Discover Your Canadian Roots

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

DNA testing has become one of the most powerful tools in genealogy , and one of the most misunderstood. Before you spend money on a kit, it's worth knowing exactly what these tests can confirm, what they can only suggest, and where they fall short entirely. What it's genuinely good at. A DNA test can confirm or rule out a biological relationship between two people with real precision, which is exactly why it's so useful for genealogy: it can verify that a suspected great-gran

Every researcher eventually hits this moment: a record clearly states a place of birth, marriage, or residence, and a search for that exact name today turns up nothing. The place isn't lost , it's very likely renamed, merged, split, or reorganized into a different jurisdiction since the record was created. Townships, counties, and parishes moved constantly. Canadian administrative geography has never been static. Townships were amalgamated into larger municipalities, counties

If you have an ancestor who served in the Canadian military during either World War, their service file can be one of the richest single documents in your entire research chain, but the process for getting a copy depends heavily on which war they served in and whether they survived it. First World War: open and largely digitized. Records for the roughly 600,000 Canadians who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War are open to the public without r

If your French-Canadian research has settled into a comfortable rhythm of parish baptisms, marriages, and burials, there's an entire parallel record system you may not have tapped yet, one that can reveal far more about a family's actual life than a church register ever will. What a notary actually recorded. In Quebec, notaries have registered private legal contracts from the early French colonial period (beginning in the 1620s), and for genealogical purposes, the most valuab