Library class a link to ancestry
Niagara Falls Public Library has started its seasonal ancestry classes to help teach people how to find out more about their heritage.
Laura Shtern, manager of community development and programming, encourages anyone who is interested in figuring out where they came from to check out the classes.
“There’s a lot of information. It takes a little bit of practice to be able to find the stuff you’re looking for,” she says.
“The records have to exist for you to find them, but the interesting thing I found is just how much is available.”
Records are found using Ancestry software.
Shtern says she found in-depth records of her grandfather’s war record from the First World War, right down to how much he was paid, how much he sent home and how much he kept for himself.
She says there can be dead ends, too.
“Sometimes the information just doesn’t exist.”
For example, Shtern says there is a significant chunk of immigration records missing from the 1920s in Canada because of a fire in the building the records were kept in, a cause that is not uncommon.
“It’s almost always a fire or a bombing if there’s no records of something.”
Another complication in finding records is that there are typically time limits on when records become public.
“You’re only going to find older stuff,” she says.
“There are privacy laws which mean records are released after a certain time period and it varies province by province. Some places marriage licences only become available after 80 years.”
Shtern says that Ancestry has records from a lot of other countries, but it depends on what kind of record keeping there was at the time.
She says in some cases people get stuck when they reach adoption papers or if they’re from a country where last names are common.
“I always feel sorry for a John Smith looking for his relatives,” says Cathy Roy, who helps teach the program.
Roy, who also works at the library, says she found records of the boat upon which her grandmother came to Canada. From that she was able to find pictures of the exact boat which carried her 101-year-old grandmother here 98 years ago as a toddler.
“This is very much historical research rather than present research,” she says. “It’s not Google.”
Shtern says even though people may not be successful, it’s worth a try, and that with all the privacy laws regarding the availability of public records, just because you looked 10 years ago doesn’t mean there aren’t new documents that have since become available.
The library’s classes open the last Thursday of every month and are available to anybody who registers, free of charge.