search for genetic genealogy, and came up with a Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia article mentioned the Genographic Project, which it stated was a joint project between IBM, National Geographic, University of Arizona, and Family Tree DNA. A web search for the Genographic Project came up with multiple pages from Family Tree DNA, National Geographic and IBM, and one of the IBM pages said that the information was processed by Family Tree DNA. So, I have now determined to my satisfaction that Family Tree DNA is a reputable company.

The next thing I want to consider is whether or not I actually want to be tested, and right now I am just not sure. The Family Tree DNA site does include a Devon DNA Project group, so it is tempting, and they do have some maps of their findings.

Does the testing itself work? Is it reliable? What's the point? I think I'll leave those for the next post because it gets kind of technical.