Canada
CENSUS RECORDS OF CANADA
VITAL RECORDS OF CANADA
Index to Toronto Jewish Vital Records
Bill Gladstone is a professional genealogist and Book Review Editor for AVOTAYNU. He recently posted to his website, http://billgladstone.ca, an index to Toronto births, marriages and deaths. Gladstone states that he compiled the indexes for his own use after realizing that existing indexes contained many errors because the handwritten originals are hard to read and were typically transcribed by people with little knowledge of Jewish first or last names. “Too often I couldn’t find a record because the surname had been terribly mangled,” said Gladstone. “It happened enough times that I decided I needed my own indexes.”The index of some 6,000 birth records ranges from 1906 to 1917, the last year for which the records are not subject to privacy restrictions. The marriage records range from 1905 to 1936, the death records from 1939 to 1942. There is no charge to access the index.The marriage index also contains some 400 records from the registers of Rabbi Y. L. Graubart, who led the city’s main Polish-Jewish congregation in the 1920s and 1930s. The Graubart records are especially significant because they give the specific birthplaces of both bride and groom.
NATURALIZATION RECORDS OF CANADA
Library and Archives Canada Genealogy Portal
New Version of “Naturalization Records, 1915–1951”
https://jgs-montreal.org/Avotaynu-Nat.pdf
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has released a new version of the online database “Naturalization Records, 1915-1951.” The nominal index has been extended with the addition of more than 93,000 names and now covers the years 1915–1939, inclusively. Work is ongoing to extend the index to 1951. This database is one of the few Canadian genealogical resources specifically designed to benefit researchers having roots other than British. The reference numbers indicated in the database can be used to request copies of the original naturalization records, which are held by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. The project was initially suggested to LAC by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal who volunteered to create the index. The announcement is at http://tinyurl.com/LACNatural. The search engine is at http://tinyurl.com/LACNaturalSearch. When submitting a surname, the search engine produces results for any name that includes the string of characters. Thus, searching for “Levy” produced results for that surname as well as results for Nalevykin.
Obtaining Naturalization Records
https://www.jgs-montreal.org/naturalizations.html
JGS-Montreal offers a service to request naturalization files for those not eligible (for a modest fee that supports our other data indexing efforts).
You can write to naturalizations@jgs-montreal.org.
Alan Greenberg
President, JGS-Montreal
https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/search/Pages/ancestors-search.aspx
MILITARY RECORDS OF CANADA
Digitization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Personnel Service Files
http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/first-world-war/personnel-records/Pages/Search.aspxLibrary and Archives Canada has announced that the indexing and digitization of 620,000 of its “Personnel Records of the First World War” database is now complete. Copies of the original documents are presented. They include a host of information including date/place of birth, name/address of next of kin and other data. Information about the project can be found at https://tinyurl.com/LACWWIIntro. The actual search page is at https://tinyurl.com/LACWWISearch. This database includes names indexed from the following First World War personnel records: • Files of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF): Soldiers, Nurses and Chaplains • Files of CEF volunteers who were rejected at Valcartier • Non-Permanent Active Militia Files
• Files of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and Newfoundland Forestry Corps
• Imperial War Service Gratuity Files