Seven Sources for Seeking Scoundrels

You loved her last webinar on this topic and requested six more! In this webinar, Janice will introduce you to her next favourite online sources for Ontario family history.

What if I told you there was an easy way to identify every published book, article or essay, and every unpublished manuscript pertaining to your ancestor’s home town, or occupation, or religious group? Would you be interested? Of course you would. But very few genealogists ever use it. The answer: Academic Theses. This mini-class will show you how to find academic theses that will turbo-charge your family history research.

Did you know that the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives is the largest private archives in the world? Let me show you one very special resource this archive has made available online: the Biographical Information Sheet. These goldmines provide a window into the HBCA’s records pertaining to 1000s of historical employees.

If you watch TV, you might be forgiven for thinking that you need to pay hefty subscription fees to big genealogy companies to research your ancestors. But some of my most exciting finds were found on six free websites. In this webinar I will introduce you to my favourite online sources for Ontario family history.

When it comes time to write the stories of your ancestors' lives, whether you want to write a blog post or a book, you are going to want more than names, places and dates. These lists of facts make for boring reading. This lecture will reveal Janice's secret method to uncovering hidden episodes of our ancestors’ lives that bring their stories to life.

Names are a genealogist’s bread and butter. But how do you find your ancestors when they didn’t “go by” their proper names, or clerks mangled their names in the records or the transcriber couldn’t read the enumerator’s handwriting? These tips might help!

The Archives of Ontario (AO) is the foremost repository for Ontario records. It houses all non-active provincial-level government records, many municipal-level government records, and reams of corporate, organizational and private papers. If you haven’t spent many hours at the AO, you haven’t thoroughly researched your Ontario ancestor. This class will introduce you to the AO’s MVRs (most valuable records), and show you how to use the website of the AO to identify relevant records, research historical background and find maps and images for your family history.

This is a case study based on five years worth of research into the family of Lorenzo White of Pickering, Ontario. Janice will walk the audience step by step through a very difficult research project that ultimately revealed both a fascinating story and important lessons learned. Audience members will learn about a wide range of Ontario records and strategies for overcoming seemingly impossible research roadblocks.

So you have traced your family's history back to an ancestor who lived in Ontario (or its predecessors, Canada West and Upper Canada) before civil registration. Now what? This lecture provides an overview of the six key record groups for pre-civil registration research (before 1869), what information you can expect…