With the death of the old year and the birth of the new, it is a good time to discuss vital statistics records: documents of births, marriages and deaths. Two practical concerns with the use of official government documents are their availability and accessibility; both vary depending on the jurisdiction.
Not all records are openly available to all researchers. Unless you can prove you are an immediate relative (parent, sibling, child) of your person of interest, you will likely have to deal with record restrictions. Each province regulates the amount of time that must pass before each type of record is available and this information can be found on the government website for the province where the event occurred.
If the records you are interested in are open to research, then the ways you are able to access them varies in ease and cost depending on the governing body. In the worst case (e.g. Alberta) you have to go through a registry agent office (their fees vary), and pay for a search to find out whether a record of the event exists. In contrast, some provinces have record indexes accessible on-line; you can confirm the event has a record and order it on-line for delivery by mail. If you are really lucky (and are searching through select records in the eastern provinces), the record may have been digitized and may be viewed on-line through services such as Ancestry.ca (for a fee).
Vital statistics records are important for a number of reasons: of course, they provide an official date for a life event, but they also list details of the event such as complete names, relationships, witnesses, occupations and locations. From these details, inferences about your ancestors’ lives can be drawn and hopefully, tested against independent evidence. All this will assist you in finding and recounting the details of your family history. So, at the end of the old year, look back to vital statistics records and forward to some great family history stories!
This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.