Alberta Ancestors: Issues of University of Alberta's " The Gateway" Online

 Was your ancestor connected to the University of Alberta? Then you absolutely should be looking at the campus publication The Gateway. Still in publication, it was founded in 1910. Best of all, all issues have been digitized and are available online for free!

The publication focuses on issues relevant to students. According to their website, their objective is

• To sponsor advancement of education of University of Alberta students through the various practices of journalism and the publication of the Gateway.
• To provide a fair, reliable, and clear source of information, focused mainly, but not exclusively, on issues which directly affect students, whether they are local, national, or international.

The University of Alberta have digitized every available issue from 1910 to present day. You can find them online at two sites.

Peel's Prairie Provinces

This must see website for Western Canada research has all available issues from 1910 to 2008. These are available in PDF form. You can access the main browse page here

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/

Keyword searching can be done either on the main page to search all issues, or you can keyword search inside a particular issue. Just click on a year, and then a particular issue. The initial pages shown are quite small. However, if you click on the page image, it will reload to a much more readable size. Once you're into the larger size, there is an option to print. 

http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1910/11/21/6/Ar00600.html

Internet Archive

If you're looking for digitized items, you should always look to see if it's been uploaded to Internet Archive. A search on their site revealed they have over 3500 issues uploaded. They run from 1910 right up to 2020! The link from my search to access all issues is here.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=gateway%20alberta&and[]=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and[]=subject%3A%22gateway%22

Just click on an issue and you can explore page by page. You can zoom in and out quite easily. Right click on an image to save the whole page and then print. Saving the image allows you to crop on a specific article if needed. Keyword searching can be done in a particular issue.

What's Inside 

So what information can you find? The issues contained news pertaining to the university, and university life. It also included articles on a local, national, and international scale. Pictures are included as well. Even if your ancestor didn't make the publication by name, you'll still get an insight into their academic life. 

Here's a short blurb about a new Science Professor, Dr. Ernest Sheldon, from 1910

Here's and article from 1934 about an upcoming night of boxing matches between the University's Varsity team and Camrose Normal.

Here's some letters to the editor from an issue in 1924

Here's the recipients of academic awards in 1943

Here's some members of the Archery Club in 1956

Here are some ads from 1969 aimed at recruiting upcoming graduates

Here is some club notices and classified ads from 1977

If your ancestor had a business that catered to the needs of students and faculty, then be sure to look at the ads throughout each issue. You might find an ad they placed. For the final example, here are some ads from 1918

I lost a couple of hours looking through the issues just for this post. Set aside some time when you research your ancestor. I can guarantee you'll get sidetracked.

Saskatchewan Ancestors: "Saskatchewan History" Magazine

 Once you delve into Canadian sources, you'll find that some provinces are absolute gold mines for online records. Saskatchewan is not one of those provinces. It's a combination of the Province's privacy laws and the youth of the Province compared to some others. Only becoming a province in 1905 means there isn't the long history that you see in Provinces like Ontario or British Columbia. Because those essential BMD records aren't as readily available as in a province like Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, those with Saskatchewan ancestry have to be a little more "out of the box" on resources.

This week I found a great resource on Internet Archive that will appeal to both genealogists and history lovers in general. Saskatchewan History is a magazine that was published by the Saskatchewan Archives Board. Internet Archive has issues from 1948 to 1957. It was published 3 times a year. History lovers and those wanting to know what their ancestor's life was like will find it a great read. 

Each issue has articles on different aspects of early pioneer life. The articles are well sourced, complete with citations.In the very first issue (Winter 1948) there is a small article highlighting a problem early settlers had that was unique to the Prairies: readily available water.

 There were also book reviews on the latest history books written about the province. This can give you new avenues of research to track down. Here's a review on Fifty Golden Years. A Brief History of the Order of St. Benedict in the Abbey Nullius of St. Peter, Muenster, Sask (Winter 1955 issue)

And here's a useful article on how Saskatchewan Places got their names (Winter 1950 issue). This section appeared regularly in the magazine

So what about the genealogy side of things? Well, there's plenty of articles focusing on specific people. One section to look at is the Notes and Correspondence section. Very much like today's "Letters to the Editor" section in newspapers and magazines. Here's a example from Winter 1949. Just look at the great extra information in these two letters:

Some issues had profiles on individuals. There's an in depth article on Philip Turner in the Spring 1950 issue. Philip was an inland surveyor.

If you're a descendant of Arthur Rowe Miller, how excited would you be to find his diary transcribed? Here's the first three pages. The article in the Spring 1957 issue is much longer.

In 1952 the Archives Board put out a Pioneer Questionnaire. In the Winter 1953 issue they featured snippets from some of the responses. Here's the page showing some memories of Mr. H. F. Copeland, who came from England in 1910.

Click here to access all the issues on Internet Archive.

