England/Wales

Members share experience and knowledge for those researching their English/Welsh ancestors. Meetings are on the 1st Thursday of the month (September to June). Meetings start at 7:30 pm. and are held at the AGS Library at #162, 14315 – 118 Avenue, Edmonton, AB.  Contact the facilitator for more information.  Check out these useful websites: Genealogy Gophers.

A new free website, still in Beta testing, containing 40,000 digitized genealogy books with a searchable surname feature. The website does not use OCR or keyword text search but rather uses information extraction to create the searchable database. Dick Eastman recommends it very highly! www.gengophers.com England’s Immigrants. Another new free website, created as a partnership between The National Archives, York University and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the database contains 64,000 names of people known to have immigrated to England between 1330 and 1550. www.englandsimmigrants.com

Families in British India Society (FIBIS). You can search the database containing more than 1.2 million names for free or you can join the Society for access to more data. Very useful for any AGS member whose British ancestors worked and lived or even visited India between 1600 and 1947. A large component of their dataset is transcriptions of arrivals and departures from newspapers, in particular The Times of India. The database includes transcriptions of church and civil registration records, cemetery transcriptions, directories and so on.