Saturday 19 September 2015

UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part VI


Updated 2015-11-20, a new 54,000 item index was just put online by LAC!

The sixth in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 5. Access free UEL record indexes and records online


By the end of Step 4, if successful, you have a candidate UEL. You can continue to work backwards chronologically as well as attempting to work forward from the UEL (which is considerably easier, just remember not to discount anything that may indicate your link to the UEL is not valid).

The easiest thing to access for most UELs are their loss claims and land petition records. Search whichever of the following databases match the locations identified for your UEL family:
And, Ancestry has a database indexing the following claims records, but you can manually view the scanned typescript nominal indexes for free:

If you get hits in an index-only database - and remember, there are often different people with the same name -- look at the details (for the databases: either displayed in the hits table or via a linked screen). The details should provide basic information (like date, name, and township, which is very useful) and then some sort of item number, typically the volume/bundle and page/item number of the record in the original manuscripts. In some cases the database links directly to an image (hopefully there will be more image links in the future). If there is no image in the databases, it will provide a microfilm reel code (usually a letter followed by a four or five digit number).

(In the typescript index, you need to carefully write down the name and all bundle, volume, page and item number information and then do a lookup which I will discuss after first explaining how to access the Land Petition records.)

The records provided online for free consist, essentially, of large digital photo albums of the images from the microfilms. There is a trick to navigating these large image banks.

To locate an individual record you look at the volume and page/item numbers in the index details, then open the virtual "reel" (see below for links to collections of reels which are scanned and available online) and check how many images it contains (usually about a thousand). Go to the page/image number box and enter a number that is about half the total (i.e. 500). Look at that image and scroll down to the bottom (sometimes look to the right side instead) where there should be a little typewritten label below the manuscript document that was filmed. The label will indicate the volume for that item and may indicate the page or item number; if not, the page/item number will be written or stamped on the document (check top right corner first).

If the volume and page number you are looking falls after the one you want, go to a page halfway between the start and where you are now (i.e. page/image 250). If you are before where you need to be in the sequence, go in the other direction (i.e. 750). Check to see if that item is before or after the one you want and then repeat this process -- you can get to the record you want much more quickly than navigating through every single image of the album in order.

Almost all Land Petition microfilms in the above series, with the exception of New Brunswick and PEI (which is very small), are available online via the index or as scans through archived LAC sites or the Héritage project. Once an index has given you a reel number, check these sites to see if the reel is in one of these online collections. (On the Héritage project site you can just type the reel number into the search box and it will pop up if it is there.)
To access claims in the Audit Office records (which you identified by checking the scanned typewritten indexes) uses fundamentally the same navigational approach described above. For AO 12, transcriptions of the original claims (which are at the National Archives UK) in the surviving volumes (1-2, 5, 7, 10-12, 15-16, 18, 23, 25-27, 57, 59-63, 98-99, 109 and 123-124) were filmed onto three very large reels when the original paper transcription became brittle. The three rolls are available online for free. Your index search should have provided a volume number (and a page/item number), determine which of the following reels you need to access (then navigate by halves until you hit the right volume and page of interest):

  • C-12903 (2803 pages), vol. 1-vol. 16 page 420
  • C-12904 (2123 pages), vols. 18-99
  • C-12905 (959 pages), images up to 285 are AO 12 vols. 109 and 123-124

If you found a name in AO 13 on the LAC website, there is good news and bad news. Firstly, it is good to know that most of the material in AO 13 repeats what is in AO 12. However, while the extant volumes (1-100, 102-140) were microfilmed, only a transcribed selection of material is in the microfilm reel which is available online for free:
While it is unfortunate that the full set is not online, you can order the specific microfilm reel you need (and it is a microfilm of the original records, not a transcription) to your local Family History Centre (or check to see if the films are in the holdings of an institution in your area).

Finally, other easy to access online collections worth checking include:
The final step is to try to identify if your UEL or their descendants left wills which link the generations together and provide additional information.

Continue to Step 6...

UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part IV


The fourth in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 3: Google, using township name


By the end of Step 2 hopefully you have names of a 19th century Canadian ancestor or couple, and some location information as well as key dates. Start Googling.

As the figure in Part 1 demonstrated, UELs can be expected to have in the range of 180,000 grandchildren and 500,000 great grandchildren in the 19th century, and perhaps 26 million descendants living today. The odds that many UEL descendants are mentioned on the web are actually pretty good. Even if your ancestors turn out not to be descended from UELs, this step has potential to kick up useful information about their origins.

Query the name as well as whatever location information you've uncovered, preferably a township name. Add any known birth, marriage, or death years. Add the term "loyalist"/"UEL" to see if they pop up in the context of a UEL's descendants listing. You could uncover posts by your cousins seeking assistance researching the family, as well as secondary content sites providing information (including some of the county histories mentioned in Part I, if your research extends far enough back, to a generation that was alive by the time those were written).

