Talented Tuesday: Colleen Fitzpatrick, forensic genealogy - video presentations online

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Colleen Fitzpatrick, forensic genealogist and author
On 20 April, 2015, we were extremely fortunate to have Colleen Fitzpatrick PhD, visiting forensic genealogist and author from the US, come and speak for us at Central Library.

Colleen is a nuclear physicist, who is a consultant in some high profile cases that involve using both genetic and forensic genealogy to solve a case. 

She has a really impressive CV.

Colleen is also the author of 


Colleen is a talented researcher and an excellent speaker with a wide choice of subjects to choose from and has a real talent for making the complicated and the technical both easily understood and entertaining.

Fortunately, her visit to us coincided with our "pilot" scheme and we were able to video her talks which you can find here on our website.

The presentations she gave us were:

CSI meets Roots
Forensic genealogy has established itself as the modern approach to family research. Reference materials such as photographs, databases, and DNA can provide much more information than you ever dreamed. But are you really using your genealogical materials to your best advantage? The goal of this talk is to spark your imagination to discover new ways of looking at your family mysteries.

Adoption searches
This talk will give you insight into adoption searches – how to use explicit and implicit information in conjunction with DNA to locate someone even if don’t know his or her name.

The "Unknown Child" of the Titanic - identified?
Of the 328 bodies recovered by the salvage operation of the SS Titanic, just one was that of a child. His identity was unknown for nearly a century until 2002, when Dr. Alan Ruffman and Dr. Ryan Parr announced that they had identified the remains of the “Unknown Child”. But was this identification correct? How was the controversy resolved so that the Unknown Child of the Titanic was unknown no longer.

So make yourself a cup of tea, sit down for an hour or two and enjoy!

Happy watching

Seonaid




Census Sunday: 1911 suffragette evaders

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By 1911 New Zealand women had voting rights for nearly two decades, while their UK sisters still battled for their rights and a voice.  The Women's Freedom League incited members with its Manifesto to " … oppose, hamper, destroy if possible, the power of an unrepresentative Government to govern women, refuse to be taxed, boycott the Census, refuse all official information until women have won that which is their absolute right – the right of a voice and vote."

Women and the vote, 1914.
Sir George Grey Special Collections,
Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19140416-48-6
The Women's Freedom League initiated a boycott of census day, Sunday 2 April 1911, to protest their lack of rights to vote. These suffragette evaders refused to have their names added to their own household registers, effectively 'vanishing' from the census while many left their homes for the day. 

Evaders such as Louisa Burnham defiantly wrote the words "No vote, no census. If I am intelligent enough to fill in this census form I can surely make a X on a ballot paper" across the schedule.











1911 Census of England,
 RG 14/2277/362 [Ancestry]



1911 Census of England,
RG 14/152 [Ancestry]
So, if you have been looking for a female family member and she is mysteriously missing from the 1911 Census of England and Wales, perhaps she too made a stand and boycotted.

Auckland Libraries has recently added two new books on the subject to the collection and there are borrowable copies.



Women and the vote : a world history by Jad Adams, 2014.

Vanishing for the vote : suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the census by Jill Liddington, 2014.

Karen
Central Auckland Research Centre

Treasure Chest Thursday: Huguenots

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Do you have Huguenot ancestors? 

Yes? Then you will be interested to know that we added these new 
CD-ROMS to the family history collection this week. 

1 GEN REL HUG    Huguenot Families Numbers One to Twenty
4 ENG REL HUG   Consistory and Administrative Records c. 1560-1660
4 ENG REL HUG    Reg. of the French Church of Threadneedle St, London
4 ENG REL HUG    Reg. of the French Churches of La Patente & Saint Jean, Spitalfields
4 ENG REL HUG    Reg. of the French Churches of the Cities of London &  Westminster & of Spitalfields

4 ENG REL HUG    Reg. of the Walloon & Huguenot Churches of Canterbury, Bristol, Plymouth, Southampton & Stonehouse
4 ENG REL HUG    Reg. of the Walloon & Huguenot Churches of Norwich, Colchester, Thorney & Thorpe-le-Soken
4 IRL REL HUG      Reg. of the French Churches in Dublin & Portarlington, Ireland
5 EUR REL HUG    Reg. of the French Churches of Guisnes, Cadzand, Dover & Le Mans
6 AAM REL HUG    Naturalizations of Foreign Protestants in the American Colonies

To find more resources in the family history collection, type the word 'Huguenot' in the subject search box of the Classic Catalogue and limit the search to 'Heritage & Research' in the drop down menu.

Good luck with your search!

The Family History Team