If you wanted to acquire land in Upper Canada, there was a process or path to follow. The essential steps were the same, but depending on who you were, your particular circumstances, and where the land was situated, the path and the settler’s experience could be quite different. The key […]
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23 posts
This is the first in a series of posts about an important set of records for Crown Land research, Township Papers. Think of it as a conveniently organized gateway into the massive collection of Crown Land records at the Archives of Ontario. It may be a gateway, but it is […]
This post was written to support a presentation by the same name—and is a revised version of a post from 2014. In preparation for the talk, I’ve dug pretty deeply into records spanning 1914 to 1919 and found some really good reasons why all Ontario researchers should pay special attention […]
This is part 2 of a post written to accompany a presentation to the Durham Region Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. It will make more sense if you read part 1, in which I explain how to find young Edward Donovan’s estate file using the digitized records on FamilySearch.org. […]
I’ve written this post to accompany a presentation to the Quinte Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. I’ll be concentrating on records from Prince Edward and Hastings Counties, although much of what I have to say will apply across the province. If you have ancestors from Hastings or Prince Edward, […]
In contrast to the last couple of posts, where I’ve attempted to lead you step by step through a set of records, this time I’m writing about records that mystify me. I can’t give you a straightforward route into them, because I haven’t found one. I have used chancery court […]
In part one, we started with the 1895 death of prominent Toronto tobacconist Joab Scales and located his name in the indexes produced by the York County Surrogate Court. When we were unable to decipher the illegible grant number, we consulted the court’s register to find it. We took the […]
Most Ontario counties have published indexes to estate files for the period 1859 to 1900, and some indexes go beyond those dates. But York County is an exception to the rule. It was the most populous county, containing the City of Toronto, and the prospect of creating a modern index […]