Discover Your Canadian Roots

Most genealogy content, including most of what's in this library, assumes the reader is in Canada, looking outward and backward toward Europe for an ancestor who crossed an ocean to get here. But migration has never run in only one direction, and there's a specific, well-documented chapter of the twentieth century in which it went the other way: hundreds of thousands of Canadians left home, many of them only temporarily, and a meaningful number of them left family behind in E

It surprises a lot of first-time researchers: you're tracing an ancestor in Ontario, or the Maritimes, or even parts of the Prairies, and suddenly the record in front of you is written entirely in French. The explanation goes back to how record-keeping actually worked in much of pre-Confederation Canada. Long before most provinces had standardized civil registration, vital events were recorded by churches, and Catholic parish registers, which covered French-Canadian, Acadian,

Ask anyone who has spent real time in the archives, and they'll tell you: family history rarely unfolds the way you expect. Here are a few of the surprises that turn up often enough to be worth knowing about in advance. A name that changes more than once. Anglicization was common for immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and it didn't always happen just once. A single ancestor might appear under three or four different spellings across a lifetime of records, depen

An estimated one in ten Canadians today is descended from a British Home Child, and a great many of them have no idea. Between 1869 and the late 1930s, more than 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada through a network of charitable organizations, including well-known names like Barnardo's, the Salvation Army, and Quarrier's. The children were mostly poor, and some were genuinely orphaned, but many still had one or both living parents back in Britain who simply cou

Every family history that begins in Canada has, somewhere behind it, an ocean crossing. For most immigrants arriving between the mid-1800s and the early twentieth century, that crossing meant steerage class, the cheapest, lowest, and most crowded accommodation a ship had to offer. The term "steerage" originally referred to the lower-cost passenger accommodation on ships and likely derives from its location near the steering gear on early vessels, deep in the hull, where the r