At Canadiana.org we will take a look at the section for Early Canadiana Online.
This section holds full text content about historical Canada, including books, magazines and government documents. These works are from the time of first European settlers until about 1950s, and span 21 European and Aboriginal languages.
This section is for you if your ancestors were early arrivals, in the fur trade, or if you have Metis or Aboriginal ancestors (also check Aboriginal newspapers in Part I). The various medical journals may hold names of ancestors or tell about epidemics that occurred. Here is where you will also find treaties and acts of government.
This time I searched for my husband's Nolin family as they have been in Canada a long time and entered in the fur trade. A few were famous interpreters at trials and meetings. This shows how many Nolin results are in each collection in this section...
I chose Hudson's Bay Company, as that would give me results for the Nolin family that worked and lived in that area. The last entry on page 1 interested me...
The Hudson's Bay Company's
land tenures..
At the top I click on the page numbers that match my search and the second one gives me lot numbers that were granted to Augustin and Jean Nolin.
When finished browsing use the "back to results" link, otherwise the browser back button will just take you back to the last page you looked at.
I tried a search for Seale, not expecting too much, as it usually reads as "scale".
I filter my results on the left. For the "search in" menu I choose text. I change the year span to when my ancestor arrived. I then checkmarked the "Genealogy and local history" collection. Using the filters cuts the number of results to a more manageable size, making the task less daunting. You can also use the minus sign in your search. I was getting many results for "voters lists" which I've seen before and don't need. When I type in the search box "Seale -voters" the number of results went down by about a third. Adding "-directory" again lessened the number of results. Seems like you can keep adding minus keywords to pare down your results. You can also use the plus sign, but I find it doesn't work as well.
Some results were militia lists, but one result looked promising as my "Seale others" lived in that area...
There are 3 pages which match my search. Good thing I looked as here they talk about George Seale, the brother of Joseph. I have Joseph on my tree but not George. This tells me about the lands he bought and sold, who and when he married, how many children he had and some of their names, etc. Now I can add George to my tree and do more research on him.
As always, I add the URL to the web link section in the Sources column on their profile page of my Ancestry tree.
You can search your ancestor's place name too and remember the program may not be properly reading the keyword you type, like my seale vs scale, or your ancestor name may be there but too faded to read.
From the home page you can choose a collection of interest and click browse a collection.
This is useful when you don't really know what you're looking for and want to see what is available. You may come across some American publications.
When you choose a result you will be in the View tab by default, and clicking on the About tab will give you information on the publication you are looking at.
You can search within the document on any page.
Happy hunting!
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