Working for the Government: Federal Civil Service Lists on Canadiana

 The machinery of the federal government runs on more than just politicians. There are thousands of people in various government departments who don't make speeches and don't lobby for votes. I'm talking about people such as clerks, surveyors, light house keepers, toll agents, and inspectors. If your ancestor was a cog in the machine of the government, you'll want to hop over to Canadiana and check out the civil service lists available on there. There are various years available. The majority that I found fell between 1882 and 1918. I did however find one from 1871.

I love Canadiana. It has such a huge amount of digitized material. The amount of material does make searching a little difficult though. Putting civil service list of Canada resulted in over 16,000 results. And that's after limiting the results to English ones! Obviously, there aren't 16,000 civil service lists, as they only came out once a year. At the end of this post I've tried to wade through and provide the links to as many years as I could to help you out.

To give you an idea of just how many departments make up the federal government, here is the index of departments for the year 1910

These lists have some surprising information in them. Through the various issues, I found information such as

• Department they worked for
• Occupation
• Salary
• Date of current appointment for current position
• Date of first appointment in Civil Service
• Date of birth

The date of birth is especially exciting. It's an actual date, not just a year!

Here's the list of Registrars in the Northwest Territories in 1900. A Mr. R. F. Chisholm wore two hats, as he was also receiving an extra $500/year as a Dominion Land Agent for Battleford Saskatchewan.

 

Here's those employed in the Customs Department in Prince Edward Island in 1909

Here's a list of people working in the Ottawa and Kingston Division of the Post Office in 1908

This one from 1871 has different information. It shows Name/Origin/Creed/Position/Salary.

If you're worried about having to wade through hundreds of pages, there were name indexes in the issues I looked through. Here's a page from the 1886 issue

Below are the links to the individual years I could find. 

1871

1882  1883  1885  1886  1887  1888  1889  1890

1891  1892  1893  1894  1895  1896  1897  1898  1899  1900

1901  1906  1907  1908  1909

1910  1912  1914  1915  1916  1917  1918