Google really is the universal genealogical index (all due respect to the IGI) and it is foolish not to use it, albeit with careful analysis of whether the results generated really do pertain to your line.

Continue to Step 4...

Friday 18 September 2015

UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part I

The first in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


BACKGROUND


An estimated half a million colonists were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution. Of those, some 420,000 Loyalists remained in the former colonies at the close of the war.

However, 60,000-100,000 Loyalists -- those who experienced persecution, the confiscation and destruction of their property, and who served the British cause -- left the United States and were compensated for their losses by the Crown. Some loyalists went to refugee camps early in the war and when peace was declared those, and others evacuated from surrendered territories, began taking up land grants in British colonies.

This generated a tonne of paperwork.

The survival of these documents, mostly intact, is a tremendous boon for those seeking to extend their North American family histories well into the 18th century, as well as access biographical details that do not tend to survive in church records. Up until about five years ago, accessing these records required surmounting the usual bricks-and-mortar research institution obstacles.

However, given that approximately 50,000 Loyalists came to Canada -- where they are known as United Empire Loyalists (UELs) -- Library and Archives Canada (LAC) took the initiative to place the most important UEL record sets (as well as all Canadian census records), online for free.

LAC's priority digitization of these records reflect the continuing importance of the Loyalists in Canada. Canada's population was only about 125,000 in 1770. Therefore, the 50,000 refugees from the former colonies to the south exert a lasting founder-effect on the population and their legacy is embodied in a significant percentage of the Canadian population today.

Additionally, my own research tracing the descendants of couples born in the late 18th century has shown me how many Canadians were caught up in American expansion westward starting in the 1850s. A significant number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of UELs returned to American soil. My "back-of-the-envelope" attempt at estimating the percentage of UEL descendants in both Canada and the US indicates the following scenario is not impossible:


The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of UELs were justifiably proud of their ancestors, who had lost everything, trekked into the Canadian wilderness, and successfully started again. They were also aware that many church records were gone and set about writing family and county histories to document their ancestors' lives before memories were lost forever. While such sources always need to be checked against primary documents, many of these 19th and early 20th century books are now in the public domain and accessible on sites such as Canadiana, OurRoots, OurOntario, and Internet Archive. Some of those sites also index the text to Google, ensuring the content will come up in a Google search, particularly if a township name and key date is included in the query.

In addition to the LAC digitization projects, and the provision of old county histories and family genealogies online, some provincial governments (Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, PEI, Newfoundland) deserve tremendous credit for placing not only vital records indexes, but actual scans of registrations online, for free.

The vital records, particularly marriages and deaths, often include parents' names and can be key to linking back to the preceding generation. While the records offer excellent coverage, there are unfortunate sequences which do not include intergenerational information (list forms were briefly used in some jurisdictions) and there is always a risk that ancestors were residing in a frontier township that could not properly support registrarial functions (or a generation was averse to registering, which does happen).

The final key in linking generations may therefore come down to wills. While the online coverage of wills is not (yet, fingers crossed) on par with these other record sets, some are online and there are techniques that enable wills to be obtained through interlibrary loan services such as Family History Centers.

Looking at the process for investigating UELs, I can break it down into 6 steps, some very easy, that you can follow to identify UELs in your tree, access the documentation of their lives, and collect solid evidence of your connection to these ancestors and their experience with some of the great events of history.

Start with Step 1...

SERIES INDEX

PART I - Background
PART II - Step 1: Search FamilySearch.org, look at Canadian censuses online
PART III - Step 2: Search FamilySearch again, access Canadian vital records
PART IV - Step 3: Google, using township name
PART V - Step 4: Take stock, seek advice as needed
PART VI - Step 5: Access free UEL record indexes and records online
PART VII - Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking to later generations
PART VIII - Future possibilities


UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part V

The fifth in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 4. Take stock, seek advice as needed


After Step 3, you will either have a candidate Loyalist ancestor or you won't:
  • Your Canadian ancestor may have left Canada before 1851 (or 1861 if from a township missing on the 1851 census) and Googling has not turned up a connection to their pre-census origins
  • You now know your Canadian ancestors immigrated to Canada from places other than the US well after the Revolution. Or before, don't forget those 125,000 Canadians kicking around in 1770 -- many of those are Quebecers, in which case the record bounty does continue but your focus would shift to Quebec records unrelated to Loyalists. If your ancestors immigrated from the US at the beginning of the 19th century, there is also a chance you have Patriots in your tree; while they won't show in Loyalist land records, their origins may show up in the county histories.
In the first scenario, circle back and look for documentation in their new country (marriage, death, burial, news coverage) that might indicate a fairly specific origin location in Canada. Run a couple more FamilySearch searches, as FamilySearch also indexes a variety of specialized Canadian record sets that pre-date 1851.

