Finding Your Ancestors On The Map
The first Ontario maps. Settlement from east to west, and from the lakefront to the back.
Structure: counties and districts, townships. hamlets, villages, towns, and cities.
Lot and concession numbers. Found in land records, assessment rolls, and printed directories.
What you can find online:
Some early township maps online at AO (not easy to find).
McGill County Map Project with the ability to search for people. Based on the 32 Ontario county atlases 1874-81.
The less well-known Ontario Historical County Map Project (Google Maps for mid-nineteenth century Ontario). Copies of the individual county maps 1856-88, with lists of subscribers in various villages. Then those maps are overlaid on the map of the province, and you can zoom in on individual lots.
City of Toronto wards, from the city of Toronto, 1862.
And from the Toronto Public Library, 1878.
Fire insurance maps, e.g., in the Niagara area: Their Special Collections has other great local maps.
Railway maps
Using Google to locate lost towns (many were simply stops on the postal routes), sometimes.
David Rumsey historical map collection: Good for locating where your loyalist ancestors came from.
The video can be viewed in fullscreen by clicking on the expand icon (four diagonal arrows) in the black video control bar.
Richard Ruggle
Richard spends too much time on the internet searching out obscure details of local, religious and military history (as well as his own tree), and has written histories of Glen Williams and Norval, of Children’s Aid in Halton, of the Lorne Scots Regiment and of the Anglican diocese of Niagara. He hopes to share with you some of the sometimes promising and sometimes frustrating sources for finding people on the map.
