Genealogy at TLSARL 2
by Elizabeth CampbellI have so many things on my to do list in this job. I wish it was full-time and paid… then I could really go to town! But, like everyone else working behind the scenes at TLSARL, I am a volunteer. So I chip away at the mountains little by little. Other members help out a lot by sending in their family trees, discussing genealogical problems with Chloe and me, by sending in stories and photos for the quarterly Newsletter, and by sending in news of births, marriages and obituaries.
For many years now, the Ladies Auxilliary has maintained obituary scrapbooks. One of the big projects I have started is the indexing of obituaries from this collection, and combing through older Manitoba newspapers looking for BMD notices of settlers and their descendants. I’m also hoping to digitize the collection as newspaper deteriorates in the best of environments. A digital collection is also far easier to search and use on a day-to-day basis.
As I’ve gone through the newspapers, I’ve also seen many stories and other information (accounts of community meetings, for example) that give another angle on the lives of individual settlers and descendants. These, too, I’ve copied and hope to index and digitize.
Chloe and I have been poring over the Selkirk Paper, too, looking for primary source information to clarify relationships, even identities, and to obtain correct dates for life events. We’ve been working with Church records, too, as did my predecessor, Kim Nelson.
Much of the information we have has come by word of mouth over a long period of time. And only those settlers with descendants that became members of TLSARL have contributed. So, there are also settlers for whom we have very little material – the 1815 ‘deserters’, for example. I’ll talk about them a bit tomorrow.
