Canada, Land, Tax, and Immigration Records in Archives - International Institute

Land Records
These are undoubtedly the most complicated of all records held in archives and used by genealogists. The legalities of how land was divided, obtained and recorded differ not only from province to province but from time period to time period. There are books and articles to help with aspects of land records in the various provinces. An overview for the prairies can be found in A genealogical guide to finding farms on the Canadian Prairies, by Dave Obee (2001). However, most researchers will find that a detailed knowledge will be required of them once they begin working with these records. They would be advised to prepare well and then allow plenty of time for the initial research in this area. The terminology used in land documents also differs among the provinces, so a glossary may be required.

Before you visit the archives, determine if there are indexes (paper, microfiche or online) which will help. These may have been made available by the archives, a genealogical society or interested individual. On the prairies, there is a nominal index to homestead records before 1930 at Alberta Genealogical Society, for example, and a similar land grant index on microfiche and computerized database in Ontario. In New Brunswick there is a searchable online land grant database, a University of New Brunswick site also accessible from the New Brunswick archives’ site.

If you know the location of your ancestor’s land, be sure you have the legal description and take it with you. If you do not, determine as near as possible where it was as you will need some sort of starting point, if only the nearest town or post office, which can be obtained from a directory. Directories are essential to this work; all archives have some local directories in their library section. The extensive collection of directories at the National Library is listed in Mary Bond’s Canadian directories, 1790-1987: a bibliography and place-name index (1989), the index of which contains 23,000 entries.

From land grants, deeds and similar land records, we can learn when people came to a certain area and, from later sales, when they left. Of course, getting a land grant did not mean people were actually on the land, and sales of property are equally ambiguous. However, they can help.

An interesting aspect of land records is that the transfer of land, in the absence of any other kind of death record, can provide an approximate death date.

Here is an example. Robert Hawthorn lived in Durham County, Ontario, appearing in the 1871 census with his wife, son and one daughter, and having another son in 1872. His wife is in the 1881 census as a widow. There is no death certificate, no will, no newspaper announcement, no known place of burial, no church record.

However, there is a land document, dated in the fall of 1878, in which his son William assumes ownership of the family farm after the death of his father. No date of death is stated. To accomplish the change, he is required to come to an arrangement regarding his stepmother’s dower rights. He must offer her board and lodging for the rest of her life, or, barring that, provide her with an allowance of $5 a year. (The family was very poor.) The rights of his siblings had also to be considered, and his three sisters, all of full age, signed away their interests in the farm, and a guardian signed away the rights of his minor half-brother. We can thus date Robert Hawthorn’s death to 1878, without an exact month or day.

Because land documents are so difficult, the archivist can be expected to provide considerable direction in how to locate the ones that are needed, and also advice on how to use them. Because they work with them constantly, the archivists in any given institution will know their own land records thoroughly, so researchers would be advised to follow their directions carefully.

Archives’ websites may provide detailed descriptions or instructions on how to deal with land records. The Saskatchewan archives site has a concise and thorough description of a homestead record and what it contains.

Archives will probably have only the oldest land records. More recent ones will still be in the offices of the relevant government department, which may be called Land Titles Office or Land Registry Offices or something similar. Accessing materials at these government offices is very different from using an historical archives.

Land records are usually massive in nature, with many piles of documents for each plot or piece going back centuries. Archives may find the management of these documents oppressive and some rearrangements may have happened. The best example of this is the attempt by the Archives of Ontario to recoup some empty space by de-accessioning some land records.

The first step in this process was to remove the huge copybooks (which contained copies of deeds) and redistribute them throughout the province, largely in university archives.

A suggestion that the original post-Confederation paper documents would be disposed of entirely (because they were also on microfilm) caused an outcry in the genealogical and historical worlds, and a revolutionary body called APOLROD came into being to deal with the crisis. It has accomplished a great deal in the way of listing the relevant documents and attempting to find alternate homes for them.

These events provide good examples of how pressured archives can be by the quantity of documents they are obliged to house, of the public’s view of their responsibilities (few of those outside government were willing to concede that the Archives of Ontario should actually dispose of the original records), of the archives’ response to public opinion and of the large community of interested people who were prepared to work voluntarily to assist the archives in overcoming the problem.

