I didn't mean to be gone so long...

...but that's just the way life is sometimes.

I'm O.K., things in my non-genealogy life have been a little stressful and there wasn't much time for research for a while which left me without much to share. I have missed it, mostly because my blog reading time was cut down also and that took me out of the genealogy blogging community all together, and that was not too fun.

But I am back at it, researching and hoping to catch up on blog reading this weekend.

John Dean

Elizabeth "Bessie" Nimmo

In August I will be attending a reunion of descendants of my second great-grandparents, John Dean and Elizabeth "Bessie" Nimmo, so this family has been one focus of what research I have done this year. One important complication of this research is distance; they lived in North Hatley, Quebec, an eight hour drive from my home on Long Island, NY, so anything not online is quite a distance away. Lucky for me, I do have good leads from Ancestry collections, family lore, photos and artifacts and a helpful if unreliable book about the families of the area.

Still, I have been unable so far to find burial records for either John, Bessie or Bessie's mother, Elizabeth Louden, who lived with them for years and is buried with them. After spending a lot of time on Google Newspapers over the holiday weekend, I now at least have death notices and approximate dates of death for all three.

While pay sites like Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank are great, (I've written previously about my many finds for the Matthews family of Pittston, PA) they do not have much Canadian content and of course their content is behind a paywall. Google Newspapers has a ton of Canadian newspapers and they are free. One big drawback is that while the papers on the pay sites are searchable thanks to optical character recognition, the papers on Google Newspapers have no search function. You must bring your time and patience to the search party but the rewards can be great.

After this weekend's searching I know that Elizabeth Louden was sick for many years before she died at 93 and 3 months and relied on her deep faith to see her through it. I know that John and Bessie's youngest daughter, Anna Mina, was not just a teacher at the little red schoolhouse my grandmother would attend years later, she was the teacher and seems to have enjoyed preparing her little scholars to give recitations and other entertainments for their neighbors to much appreciation. And I know that in 1912 when John and Bessie's eldest, my great-grandfather James Louden, lost an arm in a farming accident, his wonderful neighbors and friends helped with farm work and house work and even held a successful fundraiser for him while he and my great-grandmother, who was already ill, were recovering in the hospital.

So, whether it's one of the sites I've mentioned or something else like Chronicling America or in an archive or historical society, I highly recommend some newspaper research, I'm finding it very addictive.