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The 1931 Census is now online!

June 1, 2023 – Gatineau, Quebec

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is proud and excited to offer access to the digitized 1931 Census of Canada, 92 years after it was conducted. This is the first time that LAC has provided online access to census content on the first day permitted by law. The 1931 Census data delves into where people lived, but also how they lived; it is an extremely valuable tool for genealogy and research since it captures people and their relationships, the languages they spoke and how and where they lived—whether with extended families, within their immigrant communities or in institutions and rooming houses.

The release of the 1931 Census data is taking place in two phases. Today marks the public launch of phase one, which includes 234,687 digitized images and an interface for users that allows them to browse by district and sub-district.

Phase two involves transcribing the entire census to offer an intuitive and user-friendly search experience. As soon as the fall of 2023, all users—regardless of their level of genealogical or research expertise—will be able to search the census by name or place using Census Search. To accomplish this work in record time, LAC has been working and will continue to work collaboratively with its partners Ancestry® and FamilySearch International.

Stay tuned for the latest updates via LAC’s web page Preparing the 1931 Census.

1921 Census Now Available at Library and Archives Canada

For those of you who do not have a subscription to Ancestry, there is good news. The Canada 1921 census is now available for free on the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) website.

Several years ago, LAC signed a contentious contract with Ancestry whereby in exchange for Ancestry taking the time to digitize and transcribe the Canada 1921 census (or more specifically, the microfilm of the census), Ancestry had the exclusive rights to put the census records on their subscription website for a period of four years starting in August 2013. Now, four years later, LAC has put the records on their website.

With some exceptions, national censuses in Canada are done every ten years. The Canada 1921 census was the sixth national census and it follows the one taken in 1911. One big advantage of the 1921 census is that it asks questions about the birthplace of both parents.

The 1921 census was taken on 1 June 1921. At that time, Canada had a total population count of 8,788,483 people, or about 25% of the country’s population today.

One thing to note with this collection is that the original records from the 1921 census were destroyed when the records were transferred to microfilm back in 1955. The quality of these microfilm images varies enormously, and the odd image is, unfortunately, unreadable.

These records can be searched by first name, last name, age, province and keyword. If you cannot find your ancestors by searching by name, you might want to consider scanning the images by location if you happen to know where your ancestors lived. Alternatively, try searching for your ancestors by alternative name spellings (the Ancestry translation was not always the best). See the LAC website for more details. Access is free.

Source: Internet Genealogy Magazine

Alberta Provincial Archives Vital Statistics Indexes Now Online

For years, the question has been asked, “When is Alberta going to get historical vital statistics online?”

The time is now! The Provincial Archives of Alberta has digitized vital statistics indexes and or registers and are now available online.

You can now browse the indexes for births to 1897, marriages to 1942, and deaths to 1966. Note that these are indexes, not the actual records. But think of the time you save by looking at these indexes from the comfort of your home, instead of travelling to an archival centre to view microfilm images. From these indexes alone, genealogists are discovering the year their ancestor was born.

Genealogists can thank blogger Shannon Switzer Cherkowski for sharing the news on her blog, Shannon’s Research Services, and for writing her guide.

Surprisingly, the provincial archives did not announce the release of this index, so thank goodness for all the bloggers who jumped on this right away!

Good luck with your research!

December 2, 2016 Weekly “Around the Web”

This week’s “around the web” has some interesting sites and information.

Find My Past

There are two new record sets at Find My Past that may help you find more information about your Scottish and Irish ancestors. Please note, however, that you do need to be subscribed to FindMyPast to search these records.

(You can search FindMyPast free at your local Family History Centre or for members of Qualicum Beach Family History Centre there is a 50% discount to subscribe to FindMyPast)

Tracing Scottish Ancestors

Find My Past has a must-read article on how to trace Scottish Ancestors. According to the statistics on their website, they have 53 million records, 38 million newspaper articles and 14 million life events for Scotland research.

https://blog.findmypast.co.uk/how-to-trace-scottish-ancestors-2104865677.html

Find My Past – Ireland, Royal Irish Constabulary Service Records 1816-1922

Learn about your ancestor’s career in the Royal Irish Constabulary with various records from the National Archives at Kew, England, including general registers, disbandment registers, nominal returns, and more.

Ireland, Royal Irish Constabulary Service Records 1816-1922

Ireland, Royal Irish Constabulary History & Directories

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Did you have family who were early settlers in the Canadian Prairie provinces?

