Canada, Records at Local Archives - International Institute

A great deal of genealogical material will be available in local archives. Most of these will have been founded in recent decades, since the centennial of Canadian Confederation in 1967 sparked an interest in local history which has never dimmed.

Local archives may stand alone or more likely will be attached to a small museum or public library. Many cities have established municipal archives which gradually developed collections to help genealogists.

These archives may also be regional rather than strictly local. For those unfamiliar with a region, it may be difficult to tell where the archives might be. Again, asking at the local public library for advice is a good idea. A good example is the regional archives in New Brunswick which offer official and private papers, genealogies, newspapers and photographs regarding the northwest of the province.

Centre de documentation et d’études madawaskayennes 165 boulevard Hébert Edmundston, New Brunswick E3V 2S8 Telephone: (506) 737- 5058

There is a growing tendency to provide archival information on a regional basis, whether as a network (which may be a searchable database or simply a conjoining of small archives in certain functions to save money) or in the form of a guidebook to a region. If there is a guidebook of this kind for your area of interest, you should buy it. A good example of this kind of manual is Guide des sources d’archives sur l’Outaouais québécois, by Danielle Arseneault, Didier Cencig, Benoît Thériault (1989).

Local archives rarely have sufficient funding to employ the staff necessary to deal with the collections they own in terms of cataloging, storing and preserving, and often operate in facilities which are antiquated or too small. Visitors who find themselves in a large and comfortable reading room in a local archives should feel lucky; those who are in cramped quarters should understand the difficulties faced by the archivists helping them.

While the larger national and provincial archives are often given collections, they also have budgets for the purchase of archives which are for sale. Local archives are not usually in the position to bid for materials of interest to them, and at any rate are often outbid by private collectors when local materials come on the market. They depend on gifts. These often come in the form of individual items (a photograph, a map) or small collections (a scrapbook or a handful of theatre programmes). These tiny collections are welcomed at local archives as they might not be in larger institutions.

In particular, local archives are likely to collect ephemera, material meant for a specific and immediate purpose, which does not often survive because no one cares enough to keep it. Broadsides (posters), election brochures, programmes for events, restaurant menus, all these are good examples of ephemera.

These items can have great value for the genealogist. If your family included a politician, then brochures from that person’s election campaign would be useful, even if only as an illustration, but they may contain biographical details unknown to you.

Broadsides can be of many different kinds. Here are two interesting examples:


 * An announcement that a particular stallion would be touring a certain area on certain days, could benefit a family historian if the horse was owned by a relative. Again, it would be interesting to know about a family connection to this sort of business, but also the broadside might provide an illustration for a published family history. These broadsides could include a picture, often fanciful, of the horse.


 * The disputed parliamentary election of 1901 in East Durham riding, Ontario resulted in a broadside detailing the bribery trial of the Conservative agent. A single example of the broadside is known to exist, but it includes lengthy accounts of the testimony of two men who accepted bribes, father and son, and other people’s testimonies involving three other members of the family. For the genealogist researching this family, the broadside is a goldmine.

The difficulties involved in using local archives are based on the precarious funding which many have to deal with. The archivist may be insufficiently trained, or may have responsibility for the archives as part of another position involving other duties. The organizing of the archives may have to take a low priority, with the result that finding aids or creation of databases may be behindhand, or done by summer students or volunteers. There may also be restricted hours. The other side of this coin is that those working extensively with local archives tend to know their collections very well. These archives are small enough that those dealing with them have an intimate knowledge of even individual items in the collection. In addition, many of these workers have been with their institutions for a long time and have encountered most historical questions about the area before. Their suggestions about how to work with research questions are invaluable.

The kinds of materials which can be found in local archives include: local newspapers (including clippings collections), municipal records, photographs, maps, church records, scrapbooks, manuscript and published genealogies, club materials, school records, local histories (again both published and manuscript, and perhaps including versions of Tweedsmuir histories), diaries, letters and other kinds of family papers, business records (including store ledgers), doctors’ records, in fact anything that town life might generate. There may also be small local indexes to these records. Most users of local archives skim the surface of these materials only, and miss much.

