Toronto Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society

May 2019 meeting and AGM

Our next Toronto Branch meeting will take place on Monday 27 May starting at 7:30 pm at Lansing United Church at Poyntz Avenue and Beecroft Road in North York.

We’ll begin with our Annual General Meeting. Please join us as we take stock of Branch accomplishments and challenges over the past year, share plans and priorities for the year ahead and elect the Branch Executive Committee for 2019-2020.

Following the AGM, author Kristen den Hartog will share her experiences in partnering with her sister to trace their working-class family from the slums of Victorian London to Canada in the 1930s. Kristen will talk about the thrill of weaving intimate family stories together with broader historical events in writing The Cowkeeper’s Wish: A Genealogical Journey—part family memoir, part social history. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

The Members Network will be gathering in advance of the main meeting from 6:15 on. All Branch members are welcome to join in and share their family history experiences and questions in an informal setting.

Lansing United Church is a short walk from the Sheppard-Yonge subway station (look for the exit to Poyntz Avenue). Parking on local streets is free after 6:00 p.m and there are pay parking options nearby. Please leave the few spaces in the church parking lot for members with accessibility needs.

Toronto Branch meetings are free to attend and open to all. Visit our Meetings page to find out more.

Book cover showing a steamboat and two children at the seaside

Toronto Research Tip: Newspapers

Newspapers are a favourite resource for family historians. Researchers can find invaluable leads in birth, marriage and death notices, social columns, reports on crime and court proceedings, and business advertisements.

And increasingly, newspapers are being digitized and made available online. Digital versions of historical issues of two major Toronto dailies, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, can be accessed free of charge through the public library system and various academic institutions. But don’t overlook the smaller papers—you’ll find unexpected treasures in them too.

Ontario Community Newspapers, hosted by OurDigitalWorld, and part of the OurOntario.ca portal, is a collection of free newspaper resources: indexes, clippings and full digitized issues. You’ll find an excellent set of papers from the Toronto neighbourhood of Weston, digitized in cooperation with the Weston Historical Society, including the Times & Guide, with issues back to 1900, and the Weston Times, with issues back to 1890.

Look for papers from surrounding municipalities too, as they often picked up Toronto news. Other contributors to Ontario Community Newspapers include the Newmarket Public Library, the Whitchurch-Stouffville Public Library and the Clarington Public Library.

For more on Toronto-area newspapers and how to find them, check out our Newspapers page.