Ontario Civil Registration

“Ontario, Canada Births, 1869-1913” (2,172,142)

“Ontario, Canada, Marriages, 1801-1928” (3,393,366)

“Ontario, Canada, Deaths, 1869-1938 and Deaths Overseas, 1939-1947” (2,190,030)

I use these collections from several perspectives. The first is obviously to reconstruct missing details. Another is to pinpoint a family when I don’t have a location in Ontario. Often families moved between the censuses which can leave you at a loss as to where they were. In my Irish immigrant research, I always look at marriages and deaths for any reference to a birth place in Ireland or parent’s names.

The Ancestry website also suggests related databases to these which can supplement your research. It is always wise to consult these.

Now the birth and death databases are somewhat self-explanatory. It is the marriage database that requires some discussion. This database is actually the indexing of two organizations; Ancestry and the Genealogical Research Library in Brampton, Ontario.Ancestry furnishes an important inventory of what is on this database. The civil registration portion includes marriages 1869-1928. The period previous includes two important sources, which I use all the time in client research: District Marriage Registers (1801-1858) and Roman Catholic Marriage Registers (1828-1870).

Since there was so much cross border migration, both ways, between the Canada and the United States, databases such as these can help you solve difficult research problems in either country. Even if a record does not provide a birth place in Ireland, a place of death or marriage may help open up other resources which will list where the family was from in Ireland.