Showing posts with label Land Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Land Records. Show all posts

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Township Papers of the Province of Ontario

Mike More, the vice president of the OGS wrote this notice in the OGS e-Weekly Digest yesterday -

"The Township Papers (Archives of Ontario RG 1-58) are a large collection of documents that date from c1783 to c1870.

The documents include copies of orders-in-council, location certificates and tickets, assignments, certificates of settlement duties, correspondence and some wills. The records are arranged by township, town, or village and, within each township, by concession and then lot number. When a document dealt specifically with a particular piece of property and did not appear to fit within another records series, it was placed within the Township Papers. Once you know the particular lot of land the settler was granted, it is worth looking at the Township Papers since there may be information about the settler.

There are 540 reels of Township Papers with 528,000 pages of information, held by the Archives of Ontario in Toronto. An index to these would be a tremendous resource for Ontario genealogists but it is a HUGE job. The best indexers would be people who know the township and have an interest in the people therein. Since most of the material is hand written, everything has to be proofed, i.e. two people have to read the whole file looking for names.

OGS is considering a project to index the Township Papers of Ontario. We will need a number of volunteers to do the work but first we somebody to lead the Ontario Township Indexing Project. Are you up to the challenge? Would you like to be part of the team that brings these resources to light"?

On a personal note, this indexing project would be a great help to us who use these papers on a regular basis. I urge you to consider this as a worthwhile project.

For more information or to offer your services, contact Mike More at vp@ogs.on.ca

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Nova Scotia Land Papers 1765-1800

The Nova Scotia Archives has gathered land records (1765-1800), and has put them on it's online database.

The information that is on the website says that “The records are a collection of petitions made to government by individuals or groups of people seeking grants of Crown Land for settlement purposes in early Nova Scotia”.

The database contains 11,464 names, and links from the petitioner's name to the fully digitized document files created for that particular land grant — 1890 files, containing 9259 image that were scanned.

They say that if you are searching for online information about early land settlement in Nova Scotia, you have come to the right place – you get to read the original document! The land records are from the "Record Group 20, Series A, Land Petitions and other material."

I did come across records belonging to Andrew BARCLAY, in Shelburne County, which completed, for me, his land records that I had been looking for from 1783 to 1785.

The website for the archives is http://gov.ns.ca/nsarm

The land records are at http://gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/landpapers

In addition, there are some records here from New Brunswick before it became a separate province in 1784.

Postscript: I am slowly going through the Nova Scotia Historical Newspaper Records for news about the Barclay family from Shelbure County, and the Webster family from Kentville, Kings County, although it does seen that I have not made much progress.

You can go to http://gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/newspapers