Another presentation I attended at the FGS Conference in Boston was presented by Sylvie Tremblay who works at the Genealogy and Personal Records Unit at the National Archives of Canada. She was acting as project officer for the Canadian Genealogy Centre at Library and Archives Canada. See image of their web site below.

Tremblay was asked about immigration records into Canada. All immigration records are held at Library and Archives Canada. There are no comprehensive nominal lists of immigrants arriving in Canada before 1865. Few lists have survived. The customs house burned and they were lost. Some between 1717-1760 and 1786 exist within French colonial records. But there are many records that provide immigration clues. Some records are found in the Justice Books when ship captains carried too many passengers on their ships and they were fined. Others should now be online. For example, she mentioned the following records in 2009 so they should be indexed and linked to their original records by now if your area of interest is Canada:

• Grosse-Ile will list 33,026 names of immigrants who were detained and held because of illness at the time of arrival into Canada.
• Canadian Naturalizations with 200,000 names
• Upper Canada Naturalizations, 32,044 names
• Montreal Emigrant Society Passage Book 2,000 names
• Indexing is on-going on over 3 million Immigrants from China and Russia

Knowing the limitations of these Canadian records prior to 1865, also requires knowing that the 1865 to 1935 immigrations did not contain individual names or files. They were lists. Does a list contain enough information that you seek?

9. Seek and Use Indexes

What did the immigration lists of Canada contain? The name, age, country of origin, occupation and intended designation was on the list. What the record could contain would be the determining factor over whether an earlier researcher wanted to take the time and expense to search such an index previously. Especially if the researcher lived in another country and wasn't sure where the records were found. What this means to you, is the realization that due to record inavailability in the past, your relatives may have stopped on a line that they could find success with today.

Immigration records are currently arranged by the port and date of arrival with the exception of some years from 1919 to 1924 when a special Form 30A was used with marvelous information about the passengers. But two million of them should now be online. Search engines act as large indexes. Learning to use them online could save so much time. But if the ancestor has a common name, you will need to have that ship name, or date of arrival to pin-point one man by the same name as another. Later in this course we will focus on the immigration records of the United States.

The Government of Canada did not keep records of people leaving the country;and there are no passenger lists of departures from Canadian ports. Prior to 1908, people could move back and forth over the border freely. After that, border lists have been microfilmed and are very helpful.

You can learn more about the Canadian collection and their limitations at the Canadian Genealogy Centre online at www.collectionscanada.ca/genealogy that would help you determine what you could best do to apply these techniques to your family immigration project.