Collecting Records

A closeup of the weathered edges of documents of all different colors. Finding the record that you need in a sea of records that you don’t need can be overwhelming, but it’s manageable. And actually, kind of fun

How I Decided Which Records to Include

While IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) hasn’t exactly been transparent about how they’re making decisions about which records are enough to make the proof, there are thousands of people who have applied and been approved, so we have some ideas about their order of preference (from strongest to weakest):

1. Birth certificate

2. Birth record (like a town register for births)

3. Baptism record (note: if you have a letter from an archive or church stating that one doesn’t exist, that’s a great thing to include so you can show you were actively searching)

And then, if it lists the place of birth or parents depending on what you’d like to prove:

4. Marriage record

5. Death record

6. Other official records such as military records, census records, court documents

If you have a certified birth record, great! If you don’t, move to the next item in the list. A guide rule of thumb is the further down the list that you need to go, the more records that you should include. In my case, here’s what my submission looked like:

G0:

1. No birth certificate

2. Birth register for the town, but didn’t list first name - INCLUDED

3. No baptism record

4. Marriage record – INCLUDED

5. Death record - INCLUDED

6. Census records – 2 Canadian census records – INCLUDED

For each generation between me and my G0, I was lucky to be able to obtain a certified birth certificate. Since they were all men who had the same name their entire lives, that was all that was necessary for them. Because I had a name change, I also included legal records to show that as well.

How to Find Records

There are many ways to get records (or prove that they don’t exist):

• Ancestry.com

  • Paid subscription

  • This is an easy-to-use website and has tons of user-generated information. Make sure to carefully review any “hints” because sometimes the information is mis-labeled or for someone that has the same name that’s not your relative

• Familysearch.org

  • Free website

  • Run by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) and has a huge amount of digital records available

• Official Canadian census records

  • Free

  • Provided by the Canadian government for census information, select records available for years up to 1926

  • https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/collection/research-help/genealogy-family-history/censuses.html

  • Note that the transcriptions are often crap and that’s how search works, so don’t get discouraged if you can’t find the person that you’re looking for. Search for other members of their family to find the right page and use wildcards to broaden the results that you’ll find: https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/collection/basics/using-collection-search.html#a2

• Provencial archives (e.g., Archives of Ontario)

  • Take a look to see if the provincial government for the record that you’re looking for has an archive. For Ontario, they’ve digitized a lot of records, but you can also request copies of records (for a cost) that haven’t been digitized yet or get help from an archivist

  • Ontario: https://www.archives.gov.on.ca

  • Note: understandably there’s been a massive increase in demand for these services (one source claimed a 3000% increase this year). That means that these requests can take months to fulfill. The archives don’t seem to work any faster for people that send multiple requests for updates while they’re waiting

• Hire a Private Researcher:

  • The Ontario Archives provides a list of private researchers that you can hire and there are lots more that you can find online: https://www.archives.gov.on.ca/get-research-help/

  • Note that these people are professionals and expect to be paid for their work. It’s not going to be cheap, and you will have to pay them for their time even if they don’t find the records that you’re looking for

• Get help from a Volunteer Researcher:
  Note: these are HIGH demand services, and these are VOLUNTEERS Please extend them kindness, consideration and gratitude. Most people applying are anxious about the process and that is not an excuse to be unkind. You’re not more deserving of their help than anyone else. The worst thing that you could do is be rude to them and cause them to stop doing this kind of work. That will hurt them, you, and a lot of people that could benefit from their help. 
  
  If you want someone who’s going to work on your timeline, you need to hire someone and expect to pay them for their work. But don’t be jerks to them either. Life is hard enough already.

• If you have a FamilySearch center nearby, there are volunteers available to help you search their records (this can be especially great if you’re new to genealogy/ancestry record searches!): https://www.familysearch.org/en/locations/centers/about

  • Note: while this is an organization that is run by a religious organization, the anecdotes that I’ve seen from people that visited reported that they were NOT even asked about their religious affiliation and not pressured to participate in any religious activities. Obviously, that’s not a guarantee, but it *seems* to be chill to Mormons and non-Mormons alike

• r/Canadiancitizenship volunteers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/wiki/index/document-search-volunteers/

Certified or Not?

There are a lot of opinions on whether you need certified copies of records and there hasn’t been a lot of guidance from the IRCC. My philosophy was this: if it was easy and relatively quick to get a certified record, I did. If I had a digitized copy of a record with a solid citation from a reputable organization that digitized it, I didn’t pursue a certified copy.

It was relatively easy, though it did take time and it was annoying, to request certified copies of birth certificates for myself, my father, and my grandfather. I was also able to get a certified copy of my great-grandfather (my G0 or G zero). I didn’t have uncertified copies of those records anyway, so I needed them regardless.

For the Canadian census records, they were literally digitizations hosted by the Canadian government, so I felt confident using those with a link to the image online without requesting a certified copy from an archive which would have taken weeks or months and cost money.

For my great-grandfather’s marriage certificate, I didn’t get a certified copy. I found the record with citation information on FamilySearch. The original copy is stored in a basement in a city hall that doesn’t do records requests for records of that age, in a state that I don’t live in and would take a significant journey to get there.

The LDS Church (who owns/runs FamilySearch) is a well-respected digital archivist. Everyone in ancestry knows about them and understands their standing in the world of genealogy. By the time that I had applied, IRCC Officers had seen thousands of applications and I would bet that a significant percentage had included records from FamilySearch. I felt confident that I could get away with a copy from a digitized image with the citation.

If this had been the ONLY record I had to show my great-grandfather’s birth location, I probably would have felt differently and would have tried to get a certified copy, but I would have applied with the digitized copy and included a note in my cover letter that I was waiting to receive a certified copy. I would not have let it delay my application.