Canada, Some Other Information Found in Birth, Marriage, and Death Records - International Institute

Birth certificates can offer exact birthplaces (down to street address), name variations, and who came to register the birth.

Marriage certificates may give us residences, ages, parents’ names, occupations, names of witnesses.

Death certificates can be a cornucopia of extra information about a person’s background and early life, depending on who the informant is. A book about American death certificates, How to get the most out of death certificates, by Carolyn Earle Billingsley and Desmond Walls Allen (1991), has a good discussion of the possibilities, which apply equally to Canadian death certificates.

Of these extra bits of information, the identities of the informants and the wedding witnesses are most often omitted from indexes and ignored in transcriptions. And yet, the person entrusted with the registration of vital records is clearly a trusted friend if not a member of the family. Those chosen to ‘stand up with’ the bride and groom at a wedding are usually close friends or relatives. This writer was once able to identify the married names of four sisters by using the witnesses at their children’s weddings as clues.

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