Guest post by Jane E MacNamara, Toronto Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society
It is major news for researchers with early Ontario ancestors—especially those who are far away from the Archives of Ontario. Thanks to support from the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society and the efforts of our volunteer “file name rectifiers” Kim Carson, Bill Dawson, Eileen MacDonald, Janice Nickerson, Melanie Parker, Carole Sisto, Carol Ufford, and me—this wonderful old index is available free for anyone with internet access.
Access the OLRI online: https://archive.org/details/ontariolandrecordsindex.
The Ontario Land Records Index (OLRI) is an index to those settlers who were allocated Crown land in Upper Canada/Canada West/Ontario. Its coverage ranges from the earliest grants of the 1780s, to acquisitions administered by the Canada Company and Peter Robinson, to grants for military service in the Fenian Raids and South African War in the 20th century.
It is important to recognize that when these settlers arrived, the land had been home to many Indigenous nations for thousands of years. It was not vacant. The methods used by government to acquire land for settlement varied but were unfair and had a long-term impact on the lives of Indigenous people.
The OLRI was compiled over five years and published by the Archives of Ontario in 1979. A monumental project that saw the computer technology evolve from key tape, to an Administrative Terminal System connected to the Queen’s Park Computing Centre, and finally an early form of Optical Character Recognition that could read documents created on paper by much faster typists, it is still a remarkable database and the only index to a broad range of early Ontario land records.
In addition to the paper copies that were available to researchers at the Archives of Ontario, the database was made available on “computer output microfilm” or COM fiche. The sets of fiche were widely distributed to libraries, but that technology is disappearing.
The images in our new digital version are from a set of those 1979 fiche. This Licenced Material is provided by the Archives of Ontario. The digitization was funded by the Toronto Branch OGS, and is hosted by the Internet Archive. We are grateful for additional technical support from Internet Archive Canada, Our Digital World and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network.
The OLRI data has been sorted into two indexes which may be searched separately:
- Nominal Index (53 fiche, each with up to 270 pages)
- Township Index (75 fiche, each with up to 270 pages)
Each line of data includes the following information (if available): name of the locatee, town or township, lot and concession, or other lot description, place of residence, codes identifying the type of documents with their dates, and most importantly, the archival reference code to help you find the original document.
There are thousands of records captured in the OLRI, but it really just scratches the surface of Crown land records—focusing on lists of people and documents—rather than big document collections. But those big collections with richer detail are unlocked by the keys you’ll find in the OLRI.