The Ontario Archives: Scope of its Operations

The records of the first Court of Common Pleas for Upper Canada, with valuable annotations and historical notes, are being prepared for the press.

In this division we have in hand among other things the preparation of a domesday book for the Province. Our plan, which has made substantial progress, is to cover all our settlement of Crown lands from 1783 to 1900 by townships, giving each grantee a description, and, for the purpose of reference, a number. Succeeding volumes will furnish memoirs, notes, and statistical data of a special character bearing on the grantees and on their settlements. In this connection we are collecting and rapidly accumulating local material which will be drawn upon for this work. This I consider one of the biggest undertakings planned by the bureau, which occupy much time to bring it to completion, but when completed will be a work of reference of permanent use to our historical investigators.

We are also collecting papers and documents pertaining to the political history of Ontario that ought to be preserved in permanent form, which will be issued in a series of four consecutive volumes. These have been planned on lines that will bring their usefulness directly to the growing class of students of our provincial history.

Lately a genealogical branch has been included in our program and steps are being taken to obtain by legislation a change of official forms so as to help in the collecting of data. The work will be conducted on the basis of the county unit, with correspondents engaged under the direction of the bureau.

While effort has been directed on these lines, I have paid more attention to the collecting of much neglected material throughout the Province – in the hands of private individuals, public bodies, or local officials, rather than to the exact and adequate classification and indexing of outside material as it is being received. The Province has been so long entirely neglected that when I undertook to organize the department I decided that the most valuable service I could render to the public was to acquire, to collect, and safely preserve whatever material I could find, believing the day would soon come when the value of such material would be fully realized and the necessary office assistance provided to enable me to make the accumulated archives conveniently accessible to the public.