Canada Provincial Archives - International Institute

The original content for this article was contributed by The International Institute of Genealogical Studies in June 2012. It is an excerpt from their course Canadian: Archival Centres  by Ryan Taylor. The Institute offers over 200 comprehensive genealogy courses for a fee ($).

Provincial Archives

Each of the provinces and three territories have established government archives, and all are important to genealogical researchers. Some of the archives were founded more than a century ago and have been growing ever since. Others had their beginnings as a part of the provincial library, and were only set up in their own right thirty or forty years ago. Almost all have had new buildings in recent decades to house the rapidly growing collections and the expanded services provided to the public.

Purpose of Provincial Archives

The first purpose of the provincial archives is to act as a repository for government documents and to serve the politicians and civil servants who might need the information which these documents represent. Nowadays, this also means managing the province’s records management programme.

However, to greater or lesser extents in the different provinces, the archives also act as a place where records of ‘the people’ are stored, largely because in past days there was no other place for them to go. The development of these collections has varied considerably from province to province and from time period to time period. The mandate given to the institution, its funding, the interests of the succeeding archivists and other staff, and the interests of its users will all have affected what was collected and how it was dealt with.

Examples of Information in Provincial Archives

Materials

Materials which have had a direct dealing with government departments are obvious choices for these archives, so you will find, for example, land documents in each place. Legal documents have the same status, so do wills and probate, court records and such which will also be at the provincial archives.

Vital Statistics

Vital statistics have usually been the responsibility of some other government department. It is only as these vital records become old that the question of their transfer to the provincial archives becomes a consideration. Sometimes the question of birth, death and marriage registration could have a significant effect on an archive. The realization by the government of Newfoundland that it had few resources regarding individuals and their records caused them to collect transcripts of church records from all over the colony many decades ago, to act as a vital records surrogate. These ecclesiastical transcriptions are now an important genealogical resource at the Newfoundland and Labrador archives.

Private Papers

Private papers, both personal and business archives, became of interest to provincial archives when their interests expanded to include more general historical things. All archives, by their nature, are interested in history, but the change in emphasis from political history to social history over the last decades had a great effect on the holdings of provincial archives.

As an archivist considered the importance of some particular kind of document, the archives concerned would make an effort to collect those materials. It is possible that now pressures of space and the availability of other institutions to keep the same things have led the archives to discontinue collecting in this area, or perhaps even to de-accession the holdings they have.

An example of this is the Tweedsmuir History collection at the Archives of Ontario. These very valuable local histories in scrapbook form held information available nowhere else. The fact that they were usually housed by the curator of the history on her farm created some unease when questions of accessibility and security were considered. So the Archives of Ontario instituted a microfilming programme to record the Tweedsmuirs, at least in the state they were at the time. (Tweedsmuir Histories for active chapters of the Women’s Institute are usually still growing.)

Now that there are local archives who are interested in keeping the Tweedsmuirs of defunct chapters, and a greater awareness of the active Tweedsmuirs’ value and safety, the Archives of Ontario no longer has a programme to film them. Alternatively, they might be filmed locally.

Before there were many local archives, and in some provinces where there are few local archives even now, the provincial archives were the place for personal and business archives to be placed. Thus, researchers can find in the provincial collections diaries, collections of letters, business ledgers and similar things whose value is emphatically local.

Accessing Genealogical Documents

Accessing the obvious genealogical documents will be straightforward. These include deeds, wills, whatever vital statistics materials the archives have collected, such as church records, maps and photographs. The unexpected diaries, letters or ledgers will be more difficult to find.

In practical terms, this means that researchers should be prepared to leave their preconceptions at the door when visiting a provincial archive. They should explore the finding aids, catalogues or other files which might lead them to the more obscure corners of the collections, and also depend on the archivists for advice on finding less-used materials.

Most of the archives depend heavily on microfilm of their most popular resources. In addition, they may make available microfilm copies of archival materials from elsewhere which their users require. LAC’s passenger lists, border-crossing records and, especially, census records, can be found in provincial archives from sea to sea. Many of them participate in interlibrary loan for their microfilmed materials, and these resources may also be found in the collections of the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, which may be ordered into your local FamilySearch Center.

As well as government materials, usually kept as part of a records management programme, the provincial archives will have manuscript materials in paper form, and probably a still and moving images section and a cartographic (map) section. All of these can be valuable for genealogists. It is also possible that the archives will have a library component, as published books and pamphlets can be useful adjuncts to the manuscript materials they collect. At the Saskatchewan Archives, for example, books are requested and dealt with in the same fashion as archival materials.

It is likely, especially in the larger archives, that the non-paper and map archives will be accessed in a separate reading room or by consulting specialist archivists. This may require extra time when you visit.

An effective part of some of the provincial websites is the “New at the Archives” or “What’s New?” sections. Wise researchers with interests in particular provinces will check back at the relevant website every few weeks to see what the “What’s New?” section reveals. Sometimes these announcements will contain startling or exciting news, such as when the Archives of Ontario told of the acquisition of the Hawke Papers early in 2001.

In 2012, this announcement was on the British Columbia archives website:

New genealogy database September 4, 2012 Effective 4 September, a new genealogy database linked to digitized images of many of the province’s historical birth (1854-1903), marriage (1872-1936) and death (1872-1991) registrations is available on our website. The release of the database and attached images is a collaborative project between the BC Archives, the Vital Statistics Agency and In addition to births, marriages and deaths, the database may also be used to search for baptisms (1836-1888) and colonial marriages (1859-1872). There are currently 700,000 images; new digitized images will be loaded on a regular basis.

The importance of these records is obvious: not only is there a searchable database but the images of the original records can also be accessed. These records will be much more accessible at the British Columbia archives and now researchers will know where they are.

References

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