Even very small archives have materials which will help you, and researchers will often find that there are benefits in small institutions run by caring people for whom local resources matter in a heartfelt way. Their website may reflect this, being necessarily short but well-written, fully descriptive of the collections and the possibilities of research there. For an example of this, see the Grey Roots Archives (Grey County, Ontario) website.

It is also possible that local archives will be large, comfortable and professionally run. The City of Edmonton Archives, for instance, is housed in the former armory and has space for expansion, display and even preservation of its collections. Visitors have the same archival experience there that they would in any of the provincial archives or at LAC.

When visiting local archives it is essential to call ahead, first to determine that they will be open when you arrive, but also to be sure that what you need will be available. Discuss your research project briefly with the archivist to ensure there will be space for you, that your materials will be accessible that day and that any rules they have will be observed. In some small archives, it may be possible that the staff will do a little preliminary searching for you and have materials waiting for your arrival.

Because of the work they do with genealogists, some local archives maintain family files which include copies of work already done on the family, which they can then make available to others who arrive to search in the same material. Saint Michael’s Museum in Chatham, New Brunswick has between 300 and 400 family files for the Miramichi region, the names of which are listed on their website. If there is a really devoted genealogist, all the local data may have been sorted by family, as with the Diane Strickler collection at the archives in Maryhill, Ontario.

Many local archives are part of networks, while others will have developed their own databases, perhaps to facilitate use of certain notable parts of their collection. Often these databases will have come about through the interest of someone in a local institution (university, local government, business) with skills or needs which led them to develop the database. In the end, the searching tool is left for everyone to use and thus to benefit researchers.

For example, the annual journal of the Waterloo Historical Society in Waterloo County, Ontario, begun in 1913, was a principal source for historical data in the area. An index existed on cards at the Kitchener library, but it had the disadvantage of not being portable. A project to write a substantial local history required the use of the data, and a local academic with computer skills organized the inputting of an index of eighty years of the journal. Once the historical project was over, the database was left for use by researchers both at the public library and the local university archives.

While many of the documents in the local archives may supply the hard genealogical facts (births, marriages, deaths) that researchers require, other documents can help in filling out the personalities of people who lived in the area, and surprising details may come to light in more obscure documents. Researchers should be prepared to keep an open mind on the value of documents, lest they overlook interesting, even significant, facts.

Here is an example of municipal records which we might find in a local archive. The fonds containing the records of East Whitby township, Ontario, includes the following municipal records:

Of these, which might contain names and information of use to the family historian? The following: Board of Health, selection of jurors, assessment and collectors rolls, welfare ledger and account book, tax sale ledger, dog and poll tax ledger [the poll tax might be more useful than the dog tax], tax arrears register, direct relief register.

From the various supplemental tax materials we might find interesting sidelights about relations, and the poll tax ledger can be used as a kind of census of adult males. The welfare or ‘relief’ ledgers may inform us about the financial situation of our family, and may contain details of their condition. I have known tax arrears lists to be used to establish approximate year of death, lacking other sources.

The Board of Health may seem a strange thing to include, but in past days this board ran the various quarantine hospitals in municipalities and it may be possible to find when members of your family had smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria or similar infectious diseases. If the quarantine was simply at home, the order for it may also be included in the minutes.

Of all the various municipal records listed here, the most useful are the assessment records, which are tax lists. Because they were annual, the movement of families in and out of town can be documented using these tax lists. Some nineteenth century assessment records included the age of the man involved, so they are a possible, if remote, source for birth information. The source for the man’s age in the assessment records is probably the man himself.

The financial records may well contain names but they are so tedious to search through that the chance of finding a scrap of information may not be worthwhile given the amount of effort involved. Financial records tend to become more complex as time goes on, so early nineteenth century records may be considered more searchable than twentieth century ones.

We might also add to these possibilities voters lists and poll lists, the former often printed but also rarely surviving, and school census (lists of school age children), which tend to date from the early twentieth century.

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