RECORD DEMAND
Church archivists have seen a surge in requests since Ottawa changed citizenship laws — many from Americans trying to prove Canadian ancestry
Kyle Pugh and his Canadian colleagues from coast to coast are suddenly in high demand from Americans.
The Americans are searching for Canadian citizenship, and Pugh and his fellow archivists just might hold the keys to finding the ancestry that would make that possible.
Since before Christmas, the regional archivist with the United Church of Canada Archives has seen a surge of requests for church documents on the date, place and participants of baptism, as well as records of marriages and membership rolls that date back to the early 19th century. Almost everyone who asks for help has been from the U.S.
“Honestly, there isn't a particular state that we hear from more,” said Pugh. “Red states. Blue states. There are people from all 50 states at this point, except Hawaii.”
Thanks to changes in Canada's Citizenship Act that took effect Dec. 15, the door is now open to many foreign nationals who want to reclaim their Canadian citizenship by descent if they can establish family ties even from generations ago.
Before the changes, a child born outside Canada to a Canadian parent was not a citizen by descent if that parent was also born outside Canada.
Bill C-3 removes that limit on the passage of citizenship by descent and restores citizenship to these “Lost Canadians.”
(Under the new law, children born abroad after Dec. 15 to foreign-born Canadian parents will have to show their parent spent three years in Canada before the child's birth or adoption in order to claim citizenship. This rule does not apply to those born before the new law took effect.)
Pugh said the number of requests for genealogy searches at the Ontario regional council archive of the United Church of Canada Archives — one of the largest religious archives in the country — has quadrupled from about 60 a month to roughly 225 to 250 a month since January.
While Canadians and Americans have always shared close ties, he believes the tense political climate in the U.S. is making people look for relocation options and the new Canadian citizenship law provides an impetus.
“People are very upfront about why they're interested in getting citizenship,” said Pugh. “Usually it's because of — I mean, my favourite term was `the post-capitalist fascist hellscape,' ” said Pugh. “There's like a deep longing, a just-in-case that I can get out of here if something really bad happens.”
Aside from churches, provincial government archives across Canada have also reportedly been overwhelmed by a surge of requests for family records.
The Archives of Ontario has seen a significant rise in requests for certified copies of birth, marriage and death records. In March alone, it processed 867 requests, compared to 124 requests for the same month last year, though it said it does not collect or track information about an individual's nationality when processing requests for vital statistics records.
“Genealogical research can be complex, particularly for records that span multiple generations, as some historical births were not registered and records may be incomplete,” said the Ontario Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement. “Variations in surname spelling, transcription errors or name changes can also affect searches.”
Anyone seeking these records should have as much information as possible in advance — such as the names, dates, locations and, where relevant, religious affiliation of their Canadian relatives — to help facilitate searches, it added.
Unlike record seekers before the new citizenship rule, Pugh said the people who reach out these days don't usually have much information on their Canadian ancestors to guide the search. It creates more work for archivists.
“Because they don't know where their baptism or that marriage took place, sometimes they don't even know the city. They might just say, `I have a relative who was baptized in Ontario in 1850. Can you find it?' ” he noted.
“It takes so much longer to prove a negative because we keep saying, well, it could just be in this next register and so we have to look. So it's much more time intensive than somebody who knows exactly which register it's in.”
Also, records could be lost after being passed around multiple congregations as local churches amalgamated and separated over time, Pugh said.
Variations of spelling, such as when a silent letter was missed or a name ended with an “-ie” instead of a “-y,” can all make the search that much more difficult, he added.
So far, Pugh estimated his office has a 20 per cent success rate in searches based on the number of people that have come forward and the number of certified documents issued.
Due to the volume and complexity of requests, the United Church of Canada Archives has started to charge a $25 research fee and raised the fee for the certification of a pre-1900 certificate to $50 from $30 in order to hire a student archivist.
To help archivists do their job, Pugh said a searcher should first visit the Library and Archives Canada website for census records dating back before Confederation and contact the individual's church archives accordingly. More recent records can be found in provincial archives. In Ontario, the official provincewide civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began on July 1, 1869.
Pugh said he and other archivists are all concerned about this wave of genealogy searching.
“There's always somewhere else to look and we have a very hard time emotionally saying, `No, sorry, we can't help you any more on this,' ” he said. “Is this just any time something comes out of Washington, D.C., that there's going to be a surge? How long is this going to go on for? Is this a new permanent thing?”
According to the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the citizenship changes could open the door to an estimated 115,000 new Canadians over five years — people who have lost their citizenship or would not qualify to become citizens by descent under the old rule. The Immigration Department said it processed about 6,280 applications for proof of citizenship between Dec. 15, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2026, of which 1,480 were confirmed as a result of Bill C-3. It's not known how many of these were for Americans but officials said historically a significant share of applications have come from the U.S.