As soon as you have a province, or ideally a county or township, seek out advice on the Internet from people who have specialized knowledge of the records for that location. This could involve joining a Facebook group for a regional branch of the provincial Genealogical Society as well as reviewing branch websites (these organizations have active research support functions and branches may have very robust indexing projects), check the municipal library websites for historical records online -- particularly directories -- as well as specialized indexes for things like obituaries (this is highly variable by municipality, some have done a superb job at placing this information online), check for county and township historical societies which may also have a research function.

If your research leads to a family in the Kingston, Ontario area (a region known as "The Bay of Quinte" for the body of water that intersects with Hastings, Prince Edward, Lennox & Addington, and Frontenac counties), you should probably also check out the files of a renowned 20th century historian, Dr. H.C. Burleigh. He researched over a thousand families and Queen's University and his descendants have ensured his notes and records are viewable onlinefor free.

If you have identified a likely UEL ancestor, the time has come to ensure generational links are solid, as well as locate and review all the primary documentation available for that person online.

Continue to Step 5...

SERIES INDEX

PART VII - Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking to later generations
PART VIII - Future possibilities


UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part III

The third in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 2. Search FamilySearch again, access Canadian vital records there or at provincial sites


The initial FamilySearch query in Step 1, if done broadly, would have screened the following provincial vital records/indexes as well:
Two collections are not indexed but the images are online for browsing. New Brunswick, Provincial Returns of Deaths, 1815-1919 (80,741 images) and  Prince Edward Island Death Card Index, 1721-1905 (15,903 images). (PEI has a very small population).

If your research led you to expect a vital record from one of the sources, but it did not appear, make sure to adjust the query (type=death only, etc.). Go broader (removing date or place restrictions) or, if you get too many potential records to weed through, use the census information to further refine the query by date and place. If that still does not work, search on every known family member who could also have a vital record. Your ancestor may fall outside a record set's timeline, but their children or sibling may be recorded. As mentioned above, some families were reticent about registering and some townships were not developed enough to properly support the registrarial functions. Additionally, as always, try to anticipate any way the name could have been mangled when indexed.

Unfortunately FamilySearch does not have the index for the Drouin Collection, which is the primary index for civil registration-type information for Quebec, but some pay sites do.

Neither Newfoundland or the Northwest Territories were Loyalist settlement areas. While Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta,  and British Columbia were not Loyalist settlement areas, there is greater chance a subsequent generation went to those provinces. Manitoba vital statistics can be searched separately, as can Saskatchewan's (coming online in batches). Alberta is an online vital record dead zone, however the settlement began there quite late, so using Canadian censuses to trace back towards 1851 will likely indicate another provincial origin where the documentation trail can be more easily accessed.

Continue on to Step 3...

SERIES INDEX

PART VII - Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking to later generations
PART VIII - Future possibilities


UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part II

The second in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 1. Search FamilySearch.org, look at Canadian censuses online


FamilySearch has indexed all Canadian census records through to 1911, in addition to US censuses indexed through 1940 (with some US censuses viewable on the site). For American descendants the process will probably start by finding an ancestor listed on a US census with Canada as birth location; use the censuses to try to identify when they left Canada for the US and whether they should appear on an earlier Canadian census. Search there first (if you do not get hits, also try searching the LAC indexes at the links below as a back-up).

If you get likely hits in Canadian censuses, go to the LAC site and search (under the exact name listed on the FamilySearch index record) to view and download the census form for that person and their family (if the family extends to the previous or next page, adjust the image number at the end of the URL plus or minus one, to go forwards or backwards in the image bank):
Returns for the odd township in the 1861-1911 censuses also did not survive and if you don't find a record you expect, go to LAC's About page for each census to check if a target township is missing.

If you find your ancestors, download the census form and make special note of the County and Township (often called the Sub-District) they were residing in. Trace back through as many censuses as you can and get as specific with the location as possible. Township location is key to using more sophisticated research methods to find detailed information.

Warning: Be careful to align the details of spouses, siblings, children, birth dates (+/- up to 4 years) with any details identified in your existing research for the succeeding generation. Given that this is a group with an endogamous founding population, it is not uncommon for multiple people to have the same nameeven if the name appears to be rare at first glance. Working through other record sets described here as well as cemetery records can help you ensure the links are solid (to start: FindagraveOntario Cemetery Finding Aid - index only, but covers 3 million burials in Ontario, CemSearch, etc.).

Continue to Step 2...

SERIES INDEX

PART I - Background
PART II - Step 1: Search FamilySearch.org, look at Canadian censuses online
PART III - Step 2: Search FamilySearch again, access Canadian vital records
PART IV - Step 3: Google, using township name
PART V - Step 4: Take stock, seek advice as needed
PART VI - Step 5: Access free UEL record indexes and records online
PART VII - Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking to later generations
PART VIII - Future possibilities
PART IV - Step 3: Google, using township name
PART V - Step 4: Take stock, seek advice as needed
PART VI - Step 5: Access free UEL record indexes and records online
PART VII - Step 6: Search wills, obtain evidence linking to later generations
PART VIII - Future possibilities