New Project Obituaries Haldimand County Ontario Canada

 Olive Tree Genealogy has been given a large collection of obituaries from Haldimand County Ontario.  Many are from the Dunnville area. I will be posting these obituaries as individual blog posts and hope that descendants will find an ancestor or two. I will also add other documents as I find them 

The first obit I am posting is for Isaac Modeland who died at the residence of L H Weaver on March 26, 1906; in Dunnville

Obituary 1906

Death Registration1906

 Marriage Certificate 1856

Thousands of Newspaper Clippings to Sort!

Continuing on with our large genealogy research collection, we are now on Stage 3. We've triaged all the boxes into various topics as mentioned in my last blog post.

Yesterday we had a good look at the newspaper clippings. It's overwhelming. The image on the left shows some, but not all of the binders and boxes of clippings! There is another large plastic tub full of loose clippings.

Many are in binders but a very large number are loose and in plastic sleeves in boxes.

I pulled out one of the binders and took a photo to illustrate how they were originally organized . It is obvious by looking through the binders that she organized the clippings by surname, then glued the clippings to blank paper, attempting to keep family groups together. This is a wonderful resource of births, marriages, deaths, obituaries, graduations and so on. However there are hundreds, if not thousands, of loose clippings that are not sorted so we will have to think about how best to treat those.

I have not gotten a good sense of the time span for the clippings as we aren't taking the time right now to delve into each collection. For now we are focusing on sorting and finding space in our home to house all the books and binders so we can begin a more serious in-depth assessment and inventory.

The newer clippings may be available online so we have to decide if it is worth house space to devote to them. I did note some clippings from the early 1900s and late 1800s, and those may be worth preserving. We have some tough decisions ahead.

 

We found room in the basement for the binders of newspaper clippings which were labelled A through to Z , although we are missing some of the alphabet! I suspect those are some of the loose clippings as we know that the Heritage Assocation began removing clippings from the binders in order to inventory them before realizing the collection was too large for them to handle. 

We have saved binders to replace the missing letters and hopefully in the future we will be able to at least organize the loose clippings to insert in binders. But we won't use glue! 

Of course the question still remains - what do we do with the clippings once organized? We're mulling on that question.

Receiving a Large Collection of Genealogy Documents!

Genealogy Boxes Arrive

A few months back  Olive Tree Genealogy was offered some newspaper clippings from a donation a historical society had received. I was very excited to be asked and of course I agreed. A very large package soon arrived by mail consisting of hundreds of loose obituaries from newspapers.

As I was planning on how best to organize and inventory the clippings, another surprise came my way. I was told there were about a dozen large filing boxes full of miscellaneous genealogy items from the same donated materials.

This was too good an opportunity to save important historical records to pass up even though the thought of dealing with so many boxes was somewhat overwhelming.

My husband kindly offered to drive to the Society, some 3 hours distance from our home, to pick up the boxes. To my astonishment, there were over 15 large boxes full of genealogy binders, genealogy books, loose newspaper clippings, and more.  Here they are arriving at our home.

What To Do with So Many Boxes?

My husband and I are planners. We like to be organized. So we took a breath and decided we needed to sort the collection. First we needed a place to put the boxes where they would not be in the way but would be accessible. Then we could slowly and methodically "triage" the contents into organized groups of items.

Step One - Move & Triage!

So we moved to step one - moving the incoming boxes into our living room. Some had gotten wet in the journey in the rain to our home so removing the contents from wet boxes was our first priority.

My dogs helping me start the process

We took a break at this point but we plan to triage the contents ASAP. We saw at a glance that there are various items - hardcover genealogy books, genealogy booklets, binders of newspaper clippings, binders of research notes, family genealogies, and more. This next step will be a fun sort to organize into groups that we can either move to our basement until we have time to work on the contents, or keep in my office for starting an inventory.

The Journey Begins

Please follow along on our journey to inventory and preserve these documents. We aren't archivists but we plan to do our best. We also hope to figure out a way to make the documents accessible to genealogists and historians. If you have ideas or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments on this blog post.