Why this Toronto man is being flooded with requests from Americans about their Canadian ancestors

More on the demand to prove citizenship links under C-3:

…Unlike record seekers before the new citizenship rule, Pugh said the people who reach out these days don’t usually have much information on their Canadian ancestors to guide the search. It creates more work for archivists.

“Because they don’t know where their baptism or that marriage took place, sometimes they don’t even know the city, they might just say, ‘I have a relative who was baptized in Ontario in 1850. Can you find it?’” he noted.

“It takes so much longer to prove a negative because we keep saying well, it could just be in this next register and so we have to look. So it’s much more time intensive than somebody who knows exactly which register it’s in.”

Also, records could be lost after being passed around multiple congregations as local churches amalgamated and separated over time, Pugh said. Variations of spelling, such as when a silent letter was missed or a name ended with an “ie” instead of a “y,” can all make the search that much more difficult, he added.

Where to start your genealogy search for citizenship

So far, Pugh estimated that his office has a 20 per cent success rate in searches based on the number of people that have come forward and the number of certified documents issued.

Due to the volume and complexity of requests, the United Church of Canada Archives has started to charge a $25 research fee and raised the fee for the certification of a pre-1900 certificate to $50 from $30 in order to hire a student archivist….

Source: Why this Toronto man is being flooded with requests from Americans about their Canadian ancestors