Canadian Immigration Records
Canadian Immigrant Records
Canadian immigration records are some of the best in the world, kept by the National Archives of Canada and available to the public online. The records are only reliable back to 1865, though, because that’s the year that the passenger lists for most Canadian ports were first formally archived.
That’s the year the port of Quebec, the most important city for receiving foreign immigrants, began the practice of keeping formal records of ship registries.
American Immigration Records for Canada
Those who can’t find their family’s arrival to Canada in the ship registry archives of Quebec might want to look at the lists of passengers in New York City, Boston, Portland (Maine), Halifax (Nova Scotia) and Saint John (New Brunswick).
During the winter months (considered about 6 months of the year for shipping purposes), Quebec’s port was closed to most traffic due to ice. In those months, immigrants to Canada came to the country through other ports, including the American immigration ports listed above. So your ancestors may have arrived in the New World in America and traveled on to Canada by train.
Canadian Passenger Ship Lists
You won’t find Canadian immigration records very uniform in this period, so it’s possibly you’ll get lucky and find a lot of ancestry information, or you’ll get unlucky and have little more than name of the head of the household or maybe just the number of passengers and one name. Also, unless your genetic forebears were British by birth, they will be listed by the blanket definition of “foreign”.
At the same time, you might find a passenger list that offers information like the full names of your family, the ages of each and even their place of origin (or port of origin, at least). If this information is included, you can search the port back in England to learn more about your genealogy. In this way, you might find an important link back to the Old World and therefore be able to trace your family’s origins back for generations in the United Kingdom.
Halifax Immigration Archives
The port of Halifax followed the practices of Quebec City in archiving ship records in 1881. After that year, the registry information for Halifax is pretty reliable. Before 1881, if your cousins and forefathers entered Canada through Halifax, Nova Scotia, the record is a whole lot spottier.
Canadian Immigration Records After 1919
In 1919, Canadian immigration officials introduced immigration forms that those newly-arrived to Canada would fill out. This presents a wealth of ancestry information for the later waves of immigration. Unfortunately, this practice was suspended between 1924 and 1935, so the information might not be as complete if your ancestors immigrated to Canada in the Twenties or the first years of the Great Depression, when people were often looking for a better life somewhere else.
CollectionsCanada.gc.ca
The site “Collections Canada” offers ship registry information for several Canadian and American ports ranging from 1865 (in some cities) to 1922 (in all cities). The port immigration records include Quebec, Halifax, Saint John, North Sidney, Vancouver, Victoria, New York City and a selection of other ports in the American Eastern Seaboard. If you’re looking for good information on when and where your immigrant cousins entered Canada, it’s a good place to start looking through Canada’s immigration records.
Related Posts
Canada Ancestry Records
England Ancestry Records
Australian Immigration Records
Ireland Ancestry Records
Canadian Ancestry Records
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Genealogical Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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