If your ancestor was not a landowner, there may still be land documents which will help. Tax records (see below) are one, and rent books are another. The Prince Edward Island archives have rent books which can be used to supply the same kind of information (people in a specific place at a specific time) as ownership records.

Tax Records
The most common kind of tax records are assessments, which determine the value of a property and hence the amount of municipal taxes to be paid. Some early examples of these, in Ontario for instance, also contain head-of-family census information.

Tax records can be used to place a family or person in a particular place at a particular time. They are more reliable than deeds for this purpose, although it was still possible for someone to own land, and so be liable for taxes, after they had moved on somewhere else. Most people would not have had the funds to do this.

Before visiting the archives, the researcher will need to have a close idea what municipality the relative lived in, and when. Because of their bulk, many tax records have not been filmed, so the researcher should determine where they are and what access is available. They may need to be requested from offsite storage.

Using tax records is usually fairly simple, since the information they contain is a description of the property concerned and financial details. Thus, the archivist should only need to provide directional information about how to find them, although there may be differences in format or terminology which require explanation.

One detail sometimes available in assessment records is the age of the person involved. This is a little-known source for a birth year.

Other kinds of tax records may exist, including lists of men with responsibilities for working on the roads in pioneer days (this was a form of taxation). An interesting example is the poll tax, described by Terrence Punch in Genealogical research in Nova Scotia (1998) as “a virtual directory of adult men in a district.” He provides a list of surviving poll tax records in the province as well as a discussion of their use.

Immigration and Naturalization Records
Ships’ passenger lists are much loved by beginning genealogists, although they are difficult to use and research in them is perhaps the least rewarding of all genealogical activities.

Most passenger lists are at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), but films, particularly for 1865-1919, are available widely in provincial archives and large libraries. A good short discussion of their history and use, and a list of some published versions, can be found in Angus Baxter’s In search of your Canadian roots (2000). The microfilms are also available on interlibrary loan. Detailed lists of what ports are available, what libraries and archives have copies of the microfilm, and what searchable databases are available (and whether they are searchable by passenger name or include digitized images) can be found on the LAC website. Online indexes, transcriptions and digital images are also now available, searchable by passenger name, for immigration and ships’ lists on pay-to-view websites. You will need to decide if these are worth searching before spending hours searching the microfilms of the original records.

Before going to the archives the researcher should search any available relevant database and try to narrow down the time of arrival and port of arrival as much as possible. (This is usually the very information the genealogist wants to know.) The archivist can supply directions to the films, but little other assistance, except perhaps a comfortable chair for the long hours of searching ahead.

If you are fortunate enough to find someone on a passenger list, it will state name, port of embarkation and date of arrival in Canada, indicate who the person was traveling with (if anyone), and perhaps age. Place of origin may be given.

Border crossing lists from the United States exist for 1908-1935. The 1908-1918 lists (St. Albans, Vermont is the label, but an extensive chunk of Canada was included) are available widely on microfilm. As well, a searchable index and digital images are available online, albeit on pay-to-view website. The 1925-1935 materials for surnames starting with ‘C’ are in an Immigration Records (1925-1935) database on the LAC website; for other surnames, staff will undertake searches in the indexes, if sufficient identifying details, including year of entry, are provided.

Naturalization records for Upper Canada (Ontario) 1828-1850 are at LAC and have been published by the Ontario Genealogical Society. The registers have been digitized and are available online. Only people coming from non-British territories (including the United States) needed to become naturalized. Original records 1854-1917 have been destroyed but a card index survives with considerable information on the cards. Post-1917 records are very informative. 1915 – 1936 naturalization records are searchable by name and those from 1936 – 1951 are searchable by date. All the 1854 onward records are kept at Citizenship and Immigration Canada and are not in an archive.

The 1828-1850 records will supply the date of arrival in Canada, and the first place of settlement as well as the place of residence at the time of naturalization. In some cases, the date of arrival is exact down to the day. Ages are occasionally given.

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