Missing Friends – Ada, Frances, Tom and Harry Saggers

Local newspapers used to feature “Missing Friends” columns often. This one was from the Vancouver Sun, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 14 December 1930, on page 22 – The “Page of Old Country News”.

SAGGERS (Ada, Frances, Tom and Harry) believed to be living in Crisp Street, Limehouse, London. Inquirer niece Miss Ella Saggers, 30 Monkton Terrace, Jarmy [Jarrow?], Co, Durham.

Vancouver Sun, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 14 December 1930 – The “Page of Old Country News”, page 22.

Surnames of those searched for and those searching are: Basterifield / Ludford; Hendon / Button; Hudson / Allen; McVeigh; Russell / Panks; Saggers; Sharpley; Wilde or Smith / Powell. Google News, digitized historical newspapers, link to this article: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=tyxlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=uYgNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6458%2C1788584

Currently, June 2020, MyHeritage.com is opening up one of its genealogy collections free each day. There are two Canadian ones to come:

Canada Newspapers, 1752-2007, free on June 15, and

1921 Canada Census, free on June 16.

I couldn’t wait, so off to MyHeritage to see what I could find. With a free search, I found an interesting sounding Saggers result which told me the article was from the Vancouver Sun and gave the date. I did go to Newspapers.com which has the Vancouver Sun indexed and searchable, but no result came up.

However, I remembered that, years ago now, Google experimented with digitizing newspapers including some Vancouver Suns. It’s easy to find a newspaper by date if it was included. And there it was! No problem for me to go through the pages and find the article. (Of course, I like to read all or almost all the pages anyway. Great Christmas ads!)

I wonder if these are the newspapers included in MyHeritage’s collections? If so, bravo! as Google’s search for those papers is not that useful.

The 1921 Canadian census is available free too with page images at both Library and Archives Canada and Ancestry (register to search). But I have often said that if one search is good, two or three are better! Indexing is a difficult job; errors seem inevitable, so knowing there are other databases or indexes available can be very helpful.

Randy Seaver, at GeneaMusings, has a list of all the MyHeritage collections to be offered for free this month with the dates. It’s worth a close look.

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