Genealogy Chat

I have been a member of Ancestry for several years but my membership has just elapsed. I wa wondering if anyone could recomend another site - or is ancestry the best value for money? I am researching mainly in England but have some intersting branches of the family who went to Canada. thanks in advance for your help and advice. Alice

Regarding your Canadian rellies - when did they emigrate and which province did they go to?

Find My Past is probably the best bet for English/Welsh records and the quality of their indexing is far superior to that on "Ancestory".

For information beyond basic BMDs, it's worth joining the Rootsweb mailing lists which are relevant to the region where your roots are. The same tactic is recommended for Canada, assuming you know which areas your relatives settled in.

Joining a mailing list allows you to pick the brains of local specialists, who can recommend the best sources of information for their area - not just the online material.

Alison

both of these are free sites:

http://automatedgenealogy.com/index.html

http://www.collectionscanada.ca/index-e.html

If you know the area they went to then google and you may find alocla family history society

eg I found this for Hamilton Ontario when researching there

http://www.hwcn.org/link/HBOGS/

Thank you to everyone who replied - I wil look into finding mailing lists. My Canadian rellies went to Prescott Ontario I think they went to work on the railroad. Thank you for your help on a boxing day evening - that's dedication! Alice

Although there are many transcription errors, i still find ancestry the best. In my case I have some really odd names and if I try to find one branch of my tree of FMP I get less results than with ancestry. I'm also disappointed with FMP 1911. I paid for the 6 months and only found a small proportion of the people I was looking for.

Prescott is in Grenville Co, on the banks of the St Lawrence next to the border xing to Ogdensburg NY, 90 km S of Ottawa.

For Ontario, I think you need Ancestry, at least for a time.
Ancestry has BMDs, Censuses 1851-1911, and passenger/border xings.
Note you can search Ancestry for free - it's just that you can't see full details nor images for your hits.
This can be very useful when Ancestry allows you to search with some family structure. E.g., an 1891 soundex search for John Scott, s/o Robert gets:

John Scot Robert township, York North, Ontario abt 1878 location info

and I can now (knowing how to misspell Scott) easily spot this guy in a look up at the LAC link to get the image
http://data2.collectionscanada.gc.ca/1891/pdf/30953_148182-00261.pdf


The most useful link is the LAC gateway:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/genealogy/index-e.html
This has links to WW1 attestation papers, and various free census indices.
1861-1871 are the awkard ones - the rest are free at LAC or AG (followed by grabbing the omage from LAC)
There's usually only the individual lookup at the LDS site for 1861-71:
https://www.familysearch.org/s/collection/list#page=1®ion=NORTH_AMERICA

Ontario was known as Canada West and as Upper Canada pre-1867
It's hard to reconstruct h/h's from the LDS individual records if the surnames vary, and there's no free images yet.
Grenville Co transcriptions for these years are at:
http://ontariocensus.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

Ancestry had a licence to use LAC's images, but, as part of the deal, they are to turn over their indices and linked digital images to LAC next year.
I think they should be free online at LAC next summer (along with the 1916 prairie census).

There are partial transcriptions (no images) of ON BMDs at:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~onvsr/
These M's go thru 1927

Ancestry has B thru 1911, M thru 1926, D thru 1936 - with images.
Actually, a couple more years are public (deaths are always public, but there's no published index for 70y, so unless you pretty much know the details, it's prohibitively expensive to get a 70y search done).

Just in case they went into farming, there's concession maps at:
http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/SearchMapframes.php

If they're there by 1901, then 1901 has their full dob - 1911 just has the month. Both have the year of immigration.

Incidentally, if they're Brits from the UK, there'll be no naturalizations.
All Canadian courts could award was British citizenship. Canadian citizenship only came into being in the late 1940s with the formation of the Commonwealth (sim. for Ozzies, Kiwis, etc.).

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Anyways, what I'ld recommend is a World Ancestry sub for a month or two - there's a 7% discount for 3 months, then switching to UK only for a year, and maybe getting a World for 1 month again then.
This is assuming you can't get access to a local library with a library Ancestry sub, or easy access to a nearby LDS Family History Centre.

WOW! Thank you for that! My Rosbrooks are quite easy - because of the names - James and John may be common but if there is an Ambrose somewhere in the name he is usually mine!
All these tips you have given me will be very useful - I will be using them to try to 'pad out' what i already have! Thank you once again. Alice