[Wrapping up a week of special guest posts on the theme of East Coast roots, is the always lovely and talented Lauren. If you missed out on the series, check out the rest of the East Coast Guest Posts. Special thanks to everyone who shared their stories here.]
By Lauren Oostveen
From NSARM
If you follow @ns_archives on Twitter, you may catch me saying that we’re often very busy here at Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management. Besides our normal day-to-day activities like helping researchers, arranging and describing records, archival appraisal, corporate records management support, and conducting tours and training, since 2007 we’ve been busy bringing thousands of birth, death, and marriage records to the web.
In Nova Scotia, 100 years after a person’s birth, 75 years after a marriage, and 50 years after a death, records get transferred from the Vital Statistics Office to be held permanently at the archives. These records are the key to discovering your past. Knowledge that may have been lost through the passing of generations remains in the form of birth, death, and marriage certificates.
We’ve made building your Nova Scotian family tree a lot easier with the NovaScotiaGenealogy.com site, which upon its launch in the spring of 2007 had almost 1,000,000 records available in a fully digitized format–for free. Last year, we added over 120,000 files to the website, and are now in the final stages of adding a further 28,000 names. This involved scanning. A LOT of scanning.
From NSARM
A full-time scanner and a full-time transcriptionist have been going strong since early 2009, digitizing birth, death, and marriage records from around the province. We’re also adding almost 18,000 Halifax City death records from our main website to NovaScotiaGenealogy.com, giving us a total of over 46,000 new records. All this new material will be uploaded to the existing website sometime in the next couple of months.
If you want to try looking up your Nova Scotian relatives on NovaScotiaGenealogy.com, you need to know a few things about the person you’re looking for. First and foremost is, obviously, their name. You should also have a rough idea of when the person was born, when they were married, or the year of their death. If you are looking for a common name (for example, there are almost 400 results for Angus MacDonald), you might want to try and find out where they lived and/or their middle name. Mis-spellings of names can be very common, especially with “Mc” and “Mac” names, so be sure to try various spellings.
From NSARM
As for my family history… it’s not in Nova Scotia, unfortunately, so I can’t take advantage of NovaScotiaGenealogy.com. My father’s family came to Canada from Holland in the 1950s (by way of Pier 21), and settled in Chatham, Ontario. My grandfather’s people immigrated to PEI in the 1800s from Ireland, and my grandmother’s family came to New Brunswick from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Typically Canadian, but I enjoy having an odd last name. Fittingly, the “Oost” in Oostveen means “East”… and for the time being I also remain East Coast by choice.
Lauren is a 20-something communicator and social media fan meditating on life from the back of the film. You can find her blog at The Dartmouth Soundsystem.
Kimberly Walsh is a social media and online community manager. You can follow her on Twitter @AliasGrace.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
when the geneology site was launched, i looked up some of my family information, and found the death registration certificate of my dad’s older brother, signed by my grandfather … he died in a car accident when he was in his 29 in 1940, and it was very emotional for me to find this bit of my family’s history.
my dad’s family came to nova scotia from scotland, although they were originally from ireland. my great-grandfather came over with my grandmother and her husband, and her sister … but he went back to scotland because there were too many mosquitos in cape breton for his liking!
Thanks for that link, I immediately found my great grandfather’s death.
I did some research at the NS archives before moving to England.
Got the records on my great grandfather who emigrated from Devon in the mid 19th century. He entered canada as a “farmer” which was then a very good position because it meant land ownership. He acquired a lovely plot of land on Lake MicMac in Dartmouth and worked as a farmer (now site of MicMac tavern!)
In England I found his birth records in a museum that was once the school house he attended. It located on the street of his birth. I even saw the house of his birth.
But it turns out he was really a factory worker, not a farmer, so he lied!
Rogue.
It was fascinating to connect his life in Nova Scotia and Devon, England. I ended up having my children over there – Bristol – six generations after he left- what would he have made of that, I wonder?
I loved researching at the NS archives. It was addictive and I just wanted more.
I recall there were about six years missing around 1906-1910. Not sure why. Is this still the case?
Hey Gail!
The years we currently have online are:
Births
1864-1877
1836-1907
Marriages
Bonds 1763-1864
Registrations 1864-1932
Deaths
1864-1877
1908-1957
Some years are spotty (registration wasn’t really enforced in the “early days”) but we are adding more records all of the time!
Thanks, fascinating, I will def. pop up there one of these days