Valuable slice of Newfoundland history
The Maritime History Archive has published a new CD titled Births, Deaths and Marriages in Newfoundland Newspapers, 1810-1890. It is the culmination of Gertrude Crosbie’s great work to preserve the Newfoundland genealogical record.

A fascination with Newfoundland history and a personal friendship with the late Dr. Keith Matthews, led Ms. Crosbie to the Maritime History Archive in the mid 1970s. Sparked by interest in her ancestors, she embarked on a 25-year volunteer research project, in collaboration with the MHA, to record the birth, death and marriage announcements in Newfoundland’s 19th century newspapers.

Ms. Crosbie worked through the Newfoundland newspapers covering the years 1825-1890, extracting birth, death and marriage information, and transcribing each entry onto an index card. In 1999, the MHA began an ambitious project to transfer the entries to an interactive database for publication in CD format. As part of the project, the MHA also collected and entered relevant information from Newfoundland’s earliest surviving newspapers, 1810 1824. The CD contains more than 40,000 entries for births, deaths and marriages transcribed from 44 Newfoundland newspapers published between 1810 and 1890.

Ms. Crosbie was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Memorial in 1997. She passed away earlier this year.

Births, Deaths and Marriages is available – $49.95 per CD – from the Maritime History Archive, Memorial University, St. John's, A1C 5S7, 709-737-8428, mha@mun.ca.

Mathematicians come to summer school
Memorial is again home to the summer school of the Atlantic Association for Research in the Mathematical Sciences (AARMS). From over 100 applications and expressions of interest, 35 (mostly graduate) students have accepted an invitation to participate in the third annual school, which runs until Aug. 6. Students from Austria, Croatia, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, California and six Canadian provinces from Newfoundland to B.C. are taking two graduate courses intensely delivered over a period of four weeks.

The courses offered include number theoretic cryptology, statistical genomics and mathematical biology.

The goals of the AARMS Summer School, modelled after a school in Perugia, Italy, now in its 34th year, and initiated by Edgar Goodaire, the current director from Memorial’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, are to provide young researchers with basic training in mathematics and its applications, to encourage strong undergraduates to continue their studies at the graduate level, to attract bright minds to Atlantic Canada and to raise the profile of mathematics and mathematical research in this region.

Board to meet in central
Memorial University's governing board is meeting in Grand Falls-Windsor this week. A group of 27 community volunteers and university administrators, the Board of Regents is vested with the responsibility for the management, administration and business affairs of the university.

Over the past few years the board has held its July planning meeting in various locations around the province, focusing on some special topics and meeting with community leaders, alumni and friends of the university. “Aside from dealing with regular agenda matters, we also take some extended time to discuss special issues in more detail than we are able to during the rest of the year,” says Dr. Axel Meisen, Memorial's president and an ex officio member of the board.

“We also value these occasions as opportunities to interact with members of the community and hear about their views about the university and our plans – something that is vital to us as our province’s only university,” added Dr. Georgina Hedges, acting chair of the Board of Regents. “Last year's meeting in St. Anthony proved to be extremely valuable in terms of our sharing news about the university and then hearing about the issues facing the people in that region .”

The board meeting in Grand Falls-Windsor runs July 21-23. Dr. Hedges and Grand Falls-Windsor Mayor Walwyn Blackmore will co-host a dinner for community leaders on July 22. Special guests at that event will include Major Vyvyan Harmsworth, who is a trustee on the Rothermere Fellowship Trust, and Alexandra Harmsworth. Each year the trust awards a prestigious fellowship valued at $27,000 to a Memorial University graduate pursuing graduate studies in the UK. Major Harmsworth is a descendent of the family which founded the pulp and paper mill in Grand Falls-Windsor.