In the 20^th century the Prairie provinces encouraged their residents to write the history of the area including biographies of pioneer families and other early settlers. As many of these books are now out of print, they are being digitized and made available for you to read online.

Alberta – Go to Alberta Local History Books and Alberta History and Genealogy Books for a list of the local history books and also check out the surname index at the bottom of the webpage to find where your ancestors may be listed.

Saskatchewan – Go to http://spldatabase.saskatoonlibrary.ca/internet/ComHisQuery.htm

Manitoba – http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/finding/localhistory/

You can also keyword search the local place name and surnames at Canada’s Local Histories Online. This is also where you will find local history books for other areas of Canada.

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Ontario’s Changing Border Since 1774

A series of colourful maps on the Archives of Ontario website shows how the borders of Ontario evolved from 1774 to 1912. Published for the Government of Ontario in 1969, these maps can help genealogists better pinpoint where their ancestors may have lived during a particular period of time.

Source Genealogy à la carte

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New Blogger on the Block – Finding your Canadian Story

Candice McDonald has started a blog, “Finding Your Canadian Story” covering the subjects of both Canadian history and genealogy. But you don’t need to only research Canadian history, it should be of interest to every genealogist and historian. Candice states that, “You really can’t have an interest in one without the other”. Take a moment to go through her first few posts to gain an idea of how helpful and interesting this site will be.

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Ten years of FamilySearch Indexing

You go online to FamilySearch. You type an ancestor’s name. You instantly find your ancestor in any number of 5.5 billion historical records in the free online database. You are elated at how easy it was as you fill in another missing piece of your family tree puzzle. That successful experience was brought to you by a phenomenon called indexing. And most likely, you were the recipient of a free gift empowered by the efforts of many online indexing volunteers. To read more and learn about the IHEART free graphic download, please click here.

That’s it for this week. Happy researching!

ScotlandsPlaces records now free to access

Major news from Scotland, in that the records collections on ScotlandsPlaces have now been made available free of charge. In the past the site hosted a mixture of records, some of which were free to access (as was the case when the site was originally launched), and others which required a subscription of £15 +VAT, i.e. £18, although transcripts of some of those records were free to access.

The sources for the collections are the National Records of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (now part of Historic Environment Scotland).

A complete list of the records available to search can be found at Genes Blog.

New Scotlands People website launched by National Records of Scotland

If you have Scottish ancestors and have never visited the ScotlandsPeople website, now may be the time to do so. ScotlandsPeople – the website which helps people search for their Scottish ancestors online, has been revamped and relaunched with a new look and a number of new features.

National Records of Scotland (NRS) operates ScotlandsPeople, which has on average 3.4m site views a year and around 1 million unique users since its launch in 2002.

As part of the most extensive upgrade to the service since 2010, for the first time users will not be charged as they formerly were to search an index relating to the birth, death and marriageregister, old parish register, and open census records. If you do not have an account with ScotlandsPeople, all you need to do is set up a free account. You will only be asked to buy/use your credits if you want to view or download a record image.

The cost to use this Scottish government website, however, has increased slightly from £7 for 30 credits to £7.50 ($13CDN, $10US) for 30 credits. Thirty credits enables customers to purchase five images at cost of £1.50 ($3CDN, $2US) per image of a document.

The new site also features an improved web design which allows customers to access ScotlandsPeople across digital devices, and an enhanced search function which allows them to locate and view records with greater ease.

Newly released Irish collections free forever at FindMyPast

irish-ancestors

Following up on my previous post in August that Findmypast planned to release four Irish record collections in September 2016, they have now announced that the newly released collection of more than three million historic Irish records will be free forever. Until this release, you could only access these records by visiting the National Archives of Ireland’s reading rooms in Dublin.

The four collections are:

Original Will Registers 1858-1920 Over 181,000 records the largest collection of surviving wills for the post-1858 period for the Republic of Ireland. The registers allow researchers to explore the pages of wills to discover where their family lived, what assets they had, if it was left to relatives, and if anyone was left out due to a family feud.

