Have you ever tried exploring local council minutes for your family history research? Many are freely available online, and they’re full of names! Your ancestors might appear in the minutes because they were council members or appointed to carry out various municipal functions. Or they might have interacted with council as residents: to obtain a shop or tavern license, petition to have a road opened or a sidewalk constructed, complain about neighbourhood issues, or […]
Research Tips
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Annual tax assessment rolls are the most important municipal records for Toronto genealogical research. These are valuable resources that can help you track changes in family circumstances. Depending on their date, they may tell you who owned a property and who lived on it, with addresses, occupations, ages and other information about buildings and their occupants. Take builder Joseph Gearing for example, whose home in the Yonge-Carlton area of the city is pictured below in […]
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 […]
When it comes to putting flesh on the bones of your genealogical research, a great place to start is by seeking out any accounts of your ancestor’s life that may already have been written. Toronto family historians are in luck because we have several sources of compiled biographies and biographical indexes to draw on. These include the Biographical Card Index at Toronto Reference Library as well as an extensive collection of obituaries compiled by Library […]