First, unearth your family history
Genealogy websites were the first resources that Matt May, a career consultant for tech workers, tapped into to unravel his family’s migration from Quebec to Massachusetts, where he was born. He immediately found his great-grandmother’s baptism certificate through a free website, FamilySearch, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He said he also found a great-grandmother going back 10 generations, Hélène Desportes, who may have been the first person of French descent born in Canada.
“That just blew me away,” said Mr. May. “It’s like winning the lottery,” he added.
To complete his application, Mr. May requested copies of the baptismal records through the National Library and Archives of Québec, which says it has been inundated with requests from Americans. Last month alone, it received 1,969 requests for archival records, compared with just 87 at the same time last year.
Churches were among Canada’s first keepers of vital records, a mostly invisible role, until now.
In the subterranean level of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, two full-time archivists devote hundreds of hours to call up sometimes barely legible documents dating back as far as 1800. They are stored in a climate-controlled vault containing registries from parishes all over southern Ontario.
“My expectation was that this is going to start to slow down, but it has not,” said Claire Wilton, the archivist at the diocese. She said she and other religious archives colleagues had received no communications from the government warning them about how they might be affected by the rules change.
Searches can be all-consuming, said Sarah McDougall, the archives assistant, whose desk is adorned with scraps of paper containing biographical details she’s hunting. The records are often out of order or illegible, and they may be missing the names of parents, especially for couples married in the 1800s.
