Manitoba Ancestors: Parish Records on Canadiana

This weekend while looking for online record sets for Manitoba, I stumbled across three microfilms of Parish records on Heritage, a sister site to the free site Canadiana.

For those unfamiliar, Canadiana is a huge digitization project to provide free access to newspapers, serials, books and government publications. It's sister site Heritage is free access to digitized microfilms held mainly by Library and Archives Canada. They are constantly adding to the site, so I like to periodically delve into it to see what I can find. I'm never disappointed.

All three rolls are under the heading Parish registers: Manitoba. The three microfilm numbers are H-1344, H-1812, and H-1813.

H-1344

This microfilm consists of index cards compiled by Clarence Kipling. According to Library and Archives Canada's website, the collection contains about 4,000 index cards of records from the churches of the Red River Settlement. The microfilm however, shows over 5,000 images. The reason for this is that there is part of a second set of index cards at the tail end of the reel. These index cards are finding aid cards made by the LAC for the collection. The Kipling index cards end at image 4301. The Kipling cards are arranged alphabetically by surname. They give person's name, and the baptism  during that person's life. This is the scope and content of the collection, according to the LAC website:

"...The series consists of approximately 4,000 cards prepared by Clarence Kipling from the parish registers of the Red River Settlement: St. John's Anglican Church, 1820-1884; St. Andrew's Anglican Church, 1835-1884; and St. Boniface Roman Catholic Church, 1824-1834. The entries for St. John's Anglican Church include marriages for 1820-1878 and 1881-1882; and deaths for 1821-1823, 1825-1838, and 1841-1875. The entries for St. Andrew's Anglican Church include marriages for 1835-1876 and 1878-1883; and deaths for 1835-1876 and 1878-1884. The entries for St. Boniface Roman Catholic Church include baptisms for 1824-1825, 1829-1830, and 1832-1834; and marriages and deaths for 1825, 1828-1830, and 1832-1834. Library and Archives Canada does not hold the original registers to which this index relates, but the index cards contain transcripts of the information supplied by the registers. The cards originally numbered about 3,100 but additional cards were made for brides (who were not originally noticed separately from the bridegroom) and for any cards which contained multiple entries. The index cards were removed from the LAC reference room in 2009 for digitization, and vault storage in four containers: R4084, volumes 1 to 4. The cards are filed in alphabetical order: volume 1 holds surnames A to F, volume 2 holds surnames F to M, volume 3 holds surnames M to S, and volume 4 holds surnames S to Z...." https://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&rec_nbr=115305&lang=eng&rec_nbr_list=115304,115306,115305

Some of the cards are typed, while others are handwritten. They can contain quite a bit of information. Here's one for Angelique Zoste, baptized 10 June 1832

Here's the marriage of Elizabeth Slater to John Vincent 26 March 1863

And here's the burial of James Cowley on 13 Feb 1849

H-1812

This microfilm has 4 sets of parish records. I'm only going to concentrate on the first two.

The Winnipeg District images are a hodge podge of records from different churches. Unfortunately, the images are not of the best quality, but are still readable.

The Holy Ghost Parish collection is fascinating. The parish is the oldest Polish Roman Catholic parish in Western Canada. Included in the collection are baptismal certificates issued in Eastern Europe. If your immigrant ancestor was in this parish, what a fantastic find for you!

H-1813

This microfilm deals with the work of the Rev. James S Stewart, a Presbyterian missionary. The microfilm contains not only BMD's from his Manitoba ministry. This microfilm also gives some great insight into the life of a missionary in the late 1800's. It contains his notes from seminary schooling, and other little bits of the mundane in his professional work. If you wanted an insight in what a missionary's life was like, then it is quite informative. If you looking only for BMD information, then you'll want to concentrate on images in the last half of the roll. There are financial sheets as well, naming individual parishioners.

