Province Just Says No

New Brunswick won't allow Sharon (Weed) Thorne to put her maiden name on a license plate.

Sharon Thorne has even brought officials a copy of her birth certificate, but they still refuse to allow her to attach a tag that says "WEED" to her beloved 2001 Mustang convertible.

"I am not promoting drug use," she complained this week. "I do not smoke marijuana, have never inhaled it even once, don't sell it, am adamantly against it and have no criminal record.

"I have always been proud my name was unique, and thought people would see the plate and realize they went to school with me, or knew my parents or something. It was meant to be a fun thing, but has turned into something really annoying." [Link]

Cherchez les French-Canadian Ancestors

I am very pleased that The Drouin Collection of (mostly) French-Canadian vital records is now indexed and searchable. My Ancestry.com subscription runs out on Friday, which means that I'll have to put off sleeping, eating and bathing until the weekend.

Find French Forebears For Free

The Drouin Collection will be free to view at Ancestry.com through the end of March.

The Drouin Collection represents the largest and most valuable French-Canadian family history resources available, including an impressive collection of Quebec vital records. The collection ranges from the beginning of European settlement to the 1940s, including the nearly 12 million records which marked the history of Quebec families over three centuries.

There's no name index, so you'd better have your high-school French teacher on speed dial. I was able to find the marriage record of my 3rd-great-grandparents Martial Laplante and Marie Parent in Van Buren, Maine, in about three minutes—but only because I already knew it was there.

Canadian Clippings

I've just learned from The Internet Guy that the New Brunswick Provincial Archives has added Daniel F. Johnson's New Brunswick Newspaper Vital Statistics to its website.

As someone who has thumbed through the 102 volumes of this collection at the Maine State Library, I know what a huge boon this will be to genealogists with roots in the Maritimes. What's most remarkable about the collection—aside from the fact that the compiler is, like me, a native of Maine—is that it was mostly a one-man project.

Danny worked persistently and comprehensively mining all English-language New Brunswick newspapers available in original form or on microfilm. He copied out notices of births, marriages, deaths, and also of ship wrecks, trips outside the province and many other events, all containing names that would further the search for an ancestor. The work is remarkably accurate although as Danny was not a strict proof reader, preferring to use his time to push ahead with indexing and transcribing, occasional typographical errors crept in. Danny sold many copies of the Vital Statistics volumes to libraries, historical societies and individuals over the years and maintained a list of on-going subscribers.

Danny kept the extracted information in a database to which he later added a search capability enabling him to provide a service to researchers who did not have access to the published volumes. In celebration of the first 100 volumes of Vital Statistics, he produced a CD index of the entire series. It is hard to convey what a monumental undertaking the vital statistics project was and what a unique and invaluable benefit it is to research. [Link]