Canadian passenger lists 1865-1935 to be digitized and indexed

The Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Ancestry.ca, the largest Canadian family history web site announced, at the Ontario Genealogical Society's (OGS) annual seminar, a strategic partnership to make more resources accessible to Canadians interested in online family research, as noted in press release out today.

Initially, Ancestry.ca and LAC will focus on indexing the Quebec City passenger lists from 1870 - 1900, which comprise more than 750,000 names. The digital images of these and other passenger lists are already available on the LAC web site. The index for Quebec City will be available free of charge on www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/genealogy as well as on Ancestry.ca. LAC and Ancestry.ca will continue to work together to ensure that eventually the entire Canadian passenger list collection from 1865 to 1935, which includes ports in Halifax, St. John, Vancouver, Victoria and North Sydney, is digitized and indexed.

In addition to the Canadian passenger list collection, later this year Ancestry.ca and LAC will also make available border crossings records from the United States to Canada that took place between 1908 and 1935, and other Canadian immigration forms later this year. These additions will add to Ancestry.ca's already expansive Canadian Border Crossing Collection, which already includes more than 4 million names of individuals who crossed the Canadian-U.S. border between 1895 and 1956.