Canada, Military, Court, Legal, Maps, School, and Voter Records in Archives - International Institute

Military Records
Records of a military nature are all at Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Twentieth century records concerning individuals are remarkably informative. The South African War files (from Great Britain) are on microfilm; the World War I files can be requested through the mail. Researchers can find the person’s regimental number (which is required to obtain the file) on a searchable database. This database includes images of the attestation papers which generally include sufficient information to confirm the correct soldier has been found. LAC personnel are also helpful in determining which John Smith is the one researchers need, even if the regimental number is not known.

A great deal of personal information is included in the enlistment paper, and the service file details every move made by the soldier. A copy of the complete service file may be ordered from LAC. In 2010 LAC began digitizing the contents of the files. If the soldier’s file in which you are interested has not yet been scanned, you can order photocopies or scanned images. The cost is the same. When a digital copy is requested, the complete file will be scanned and the digital images will be added to the database and made available to other interested researchers.

World War II, Korean War and subsequent peacetime records are not available except for those who died in service during the Second World War between 1939 and 1946. The online searchable database is available.

In the nineteenth century, military records in Canada were British. LAC has a great many of these on microfilm. There is a detailed list on the website. Medal registers for various campaigns and the South African War papers are indexed; information can be requested in writing.

Before visiting the archives, researchers should examine the LAC website carefully and determine what could be done by searching a database or viewing the microfilm at a home library.

An exception is local militia lists for the nineteenth century, which have not been filmed. They will locate an individual male in a place and may provide an age. For a better idea of how these papers can be used, see Men of Upper Canada: militia nominal rolls, 1828-1829, edited and with an introduction by Bruce S. Elliott, Dan Walker, Fawne Stratford-Devai (1995). It should be clear that the archivists at LAC are of considerable assistance in using these records.

Court Records
There is such a variety of court records, all of which may be of use to genealogists, that it would be impossible to summarize their use or what might be learned from them. Researchers may begin by thinking of them in terms of the criminal courts, with their murder and burglary cases, but both civil courts, with their fascinating records, and the less glamorous cases in quarter sessions or other local courts, should probably be of more interest to family historians.

Court cases may be difficult to find. There may be indexes, especially on a volume-by-volume basis in 19th century records. It may simply be necessary to obtain the files and search through them.

Before visiting the archives, enquire from the archives about access and indexing, and ask advice about how to proceed. If you have some particular case in mind, you may well discover that the archives can access it for you and provide a copy. Once you are in the building, you may find that there is a legal specialist on staff who can provide advice on using court records also.

The archivists can direct researchers to kinds of court records, indexes and finding aids, but the work of plodding through these legal documents is up to the researcher. It may be that the reference archivist will not have the specialized knowledge required to interpret or assist the researcher beyond that.

Certainly working with court records can be very rewarding. Gems can be found, as with the researcher who found a plan of an 1890s farm, with all outbuildings carefully drawn, in the records of a rape case. The plan was to help determine whether a girl’s screams could be heard in the house from the barn, but for those who wanted to determine exactly what an ancestral farm was like, here was proof. (This was an unpleasant way to obtain the information.)

An interesting aspect of local courts was the cases of vagrancy. If there is a missing person in the family, they may simply have become a homeless person. The information about vagrants in the court records held at the Windsor, Ontario, municipal archives (at the Windsor Public Library) is interesting because it includes personal details.

A sidelight of court records is jail and criminal records. Local jail records can be used for personal details about people, including height, hair and eye colour, age and birthplace. If the jail records are held locally, the archivist probably knows them well and can direct a researcher’s use of them profitably.

If you find a court case, the next step should be to consult local newspapers for reports of the case. There may be details or discussions which were not in the official version.