As I was about to upload this post, I realized that the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan has digitized the entire run of the magazine from 1948 to 2017. Each entire issue can be downloaded as PDFs. They also have a PDF list of all the featured articles. You can get the links for each on the Archives' website.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both sites. The Provincial Archives has the complete run. However, you will have to download the entire issue. With Internet Archive you can have the ability to download specific pages. You do this by right clicking on the page and saving as a jpeg. Either way, if you have Saskatchewan ancestors, you'll want to take a look at this resource.

British Columbia Ancestors: Historical BC Government Gazette Online

Government Gazettes are a great resource. During the early years of Canada, these publications gave information on many aspects of the lives of our ancestors. They had notices of divorces, bankruptcies, and business dealings, just to name a few. I've written before on the Canada Gazette, the publication of the federal government. But provincial governments publish their own versions.I've found 3 online sources for free digitizations.


University of Victoria
Their collection, Official Gazettes of the Province of British Columbia, contains 715 issues. The issues run from 1863 to 1871, before it became a Canadian Province.

https://vault.library.uvic.ca/collections/d9265b4b-b757-4508-bc7d-85bd3ae91ddc?locale=en

The set up is extremely easy to use. They are by default listed by date created ascending, but you can modify the list to

• date created descending
• title ascending
• title descending
• relevance
• date modified ascending
• date modified descending

Just pick a year and issue and click on the image to have it open to browse page by page. My suggestion if using this method is to right click on the issue title and open the issue in a new window. It will make it much easier on yourself than constantly using the back arrow to go back to the main page.

If your searching for something specific, use the search bar located just above the issues list to search by keyword. This will then give you a list of issues with your keyword. It does not however, highlight the keyword within the issue itself.

Once you're looking at a particular issue, you can zoom in and out by using your mouse. You can also full screen the issue. To save, you can download or print the whole issue. 

University of British Columbia

Their collection of digitized directories has duplicates of the ones that UVic has, but also later editions up to 1882. The ones on this site have an entire year in book form. Just click on the volume and it will take you into the image viewer. As with the UVic's collecton, I would suggest opening in a new tab for ease of browsing volumes. You can search within each volume sing the search bar, or you can browse page by page. If you use the search function, the result will first highlight a page within the volume for your keyword. It will then highlight the word itself.

 

As with UVic's collection you can manipulate the image. You can also download individual pages to your computer. 

Internet Archive

Lastly, Internet Archive has a huge amount of years on their site in the collection Official Gazettes of the Province of British Columbia. They have various years from the start of the colony up to 1974. A good chunk of them are not tagged with a date. You can search within specific volumes with keywords. You can zoom in and out. To save a specific page, right click on the image, and then on Save image as. There is no way to print directly from the site.

So, what can be found in these issues? Here's a list of Road Tax Defaulters from 1870:

 

And here's a notice from 1868 looking for information on who shot John Crocket, alias Crosby. They are offering a $100 reward. That's quite a large sum back then.

And in August of 1864, there is a very lengthy account of the Bentick Arm Expedition. It runs for several pages

Here's some estate notices from 1879

And here's a Register of Medical Practitioners from 1873

Here's some notices of intention to purchase land from 1882

Here's some about Coal Prospecting Licences in 1911

52 Ancestors: Week 46 - Poorhouses

http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/canadian-illustrated-news-1869-1883/Pages/image.aspx?Image=58537&URLjpg=http%3a%2f%2fwww.collectionscanada.gc.ca%2fobj%2f026019%2ff4%2f58537-v6.gif&Ecopy=58537

Week 46 of 52 Ancestors is "poor". One can't think of the poor in history without the dreaded "poorhouse" or "workhouse" coming to mind. Most people associate these with Britain, but Canada had them too. These institutions had the official names of "Houses of Industry". They also went by names such as "Poor Asylum". Their goal was to have inmates work to support their admittance into them. These institutions first started to appear in Canada in the late 1700's to early 1800's in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. In Western Canada, the notion did not appear to take hold, though British Columbia had a similar system. If you would like a good read on the history of social welfare in Canada, you can preview Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History By Alvin Finkel on Google Books. The free preview lets you look at several sections, and it's a very good read. I took some looking around at the provincial archives, and found some various records by province for Eastern and Central Canada. This is by no means a complete list. These will help you get started though.

Newfoundland
Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949. From what I have read, there were porr houses in the province much earlier than the rest of Canada, and they adopted the Poor Law of Elizabeth I. The Rooms has in their holdings a few things relating to poorhouses and asylums:

• Office of the Colonial Secretary fonds Reports Fonds GN 2, Series GN 2.28 1868, 1896, 1899-1909, [1917]
• John Peyton Jr. and Thomas Peyton fonds Fonds MG 323 1805-1911 They were magistrates that dealt with poor relief

Prince Edward Island

PARO has some records in their collection, including Fonds RG34 - Independent Boards and Commissions fonds. This collection deals with the government side of the Poor Asylums and Insane Asylums.

