Canada, Special Collections (National Institute)

Special Collections
Every area has some specialized topics of particular interest, such as fishing in Newfoundland or mining in Rouyn-Noranda. If your family was connected with these activities, you should ask the archivist about fonds in their institution which might interest you. Since there is usually some local pride in these materials, there may be a brochure about them.

Newspapers
Every area has a newspaper, and the information in them can include every family who lived there. Most commonly, there will be death notices, but marriages and births are also possible. Social notices are a vast untapped resource for many families, including that most tantalizing of searches, finding the lost sheep.

Both libraries and archives have newspapers, with the originals in archives being largely unavailable because of their fragility. Using original newspapers is very difficult for this reason, as well as being time consuming and dusty.

Microfilms are very often available through interloan. Before visiting the archives or embarking on an extensive newspaper search, make enquiries locally about indexes. These may be on cards (if they are old), in published form, or on a database. Some published ones may be on microfiche. Consult them before searching.

The most valuable of these reproduce the whole newspaper item. Those which provide a KWIC (keyword in context) index are also good. The indexes which are only names and page numbers require some patience to use, since you must do the whole search to determine the worth of the item.

There are a number of series of newspaper indexes or extractions worth mentioning. The Genealogical Association of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society (forerunner of the Nova Scotia Genealogical Association) published several volumes of Nova Scotia/Halifax extractions covering the first half of the nineteenth century. There is a series, Vital statistics from New Brunswick newspapers, by Dan Johnson, which starts with 1784 (published 1985) and continues to 1896. This is currently searchable by name and keyword online at the above link.

For Ontario, large number of nineteenth century newspapers have been extracted and published by Bur-Mor of Stratford.

Library and Archives Canada also has an index to newspapers they hold on microfilm, organized by province or title. Many, or indeed most, of the microfilms are available by interlibrary loan.

If there is no index, then more searching is required. The only danger here is that reading old newspapers is so fascinating that it takes a great deal longer than anticipated to get very far!

Ask the archivist in a local archives about the newspaper history. If your family lived in a rural area, ask for advice about what newspaper they may have read. The answer may be surprising, not from the obvious nearby town but somewhere a little farther away because of transportation considerations, or politics.

A growing number of newspapers can be found online in a digitized format, which eliminates the necessity of obtaining microfilm. Also, the digitized versions are usually searchable, so finding things can be much quicker; it is simply a matter of searching and then printing the results. Larger newspapers may be digitizing their own back issues. The Olive Tree Genealogy website has links to searchable extracted indexes from Ontario newspapers organized by county.

The trick about doing searches in online resources of digitized newspapers is choosing the search term/s. If the family name which interests you is ‘Hartree’ then you’re in luck; if you are searching for ‘Smith’ or ‘Black’, not so much. Of course you can use the person’s full name, but chances are there are a large number of family members you want to search for. It’s a dilemma. In the end, searching in digitized newspapers is quick and easy, but may also be time-consuming because of the number of searches you must do to be sure that all bases have been covered.

Since the digitization of any given newspaper title may be done far from its place of origin, researchers should not make any assumptions about what sites will yield digitized newspapers. Wide-ranging searches are necessary to determine what titles have been digitized.

Religious newspapers were of great importance and should not be neglected. An important religious newspaper index for Nova Scotia is The Presbyterian witness, and evangelical advocate: vital statistics, compiled by J. and S. McCormick (2000) which covers sixty years in eight volumes. Donald McKenzie of Ottawa has published several volumes of Methodist obituaries for Ontario covering most of the nineteenth century.

Diaries, Letters and Personal Papers
These records are at the same time the most difficult and the most rewarding. Simply locating an archival collection which concerns your geographical area of interest can be very difficult. While a diary may have been written in one place, a century later it may have been carried far away by the diarist’s descendant. That person, if moved to donate it to an archive, may well choose to place it in an institution near where they live. Thus we have the anomalous situation that the diary of Victoria Campion, written in the 1860s in Hastings County, Ontario and concerned entirely with that area, is in the Glenbow Archives in Calgary, placed there by Victoria’s granddaughter. (Fortunately there is a typescript copy at Upper Canada Village, especially as Victoria’s handwriting is atrocious.)

Letters are even more likely to be found far afield, as they were written to be sent away. A cache of letters from a single village will be bound to illuminate a family history from that village in some way.

It may be possible to consult with the archivist about holdings of personal papers, but chances are researchers will have to go through lists of fonds or finding aids, looking at the scope and contents notes to see if the geographical area concerned suits them.

Once a diary has been found, there is the pleasure of reading it. This very intimate glimpse into someone else’s life has a great thrill.

Some genealogists will only look for diaries written by family members, but this is an error. Anyone writing in the neighbourhood may well mention your relations, and the diary entry will add to your family history. It might even be a hard fact concerning a birth or death, but more likely it will be an observation that illuminates a personality. Consider this entry, written by a young woman whose house was near the church where a funeral was being held:


 * Mrs. Ross’ funeral sermon is this morning. the service must be nearly through as it is now half past eleven—a number of cutters have passed by but I do not think it is quite through as the bell would surely toll if it were. What a number of mourners there will be—Mrs. R had so many cousins. Already some have mentioned the Widow Suffield as a probable Successor, but I must say his former conduct gave rise to talk and I presume people think he will court in haste again.

What a treasure for relations of Mrs. Ross, or Mr. Ross, or indeed even Mrs. Suffield!

Finding these gems in personal papers requires time and patience, but there is a great deal of fun in reading these materials and glimpsing past lives as we do so. As these materials become available online or on microfilm, it is easier to consult them at leisure in our home libraries, or at home on the Internet.

Other Non-Paper Archival Materials
The most obvious of these is the photograph, of which archives own many thousands. Access depends on the cataloguing, which may be very good. In smaller archives, depend on the archivist, who probably knows the collection upside down.

Many photographic collections are being digitized for display on websites, which is an easy way for researchers to find useful images. When using databases for searching, be as creative as possible and try as many terms and forms of terms as you can.

Sound archives may contain tapes which will be helpful, most often oral histories. In some places there are extensive oral history projects, such as the Alberta archives, who published a survey of pre-1980 accomplishments, Voices of Alberta, by Jean E. Dryden (1981). A source for finding these is Guide to oral history collections in Canada=Guide des fonds d’histoire orale au Canada, compiled by Normand Fortier (1993).

Oral histories of this kind are often local in nature and provide information not available in printed sources. In addition there can be oral family histories, such as those for the Nunavik area which are published in the Avataq Cultural Institute’s periodical Tumivut. These are originally from an archival collection.