Deathbed Wills
Deathbed wills are documents that were dictated orally by a testator who was in imminent peril of death, who did not expect to make it through the night, who did not hope to see another day. There is a more…
Continue reading →Death and Burial
“Did an operation precede death”? (Ontario civil death records)
Death records often supply interesting (and occasionally rather gruesome) details about an ancestor’s cause of death. And while the information found in early Ontario civil death records is often a bit scanty, once we get into the twentieth century, the…
Continue reading →“Now comes Thos. L. Ryan…”
Where did Michael James McGlade Reside? Sometimes you can’t find a person, no matter how carefully and thoroughly you look. And sometimes you find the same person at more than one address (and in more than one census return) at…
Continue reading →Obituary for Thomas and Alexander Moran
While it may seem a glaringly obvious point, it’s a point worth keeping in mind when you discover an ancestor’s obituary. That obituary or death notice1 that you discovered for your ancestor didn’t just write itself. Somebody had to write…
Continue reading →Cause of Death: Pulmonary tuberculosis
I’ve written about tuberculosis before. See, for example, Tuberculosis in Ontario; and also see a list of those who Died of Tuberculosis in the Ottawa Valley Irish database. Here’s a family that was hit hard by the scourge of tuberculosis…
Continue reading →The hazards of early settler life
As I’ve mentioned before, 19th-century Roman Catholic burial records did not generally record a cause of death for the deceased, but there were exceptions to this general rule. In cases where a death was considered unusually tragic, dramatic, or violent,…
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