Specialized Legal Documents
Being specialized, these may be anything that the local legal establishment produced. The most significant of these are the notarial records of Québec. These include marriage contracts and inventories for probate purposes. The notary was a businessman and so kept his own records, but they had legal implications also. The New France records can be located by using Inventaire des greffes des notaires du régime français, published by the Archives de la province du Québec in many volumes starting in 1942. A great many of these have been published, so before visiting the archives do a thorough search in library sources. An example of published notarial records is Index et répertoires de certains notaires, non publiés, provenant des districts judiciaires de Beauharnois, d’Iberville, de Joliette, de Richelieu, de St-Hyacinthe, de Terrebonne et de Montréal, conception et rédaction, J.-Raymond Denault; préparation des textes, T. Vallée Denault (1993?). One of the principal publishers of notarial records is Archiv-Histo in Montréal; there is also a database called Parchemin, which is explained in the section on the Archives nationales du Québec.

If you are going to consult original notarial records in an archives, you should be able to read French handwriting easily, including, for the earlier records, an archaic form of legal French.

Maps
Maps are essential to genealogy to assist us in locating ancestors but also to enlighten us regarding what their surroundings looked like. From a contemporary map we can see what roads there were, the railways, rivers (with ferries or bridges), who the neighbours were, any number of details. Consulting a map of the area where ancestors lived should be an early task for every genealogist. Those who think they know the area well should still have a look, as there may be changes they did not envision.

There may be a chance that researchers can consult a cartographic catalogue before visiting the archives, but most likely this is work that can safely be left to the visit itself. The archivist will show how maps are listed, and then it will be a simple matter to request and consult them. The hand-drawn, and perhaps hand-coloured, ones are a great deal of fun.

Fire insurance maps were commissioned by insurance companies and are exact reproductions of towns showing every building (not only houses but outbuildings also), its relation to its surroundings and what it is made of. They are often coloured also. From a fire insurance map you can see exactly what your ancestor’s house was like as to size and material of construction. These are widely available, especially in university libraries, and have been reproduced on fiche. For more information about them see Fire insurance maps: their history and applications, by Diane L. Oswald (1997).

In search of your Canadian past:the Canadian county atlas digital project is the digitization of various atlases between 1874 and 1881 in Ontario. The website provides a database that can be searched by county map or by property owners' names which appear on the township maps in the county atlases. Township maps, portraits and properties have been scanned, with links from the property owners' names in the database.

School Records
If local school records have survived, they can be useful to obtain information about children in a family. A reasonable guess about age can be made from the time they start school (you will need to find out what the habit was in that area, which the local archivist or local historian librarian can probably tell you), and the information about attendance and grades which they may contain will be useful in the family history. They also place a family in a specific school district at a time period.

The survival rate for school records has not generally been good, but they are worth looking for. Before visiting the archives, enquire about where they are. These are most likely found in local archives or even in school board archives and offices. Quite often their survival has depended on being held privately by the secretaries of small school boards or individual teachers, and then donated to archives when they were established. The archivist may be able to help in determining what school district your ancestors lived in. Keep in mind that in rural areas it might have been possible for children to go to a choice of schools, depending on how they could travel to them. Children in the same family might even attend different schools. Also, attendance was sporadic, depending on weather, farm chores and the parents’ general attitude to education.

Indian Residential Schools - Many indigenous children were separated from their families and communities to attend residential schools.

Voters Lists
Lists of those eligible to vote were often printed in small numbers and posted in public buildings around a municipality. These were not meant to have long lives, and are usually on cheap newsprint. They can be an alternate form of directory of adult males, or all adults after the advent of universal suffrage. These may be found in a library rather than an archive, although they lie on the borderline between ‘published’ and ‘unpublished’ materials. Some of these are also now available in searchable format, complete with digital images, on the Internet.

Women in Canada won the right to vote at various times in the various provinces and territories over the twentieth century. As early as 1916 women could vote in Manitoba but it wasn’t until 1960 that Aboriginal women covered by the Indian Act could vote in federal elections, meaning that at last all women in Canada had the equal right to vote. A summary chart of the applicable dates across the country is available at Parliament of Canada.

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