New Brunswick

PANB has a few record sets in their holdings:

• Fonds ID81 - Provincial Lunatic Asylum
• Fonds ID4836 - Leavitt family. Includes an account book for the St. John almshouse
• Fonds MC249 - Saint John almshouse

Nova Scotia

The NSA has in their holdings the Halifax (N.S.). Poor Asylum. This rather notorious institution originally burnt to the ground in 1882. it was rebuilt in 1886.

Quebec

BAnQ has the St. Bridget's Asylum Fund.- 1856-1865 in their holdings. One thing that should be noted about the province is that poor relief was mainly taken on by the church, as opposed to the government. Keep this in mind when looking for records

Ontario

In 1890, Ontario passed the House of Refuge Act. This gave grants to each County to set aside 45 acres for Houses of Industry. In 1903 it became mandatory for each County to have at least one House of Refuge. Because of this, there were much more of these than in any other province. The Archives of Ontario has some fonds of some of them:

• County of Lanark
• Newcastle District Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace grand jury presentments
• Peterborough County Court of General Sessions of the Peace grand jury presentments
• Perth County Grand Jury presentments
• Drawings of House of Industry (Toronto, Ont.)

UPDATE Dec 15 2019: I didn't realize when I wrote the blog post that the AO's links are time sensitive. However, if you go to the Archives of Ontario's website you can still find them. Go into Access Our Collections, then Archives Descriptive Database. Use for your search term "House of Industry" (use the quotation marks), then into Groups of Archival Records.

More Places to Search

Don't forget to look at these other sources for Poorhouse records:

• City/County Archives. In fact, your much more likely to find specific records here than in the Provincial Archives. For instance, The City of Toronto Archives hold the books of the Toronto House of Refuge. The Toronto Branch of Ontario Ancestors has a project going on right now to get these indexed.
• Internet Archive - remember to use a variety of search terms such as "poor house", "almshouse", "house of industry". And remember to include your location as well in the search. They have uploads from all over the world.
• University and College Libraries
• Google. If you know the name of the institution, try using Google. Some of these buildings have been turned into museums, especially in Ontario. Others, like the Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge, are virtual museums giving an amazing amount of information on not only the residents, but the staff as well.
• As always,Canadiana is a go-to source. "House Of Industry" resulted in 1756 hits. "Poor Asylum" gave 792 hits, and "poor house" gave 3408 hits.

52 Ancestors: Week 39 - Finding Maps on Internet Archive

Week 39's 52 ancestors prompt is "Map It Out". I love old maps. Finding Canadian old maps on line can be a little challenging sometimes though. I recently took a look at Internet Archive to see what they have, and boy was I happy!

If you've never used Internet Archive, you should start. Starting way back in 1996, this wonderful sites allows libraries and institutions around the world to upload materials to the site for FREE. According to their about page, this virtual library now holds:

• 330 billion web pages
• 20 million books and texts
• 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts)
• 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs)
• 3 million images
• 200,000 software programs

I like to regularly check on there to see what they've got relating to Canadian history and genealogy. I'm always finding something new. Genealogical Societies are jumping on the bandwagon too. They have been digitizing material and uploading to Internet Archive. One notable project has been the digitization of Toronto City Directories by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society (now known as Ontario Ancestors). To date they have digitized most directories from 1833 to 1969. They have a chart on their website with direct links to the digitized directories here. Check with your local society to see if they've been uploading to Internet Archive. If they haven't, speak to the leadership about starting a project to do so.

But back to maps. The drawback to Internet Archive is that because of the sheer volume of information available, it will take some searching to find what you want. You don't want to be too specific, but you also want to try and weed out as much as you can on the first go. For instance, I typed in "Canada Maps" and got 2966 results. I typed in "Newfoundland Maps" and got 148 results. I typed in "Newfoundland Land Maps" and got 16 results, but they may not be what I'm looking for. And it all depends how the uploads been tagged for the search engines. When I typed in "Atlantic Canada Maps" I got 132 results. Some pertained to Newfoundland and didn't come up in the searches using "Newfoundland". As you can see, you'll have to play around a bit.

Now some of these various results were maps. But some of the results were also voice recordings, videos, reports, non fiction books and novels. These other results can be interesting to look at too. But if you only want to focus on one thing, then your next step is to use the filters on the left side bar. Here's a screenshot of the results from the search term "Canada Maps".

