Is there any CANADIAN genealogy free sites?

Question

and if there are no free CANADIAN genalogy sites, where does one start for the most accurate family history?

Answer 1

We have to separate out French-Canada from English-Canada. The two do not have their records in one nice tidy database.

For F/C you need to break out the Quebecois from the Acadians. The Acadians have most of their early genealogy in a few easy places. The first is the Universite de Moncton http://www.umoncton.ca/etudeacadiennes/centre/cea.html This is the most comprehensive and authoritative site. Included on this site is information from the White dictionary of Acadian families.

Yvon Cyr (a distant cousin, but phenomenal genealogist) has also gathered the most comprehensive list of Acadian resources. Check them out here: http://www.acadian-cajun.com/genlink.htm


For the Quebecois there are very few civil records and almost everything from 1500-1860 involves Catholic parish/sacramental registers. The first is the Loiselle Marriage Index...but it is NOT online. There are dozens and dozens of films of these index cards that were written over a period of nearly 50 years by Pere Loiselle as he moved from parish to parish. He got help from several dedicated nuns. They are available through the LDS (you order by letter of the alphabet for one of the surnames that you're researching) but many major genealogy libraries have the entire collection in house, such as the Allen library in Fort Wayne, Detroit Public Library (Burton Collection), Newberry Library in Chicago, etc.

Next you need to consider the PRDH from the Universite de Montreal. It is the definitive resource on all French records from 1500-1799. They're also starting to hit the early 1800s which is phenomenal. It's not completely free, but you can find the records for free. You just have to pay for additional info off the records and the family links. http://www.genealogie.umontreal.ca/en/

Now comes the hard part. The rest of Canada is not so easy to point to and say "go here". Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org both have considerable Canadian resources, but with serious gaps. Canada is the second largest country in the world. When looking for records from Nova Scotia you need an entirely different set of sites than you need for Manitoba or British Columbia. Canada (like Britain) has a 100 year privacy law on records so you need to know where you're going before you start on the trip. You won't be able to just type in a name and find the records.

The following have been very helpful to me through the years:
http://www.ingeneas.com/
http://www.genealogy.gc.ca/
http://www.canadiangenealogy.net/
http://www.islandnet.com/~jveinot/cghl/cghl.html
http://genealogy.allinfoabout.com/subjects/submarriages_can.html

If you have specific questions or need a sense of direction, feel free to contact me. I've been doing Canadian research for over 25 years and love the region. It's not hard...it's just not in one nice little package. I also live 20 minutes from the border, so anything you need I may be able to find.

Good luck!

Answer 2

All of the major genealogy sites have Canadian records; many of my lines go through Nova Scotia and Ontario, and I can use the same basic sites there as for the U.S. connections - ancestry.com, genealogy.com, familysearch.org, etc.

I will say that Canadian records tend not to have the amount of coverage as American records, so you often have to use libraries, printed sources, and FHC's instead of just clicking around the net... but you have to do that anyway to make a good genealogy.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Take your name you have in Canada and use Search for that name and Canada and Genealogy and you will come up with a bunch of links to different sites.

Answer 4

There are tons of Canadian free sites.

Start here..............
http://www.cyndislist.com/canada.htm