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Canadian resources not to be missed

The Legal Genealogist was honored to be among the featured speakers at this past weekend’s 2016 Ontario Genealogical Society conference — Genealogy on the Cutting Edge — in Toronto.

Canada It was wonderful!! More than 700 enthusiastic attendees, great presentations, and a lot of fun.

To get ready for that conference, I had to review or even learn for the first time about a variety of resources for Canadian research — and there are some stellar options.

I’m sure I don’t need to spent time listing things like Library and Archives Canada — anyone doing Canadian research probably already knows about the combination National Archives and National Library site.

And the website of my hosts, the Ontario Genealogical Society, is an obvious “don’t miss” resource, especially with its TONI (The Ontario Name Index) database.

But there are others that will get you started in Canadian research that you don’t want to miss either.

Try some of these on for size as Canadian resources you just shouldn’t overlook if your ancestors ended up north of the border:

Canadiana.ca: A non-profit organization dedicated to making historically significant documentary materials available online. Major collections include Early Canadiana Online, full-text historical books, magazines and government documents; Héritage, roughly 60 million pages of primary-source documents; and the War of 1812 Collection.

ArchivesCanada: A research portal to more than 800 Canadian repositories of archival materials and images.

Dictionary of Canadian Biography, University of Toronto: A collection of nearly 8,500 biographies of persons of significance to Canada (or its colonial antecedents) from voyagers like St. Brendan to Canadians of the 20th century (and don’t miss the biography of the day feature — it’s fun!).

CanadaGenWeb: A research portal and gateway to variety of Canadian research sites, projects, archives and guides.

CanGenealogy Historical Newspapers: A site collecting links to digitized newspapers across Canada plus information specifically about using Google News Archive.

And from Ontario itself, don’t miss the Archives of Ontario, “Conducting Your Research From Home”: Research tools, databases, links and catalogues of information that can help you conduct much of your research from home, including in some cases direct access to documents, indexes and images.

These are just some of the great resources that exist in Canada for research there — into its great history, its geography, its people.

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