How to Find War of 1812 Related Documents
for Your Ancestors
Part 1:
Upper Canada Land Petitions
Published August 14, 2019
This is a series of blogs on how to find Upper Canadian
documents from about the time of the War of 1812, but some of these strategies
could be applied to other British provinces.
This discussion will focus on documents from before, during, and after
the war.
It
will help you with your research if you know where your ancestors were living
prior to the war and up to about 1850. If
you have already looked at the land petitions or know where your ancestors were
living you can skip ahead to Part 2.
A
number of war related claims and petitions were made well after the war and
some people moved to other areas during this time period. Militias were recruited from different areas
within Upper Canada and finding those documents requires knowing which regiments
and corps were recruiting from where your ancestor was living. The Upper Canada Land Petitions and other
sources can provide clues that will help you discover which collections of
records you want to look at.
My
direct ancestral veteran of the war was Ebenezer Blair. In 1811, his third child, Catherine, was
baptized on April 7, 1811 in Williamstown, northeast of Cornwall, Ontario. In 1824, Ebenezer made a land petition as a
resident of Vaughan Township, north of the Town of York, in which he stated
that he had served in the militia during the War of 1812. The Upper Canada Land petition was the only
documented evidence that we had that confirmed that Ebenezer was living near
the Town of York and had served in the Upper Canada Militia.
From these
two documents we knew that sometime between April, 1811 and 1824, Ebenezer and
his family had moved west. Family
history suggested that he had lived somewhere near the Town of York during the
war. We hoped they were right and looked
at the York Militias first.
There
were three York militias. Which one did
Ebenezer serve in? The 1st
York was recruited from the townships north of York, the 2nd York from
was the western part of York County which included what would later become
several townships in the area from Mississauga to Burlington, and the 3rd
York from the Town of York and the townships to the east. About 1990 my cousin, Don Blair, made a trip
to Ottawa to look at the surviving militia payrolls. After hours of looking at microfilm he
discovered the first payroll with Private Ebenezer Blair’s name on it in the 2nd
York Militia documents. By the end of
the day he had several documents and discovered that Ebenezer had been at the
Battle of Lundy’s Lane in 1814. These
militia payroll documents are now online and will be discussed in the next How
To blog. Some men never served in a
militia or corps but their names may still be found in war related documents.
If
your ancestor was living in Upper Canada during the war, he or she may have
made a land petition before, during, or after the war. If the petition was made about the time of
the war it may help you find his militia or other war related documents. Even if the petition was made decades after
the war it still may provide you with clues as to where he was living earlier
and his past history in the province.
Petitions made by women may be found under their maiden or married
surnames. Some people also made more
than one land petition.
If you
want to look for ancestral petitions online you can find them and a helpful
search engine at Collections Canada at
There
is a lot of useful advice on this page.
You will particularly want to look at the Search Results before you
start a name search. The Search Results
will give you Surname, Given Names, Place, Year, Volume, Bundle, Petition
Number, Reference, and Microfilm Number and other information. The paper petitions were numbered and originally
filed by the first letter of the surname and the date of the petition in
Bundles. The bundles were than filed in Volumes. Later these documents were microfilmed and it
is the digitized microfilm images that you will be viewing online. Reference RG 1 L3 was the Upper Canada Land
Petitions.
Note
that you can also look for Lower Canada Land Petitions from 1764 to 1841.
Back
at the top of the Land Petitions of Upper Canada, 1763-1865, in the left-hand
corner you will see a link to the search engine at “Search:
Database”. I knew that there are
a few different variations in the spelling of the Blair surname but I tried my
version first. It is sometimes helpful
to search for just the surname (or part of it) first without the given names as
this my give results for petitions made by other family members or results for
misspellings of the given names.
Ebenezer was sometimes recorded as Abner. My search gave 32 Blair results, one of which
was Ebenezer. Ebenezer’s land petition
was in Volume 46, in Bundle B 14, in Petition 51 on Microfilm C-1626. Yes, you will need to record all these
numbers to find the petition.
One
problem with the search engine is that a woman’s petition may have been filed
under her maiden or married surname so that Ebenezer’s wife’s petition, as the
daughter of a Loyalist, could have appeared in the search engine as Janet
Blair/Young or Janet Young/Blair. This
becomes a problem if you are looking for a daughter of an ancestor and do not
know her married surname. If I was
looking for a sister of Janet and did not know her married surname, I would
have to look at all the search results that had the Young surname first and
second.
I
now had enough information to find Ebenezer’s land petition. You have to go back to the Land Petitions
webpage, scroll down to How to Obtain Copies, and click on the “online”
link. This will take you to the first
page of the 327 microfilms.
The
link to the first page is
Microfilm
C-1626 is on the first page. There are
1044 pages on this microfilm and the search engine did not give me a page
number! I had two search options with
different advantages.
The
first option was to make the search area smaller by dividing it in half. I jumped to page 500 using the page Go to
box just above the image on the right side.
On page 500, I looked at the tag in the image at the bottom of that page
that told me it was in Volume 45, Bundle B13.
Sometimes there is no tag at the bottom of the image and you have to
skip ahead to find a page with an identifying tag. As Ebenezer’s claim was in Volume 46, I now
knew that it was somewhere between pages 501 and 1044. I kept dividing the search area approximately
in half until I had found the correct Volume and Bundle. On page 900, I discovered that I was in the
correct set of documents. In the top
left or right hand corner of the document page, there is usually a petition
number. On this page it was 25a which was
the 2nd page of Petition 25.
As I wanted Petition 51 I had to skip ahead to find the one I
wanted. The number of pages in a
petition averages around 4 but a few have as many as 100 pages. I skipped ahead to page 1000 and found
Petition 54a and then made small jumps back to Petition 51. This option works better if the petition is
near the middle of the microfilm.
The
second option is sometimes faster than the first. Directly above the Go to page number box is a
Help link. Further down on Help page is
a List of Content of Microfilms. If I
had looked at Microfilm C-1626, I would have seen that it contained three
Volumes and that Volume 46, Bundle B 14, Pages 1 to 68 was at the end of the
microfilm. This search option is
particularly helpful for petitions that are at the beginning or end of the
microfilm and for Bundles where the surnames start with U or V, where the
bundles are not always in alphabetical order.
If
you have difficulty interpreting the information in the petition, you can send
me an email with a detailed description of the problem and I will try to
resolve it for you. Hopefully there will
be some clues as to where your ancestor was living. These petitions are like Forrest Gump’s box of
chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.
If
the Upper Canada Land Petitions did not help you discover where your ancestor
was living during the war, there are other documents that may also contain this
information. I will write more about
these other collections in upcoming blogs.
Fred
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