 

Ontario Ancestors: Roman Catholic Church Records on Family Search

Those of us with Catholic ancestors in Canada may not always appreciate how lucky we are when it comes to online research. Compared with other religious sects, there's an amazing amount of church records already online. If your Catholic ancestors came from Quebec and the Maritimes, then you are no doubt very familiar with the Drouin collection. This huge collection of digitized church records are easily accessible through several different providers. However, Catholics from Ontario are somewhat left out of the party. The records for Ontario are usually scattered among Quebec records, or behind pay walls of subscription sites. But Family Search has a browse only collection on their site. Because it is a browse only collection, it does not appear in searches. As such, if you were unaware of it, you would be missing a great resource. The collection, Ontario, Roman Catholic Church Records, 1760-1923, contains over 125,000 images. Each parish has varying years within the title's time frame.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1927566

The collection is very easy to navigate. First, select a County:

• Algoma
• Brant
• Cardwell
• Carleton
• Carleton, Lanark
• Cochrane
• Dufferin
• Dundas
• Durham
• Elgin
• Essex
• Frontenac
• Grenville
• Haldimand
• Hastings
• Huron
• Kenora
• Kent
• Lambton
• Lanark
• Leeds
• Lennox and Addington
• Lincoln
• Manitoulin
• Middlesex
• Muskoka
• Nipissing
• Norfolk
• Northumberland
• Ontario
• Oxford
• Parry Sound
• Peel
• Perth
• Peterborough
• Prescott
• Prescott and Russell
• Rainy River
• Renfrew
• Russell
• Simcoe
• Sudbury
• Thunder Bay
• Timiskaming
• Victoria
• Welland
• York

If you're having trouble knowing which County your ancestor came from, then the Canadian County Atlas Digital Project through McGill University can help you to pinpoint which Counties to look at.

Next, pick a City or Town. Here's a screen shot of Frontenac County

After that, pick a parish. This is what comes up for Toronto in York County

Finally, pick a section. This is St. Francis of Sales parish in Smith's Falls, Lanark County

So, what information can you find from Catholic Church records?

Baptisms

• Date of baptism
• Date of birth
• Child's name
• Parents' names
• Residence
• Father's occupation
• Godparents/Sponsors' names

Here's an example  of baptisms from St. Peter's Cathedral in London, Middlesex County dated for May and June 1843

Marriages

• Bride and Groom's names
• Groom's occupation
• Bride and Groom's marital status
• Parents' names
• Residences and/or Birthplaces
• Ages
• Witnesses
• Date of Marriage

Here's an example of a marriage from St. Jacques in Embrun, in Prescott and Russell

Burials

• Date of death
• Date of Burial
• Residence
• Age
• Cemetery
• Names of immediate family
• Witnesses

Here's an example of an interesting entry from 1909. It was from the registers of St. Mary's in Woodstock, Oxford County.

Sometimes in an entry for one event, you'll get a bonus notation about a subsequent event. Here's an example of a baptism entry that also has a notation of her subsequent marriage in another parish.

Some things to keep in mind when looking at the records:

1. The language can be in English, French, Latin, or any combination of the three. 
2. Take notes of witnesses and sponsors. These could lead to extended family relationships.
3. A baptism may not have occurred immediately after birth, though this was the Catholic custom. Sometimes circumstances, such as extremely large parish boundaries, meant that the baptism could take place months or even years after the birth. A good indicator of this reason is multiple children getting baptized on the same day.
4. As with baptisms, burial services sometimes did not happen immediately after death. A good example of this is deaths that took place in winter. Sometimes it wasn't until the following spring that burial took place.
5. Make sure you are looking at the first pages in the microfilm. Many of the parishes I looked at had indexes at the start of the microfilm roll. This could save you a lot of time if you look through the index first.

The Family Search Viewer lets you manipulate the images in several ways for maximum viewing. You can download the whole page to your computer as a image, and also print the entire page off. I like to download a page, and then use photo editing to zoom in on a specific entry. I then save that image as a separate file.