Discover Your Canadian Roots

Not every migration in this collection happened generations ago. For a great many Canadian families, “how we got here” is a living memory rather than an archival record, and the arrival of Southeast Asian refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s remains one of the most significant, and most quietly transformative, chapters in recent Canadian immigration history. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the upheaval that followed across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, well over

If your family arrived in Canada any time from the late 1940s onward, there's a good chance their immigration story was shaped by one of the most significant policy shifts in Canadian history, a change that quietly transformed who was even allowed to come. The years immediately following the Second World War brought a wave of displaced persons and refugees from a shattered Europe, followed through the 1950s and into the 1960s by major immigration from Italy, Greece, Portugal,

Not every population movement in Canadian history was about immigration at all. Between 1914 and 1945, the two world wars and the Depression sandwiched between them disrupted, redirected, and in some cases forcibly relocated Canadian populations in ways that left a very real mark on the historical record. International immigration to Canada slowed dramatically during both world wars, as transatlantic travel became dangerous and countries turned their attention and resources t

In May 1914, a ship carrying 376 passengers, 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, nearly all from Punjab and all British subjects, sailed into Vancouver's harbour expecting to be admitted to Canada as a matter of imperial right. They spent the next two months anchored just offshore and were ultimately forced to leave almost as they'd arrived, in a confrontation that remains one of the starkest examples of racially targeted exclusion in Canadian immigration history. By the ea

Few chapters of Canadian immigration history are as well-documented, or as deliberately punitive, as the decades Chinese immigrants spent facing a tax that no other group in Canadian history was ever required to pay simply for arriving. Between roughly 1880 and 1885, as many as 17,000 Chinese labourers came to Canada to work on the western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway, performing some of the most dangerous work in its construction, the death toll from accidents, di

If your family tree suddenly sprouts a homestead in Saskatchewan or Manitoba around the turn of the twentieth century, there's a good chance you have one man's advertising campaign to thank for it. In 1896, fewer than 17,000 immigrants arrived in Canada in a given year. By 1914, that number had climbed past 400,000. The engine behind that shift was Clifford Sifton, appointed Minister of the Interior that same year, who believed the Canadian Prairies could become the nation's

Most immigration stories have a clear shape: someone leaves, crosses an ocean, and settles somewhere new for good. The Quebec-to-New England migration doesn't fit that shape at all, and understanding exactly how it was different is often the key to finding a French-Canadian family that seems to blink in and out of existence on both sides of the border. A border, not an ocean For a French-Canadian family in the Eastern Townships or the Richelieu Valley, New England wasn't a di

If you've ever traced a family confidently through Canadian records, only to have them vanish the moment they seem to have crossed into the United States, or the other way around, you're not doing anything wrong. For most of Canadian and American history, the border between the two countries simply wasn't the kind of place that generated much paperwork. Knowing when that changed, and exactly what got recorded once it did, is often the difference between a permanent dead end a

If a French-Canadian family disappears from Quebec parish records sometime in the second half of the 1800s, there's a very good chance they didn't go far, they just crossed an international border most of us don't think of as a historical migration route at all. Between roughly 1840 and 1930, roughly 900,000 to one million French-speaking Quebecers left the province for New England, in one of the largest and least-remembered migrations in Canadian history. The pull was almost

Few single years left as deep a mark on Canadian immigration history as 1847, a year Irish immigrants themselves came to call “Black '47.” The Great Famine, caused by repeated failures of Ireland's potato crop beginning in 1845, forced hundreds of thousands of desperate families to flee the country in search of survival. A significant share of them sailed for Quebec, arriving at Grosse Île, a small quarantine island in the St. Lawrence River roughly 48 kilometres downstream f

Canadian genealogy already tells the story of the Loyalist migration of 1783, but that story looks very different depending on which Loyalists you're following. Alongside the roughly 40,000 to 50,000 white Loyalists who resettled in British North America after the American Revolution, between 3,000 and 3,500 Black Loyalists made the same journey, and their experience once they arrived was fundamentally different. Most Black Loyalists had been enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies

For a great many English-speaking Canadian families, the family story doesn't start in Canada at all, it starts in the newly independent United States, with an ancestor who chose the losing side. After the American Revolution ended in 1783, an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Loyalists, including Black Loyalists, Indigenous allies, and German-speaking Loyalists, left the new United States rather than remain there. Some left because they feared retaliation; others lost property to c

Not every migration in Canadian history was a choice. For thousands of Acadian families, the defining event in their history wasn't a decision to leave home, it was being forced out of it at gunpoint. The Acadians were French-speaking settlers who had lived in what's now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island since the early 1600s, developing distinct farming communities built around dikes and tidal marshland agriculture. Their troubles began after Britain gaine

If your family tree traces back to French-Canadian roots, there's a real chance your line runs through one of several hundred young women who never intended to become the ancestors of millions. French colonization of what's now Quebec and the Maritimes began in the early 1600s, but for its first several decades, New France had a serious population problem: far more men than women, and almost no path to building the stable, family-based settlements the French Crown wanted. The