Ontario Municipal Records - A Beginner's Guide

By Fraser Dunford

This guidebook is an introduction to the long list of municipal records that are helpful to family history researchers. It provides a brief history of municipal records that have been collected in Ontario, Upper Canada & Canada West, and a short description of records that researchers can find. Changing boundaries of districts, counties and regional municipalities over a 200 year period are confusing to even experienced researchers. The author included maps that clearly show those boundary changes from 1788 to 1979.

Municipalities provided an astonishing variety of records, all of them local (by definition!) and many just loaded with names of people living in that locality. This source is not well-known because: (a) you must know the municipality your ancestor was in, (b) you have to know where that municipality’s records are now, and (c) the records will almost certainly be completely, totally, absolutely un-indexed.

Contents include:

• Introduction - The Purpose of this book
• A brief history of Ontario Municipalities
• Maps showing changes of boundaries 1788-1979 including:
  • Maps of District boundaries 1788-1792, 1798, 1826, 1838, 1845,
  • Maps of County boundaries 1792, 1851, 1882
  • Map of Regional Municipality boundaries 1979
• Municipal Records - List of, with descriptions
• Glossary of terms
• Notes

Details:

• 32 Pages
  
• 8-1/2 x 11"
  
• Maps/illustrations
• Softcover - Coil bound
• This edition published by Global Heritage Press, Carleton Place, 2023 under ISBN 978-1-77240-210-0
  
• Originally published by Ontario Genealogical Society, 2015 under ISBN 978-0-7779-3447-0