Finding Your Canadian Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide, by Sherry Irvine and Dave Obee. Softcover, large format, 270 pages. Ancestry Publishing, Provo, Utah. $18.95. Available through Ancestry.com
Several Jewish-Canadian historians have done an admirable job in recent decades of demonstrating how thoroughly Jews were involved in early Canadian affairs, ranging from the fur trade to the expansion of British North America to the settlement of pre-Confederate cities from Halifax to Victoria. Writers such as Sheldon and Judith Godfrey (in their book Search Out the Land), Irving Abella (A Coat of Many Colors) and Gerald Tulchinsky (in his brand-new Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey) have uncovered multitudes of remarkable and adventurous Jews pursuing happiness and fortunes in the territories that were confederated into the great Dominion of Canada between 1867 and 1949.
I forget which book I saw it in, but my mind’s eye vividly retains the image of some crazed Jewish adventurer—somebody’s Uncle Mendel, perhaps—happily smoking a peace pipe beside a tepee and campfire with the Indians of the Canadian Northwest. The odds are very slight (much less than one percent), however, that this was your grandfather’s Uncle Mendel. Despite the small number of Jews who ventured into these northern latitudes in the 19th century, and despite the first wave of Jewish refugees that landed here after 1880, the great masses of Jewish immigrants did not begin to arrive until the early 20th century (between 1904 and 1914).
Thus, likely only a very small proportion of Jewish researchers will need to refer to the 18th and 19th century material discussed in this book, just as they would likely not need the resources on aboriginal peoples or Acadian and Loyalist settlers. Catholic church records are perhaps useful for those with mixed religious background.
Still, researchers will benefit from the succinct summary of resources of the federal government’s Library and Archives Canada and its one-stop-shopping website, the Canadian Genealogy Centre. The censuses (up to 1911), immigration indexes, Soldiers of the First World War database and the phenomenal naturalizations index (courtesy of the Jewish genealogical societies of Montreal and Ottawa) are only some of the treasures available. An online database of the famed LI-RA-MA Collection, otherwise known as the Russian Consular Records, has also quietly been added to this site in the last couple of years.
The book offers chapters on all Canadian provinces and territories, but my guess is that those on Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba (with their respective Jewish communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg) will be of greatest interest to “Our Crowd.” Oh, also Saskatchewan, for the many daring souls who settled nearly a century ago in Hirsh, Estevan, Edenbridge, and other Jewish farming communities on the prairies. Researchers with mixed marriages in the family may also find ancestors anywhere from the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, to Dawson City, Yukon.
As a quick reference guide to Canadian genealogy, this book is quite adequate and seems all the more attractive by its relatively inexpensive price of $18.95.
Bill Gladstone
