28 March 2014

Tracing your family history through wills in Ontario

Ottawa media were scooped by North Country Public Radio, from far upstate New York, when it came to reporting on the Gene-O-Rama event last weekend. Jane MacNamara was interviewed about the use of wills. Read and/or listen at
 
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/24454/20140327/gene-o-rama-tracking-your-family-history-through-wills
At the end of the interview Jane comments that "some inheritance records are now coming on line, and so on. Ontario isn't, at this point - at least not that I know of."

I detect a certain wishfulness in that comment. At present using Ontario Estate Files is a cumbersome multi-step task. It's reminiscent of the way things used to be with Ontario Civil Registration records before Ancestry stepped in digitizing and indexing the whole lot. What will it take for the Archives of Ontario to move ahead, perhaps in a partnership, to digitize and index the province's Estate Files?

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