Qualification and Convert Rolls 1701 – 1845 – Lists of over 52,000 Catholics who swore loyalty to the crown or converted to Protestantism. During the harsh Penal Laws of the 18th century, Irish Catholics were restricted from owning property or running businesses. Many chose to either convert (at least legally) to the established Church or swear loyalty in front of a court in order to qualify for certain rights

Valuation Office books 1824-1856- These land and house surveys kept by the Valuation Office of Ireland contain over 2 million names. The books that make up this collection were preparatory to the Griffith’s Valuation, and provide a comprehensive assessment of the rental value of Irish lands and property from the mid-1820s to the mid-1850s. The books reveal where and when individuals rented or owned property and provide rare glimpses of life in pre-famine Ireland

Merchant Navy Crew lists 1857-1922 – These indexed lists records the details of over 832,000 men and women who served with the Merchant Navy. The original lists were extensive and provided detailed information for each crew member, where and when they were born, and their life at sea. The lists not only cover Irish sailors but also include natives of Norway, Russia, Sweden, America and Germany, to name but a few

Learn more about these collections at Findmypast.com. Once there, it’s easy to find a particular record collection by clicking on Search and scrolling down to the card catalogue, A to Z of record sets. Then enter the title of one of the new collections. Or you can just search by name and location.

New Search Tool for Canadian Find A Grave Records

There is a fairly new Find a Grave search page that makes it easy to narrow down the results when looking for Canadian gravesites and cemeteries.

Ken Lange was frustrated with searching for Canadian records and stated that “for the most part, we all love Find A Grave, and I’m sure everyone has benefited from information gleaned from the site at some point in time. However, as a Canadian, I have long been frustrated by the fact that when searching for memorials in Canada, you can’t narrow the search down even to a province… Canada is a big country, and while not at populous as the US, this still leads to unnecessary sifting through records, especially for common surnames. I don’t know if there are existing tools out there to address this problem, and I’m hoping that Ancestry will fix this sometime soon. But out of frustration a while back I took matters into my own hands and modified the Find a Grave search page for Canadian searches so that you can at least specify a province.

I don’t know if it will work with all browsers in all environments, but I’ve had it working in IE, Firefox, and Chrome.”

Follow the link below to search for Canadian gravestones and cemeteries at FindAGrave.

Find a Grave Search Page for Canadian Searches

Happy hunting!

Findmypast to release four Irish collections in September, 2016

Findmypast plans to release four Irish record collections in September, 2016 that should help many family historians further their research. According to Brian Donovan, global head of Irish Collections at Findmypast.com, the British-based online genealogy company will release the Valuation Office Field and House Books on September 15^th, 2016. These records, which contain about two million names, will allow us to go back a generation earlier than Griffith’s Valuation.

Another large collection that will interest many family historians will be the Merchant Marine Records that contain almost one million names. What is especially interesting about these records is that they provide the individual’s age, place of birth, next of kin, and their entire career. Half of the merchant marines were from Ireland and the other half were from Britain, continental Europe, and America.

Two other Irish collections planned for release are Irish Wills 1858-1922 and Catholic Qualifications and Convert Rolls. (During the 18th century, the only way for Catholics to own land, have a profession, run for office, or go to school was to go to court to convert to the established Episcopalian church.)

For anyone who is not a subscriber, Findmypast offers some Irish collections for free, such as the 1901 and 1911 censuses and Irish Catholic parish registers. They are able to do so because of their partnership with The National Archives of Ireland.

Note: One of the perks of being a member of the Qualicum Beach Family History Society is that members are entitled to a 50% discount subscription to Findmypast. Members must log in and then open the “Find My Past Membership” page for more information on receiving the discount code. Trouble logging in? Contact the webmaster for your login information.

Mocavo and Find My Past

The latest post from The Ancestry Insider follows up on the rumour that Mocavo would be making changes to their method of providing genealogy information.

“Good news for Mocavo users and—basically—all genealogists. After my story “Mocavo’s Free Forever Promise No Longer” Findmypast content marketing manager, Jim Shaughnessy, reached out with this comment:

‘All the Mocavo content either is or will shortly be published for free on Findmypast in line with our promise to Mocavo customers. All that is required to access the content will be for users to register and create a free account (just the same as was done for Mocavo)..’

Jim has since informed me:

‘I can now confirm that all US Census years are now free on Findmypast as per our Mocavo promise.’

I verified access to a couple of the census years. I logged in with the free account I created last time. I think it is entirely appropriate for them to require registration. We should expect to put some skin in the game. I didn’t have to provide a credit card number and there is no automatic conversion to a paid subscription. I was able to view complete index entries and images with no hassles. I wasn’t plagued by nag-ware. Findmypast has done a completely classy implementation.

Thank you Jim, and thank you Findmypast for this generous gift to the genealogical community. Hat’s off to you.”

Please click here for further information on the merging of Mocavo into FindMyPast.