Full-day Workshop on Quebec Family History, Saturday, April 16, 2016

From publicity@torontofamilyhistory.org:

"Registration is now open for our full-day workshop on Quebec Family History on Saturday 16 April. We hope this information will be of interest to you and your colleagues, members and patrons.

This workshop will feature three expert presenters. Gary Schroder, the long-time President of the Quebec Family History Society, will demonstrate how to access and use church and civil registers, as well as census, probate, land, tax and other records to research your Quebec ancestors. Reference archivist Denyse Beaugrand-Champagne will tell us about some of the many archival treasures that can be found at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, including judicial records and coroners’ files, as well as resources that are available online. And Ryerson University historian Dan Horner will examine the history of migration into and out of the province and the impact it has had on Quebec culture and society.

We hope you will consider joining us to spend a day exploring the history and genealogy of the people of “La Belle Province”!

Web Hosting Options

As you may know by now, our current web host and mailing list management provider, Rootsweb, experienced hardware issues in March, 2016. We were unable to email notices of our March meeting to our members, and could not gain access to our web site in order to update its content.

If we want to have reliable web hosting with more features, we may wish to consider using a paid hosting service. I currently use Sectorlink (www.sectorlink.com) and am satisfied with their service and the features they offer. The plan I would recommend, and which I use, costs $5.95 USD per month. In addition to this cost, we would also be required to register a domain name. Further, we would also be required to pay a small domain name renewal fee each year. The costs are not high, but our group is small.

(If we wish to host with a Canadian company, I would recommend using the services of blacksun.ca)

My preference would be to use the free facilities offered by Facebook. I've already set up a closed group on Facebook (it's currently inactive); the group's contents are accessible only by request. My understanding is that some folks are concerned about privacy issues, since they would be required to set up an account on Facebook. Here's an article that may give you some idea as to how thoroughly you can protect your privacy on Facebook:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-change-facebook-privacy-settings-to-go-invisible-2015-3

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about our current situation? Other options include using either Yahoo or Google groups, but I have yet to determine whether one must have a Yahoo or Google email account to participate, or view the respective content.

DNA Testing

This URL leads to a page that lists companies offering DNA testing services:

http://isogg.org/wiki/List_of_DNA_testing_companies

According to the site, "This is a list of DNA testing companies offering direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA tests for genealogy, deep ancestry and biogeographical ancestry. This list is provided for information only. Inclusion on this list does not imply recommendation or endorsement by ISOGG. ISOGG welcomes additions and corrections to this list. Please contact us with the appropriate details."

Rootsweb Hardware Issues

Unfortunately, we are unable to send out meeting notifications to our members due to hardware issues at Rootsweb. In addition, it is not possible to edit the content of our website (http://www.rootsweb.com/~onegg/) in order to update meeting details. Here is what Rootsweb has to say:

“We're currently experiencing a temporary website outage due to RootsWeb hardware failure. Rest assured, our development and web operations teams are busy working to securely restore the site as quickly as possible.

Our initial expectation is to have the site back up and running on or around March 15, 2016. We apologize for the disruption and thank-you for your patience. We will provide other updates here as we have them.”

Please check for details of our meeting via the "Meeting Announcements" menu item to the right of this post.