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Canada%20Maps

Now if I filtered to just images, I get 65 results. But, not all of them are Canada specific maps.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Canada+Maps&and[]=mediatype%3A%22image%22

Now when I filtered to just texts, I found some interesting results. One was called Six manuscript maps showing places on Lake Ontario in southern Canada, the Niagara River and along the St. Lawence River. This was six hand dawn maps that were later included in a 1823 book called Travels through part of the United States and Canada in 1818 and 1819, volume 2, by John M. Duncan. What makes these manuscript maps so exciting is the notations at the bottom of each one. Here's a screen shot of map 2:

And here's a close up of the notations for map 2

Did you have an ancestor that fought in Flanders? Here's a map that is just one of many in the book Canada in Flanders (Vol 1) by Sir Max Aitken, with a preface by A. Bonar Law and an introduction by Sir Robert Borden.

As a side note, while I was flipping through pages I noticed many individual soldiers named. It's worth a look into the whole book.

I decided to filter by collection. I chose the collection Canadian Municipal Collection (Cities and Towns). I chose the rather dry sounding RESIDENTIAL AREAS GREATER WINNIPEG - PRELIMINARY REPORT, published in 1948. There's some rather interesting maps in there:

Judging from the report, Winnipeg had a housing crisis in the post WWII years. Included in the report are pictures of government housing areas. This report is a nice insight into the problems people had with adequate housing in post war Winnipeg.

Finally, here's a map from a pamphlet enticing wholesalers to come to Saskatoon. The map from the 1911 publication was made by the Saskatchewan Board of Trade.

And of course there are the maps on Internet Archive that one usually searches for, such as topographical and fire insurances maps. But what I really like about this site is that you will always find sources you didn't think to look at. Each I time I search on here I always find an unexpected source that leads me in a new direction.

52 Ancestors: Week 35 - Finding Occupational Records

Occupational records can give good insight on the working life of your ancestors. If your ancestor was in politics, the military, or in a position of power, chances are you can find detailed records on them. However, if your ancestor wasn't, you might have to be a little more creative in finding records. This post I'm going to steer you to some sources that go beyond looking at a business directory.

Family Search

What you want to do is search their catalog. By using the search word "Canada" I was able to bring up a list of their holdings both online and offline. If you go through the list, you'll notice subheadings such as Business Records and Commerce, and Occupations. Expand on these subheadings and you can get individual titles. For instance, here's some titles of books I found:

• Polk's dental register and directory of the United States and Canada, 1925 : complete index of dentists, alphabetically arranged
• Shipping literature of the Great Lakes : a catalog of company publications, 1852-1990, compiled by  Le Roy Barnett
• Ogilvie in Canada : pioneer millers, 1801-195, by G.R. Stevens
• Clock & watchmakers and allied workers in Canada, 1700 to 1900, by John E. Langdon

When you click on the title, It will give you the record information. It will also give either a link to view it online, if possible. If it is not digitized, then you can click on the link to WorldCat to see if there is a copy available at a library near you. These can be public libraries, university libraries, or other institutions across the world. For instance, I found 55 different places to find Clock & watchmakers and allied workers in Canada, 1700 to 1900. 

Library and Archives Canada
The LAC has records pertaining to employment in their holdings. You can access their information page here.

http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/genealogy/topics/employment/Pages/introduction.aspx

As you can see above, they have a variety of occupational records listed. Just click on the type you're interested in, and it will give you some more detail on what they have, the access restrictions, and how to access.

Alternatively, you can also use the Archives Search. Try typing in an occupation, and see what comes up. I used the search term "salesmen". and got 71 hits. Among the results were:

• "Volume 2 / Alberta Brotherhood of Dairy Employees & Driver Salesmen, Alberta.". 
• Nasmith, Fennell & Porter - Toronto, Ontario - Fraudulent operations of certain stock salesmen re Manufacturers Finance Corporation Ltd. 
• Bond Salesmen's Ordinance - NWT.

Internet Archive

This site can be a goldmine of information, but it takes some work to find things. Because they have digitized items from all over the world, you will really have to play with the search terms. I used "inspector Canada" just to see what would come up. There were over 300 hits, but many of them were only loosely connected to the search term I used. It will take some targeted searching. One interesting thing I found was a publication titled Transactions of the Engineering Institute of Canada from 1919. On page 34 an obituary section starts. Some obituaries are quite detailed in the work history of the engineer.

Provincial and Local Archives
If your ancestor worked for a company that had ties to the local history of the area, check the local or provincial archive. For instance, when I looked at the Provincial Archives of Alberta's website, I used the search term "butcher". Among their holdings are several photographs of butcher shops from the 1920s and 1930s. These butcher shops are from around the province. While it may not give you specific details of your ancestor, how great would it be to have a picture of where they worked?

I looked at the Halifax Municipal Archives' website and searched using "transit". Among their holdings are the Dartmouth Ferry Commission Records. I saw among the collection staff reports and engineer log books.



Contact the Company
If the company your ancestor worked for is still in existence, why not contact the company? Even if they don't have a company archive, they might steer you toward where historical records might be kept.



Have you come across a source for looking at employment records? let us know what it is in te comments below.