New Search Tool for Canadian Find A Grave Records

There is a fairly new Find a Grave search page that makes it easy to narrow down the results when looking for Canadian gravesites and cemeteries.

Ken Lange was frustrated with searching for Canadian records and stated that “for the most part, we all love Find A Grave, and I’m sure everyone has benefited from information gleaned from the site at some point in time. However, as a Canadian, I have long been frustrated by the fact that when searching for memorials in Canada, you can’t narrow the search down even to a province… Canada is a big country, and while not at populous as the US, this still leads to unnecessary sifting through records, especially for common surnames. I don’t know if there are existing tools out there to address this problem, and I’m hoping that Ancestry will fix this sometime soon. But out of frustration a while back I took matters into my own hands and modified the Find a Grave search page for Canadian searches so that you can at least specify a province.

I don’t know if it will work with all browsers in all environments, but I’ve had it working in IE, Firefox, and Chrome.”

Follow the link below to search for Canadian gravestones and cemeteries at FindAGrave.

Find a Grave Search Page for Canadian Searches

Happy hunting!

Casualty Records Released by Canadian War Graves Commission

Original records for the full 1.7 million individuals commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission were revealed to the public for the first time in August 2015. Following the release of First World War Casualty Archive Documents in 2014, the CWGC has now released the Second World War records to coincide with the 70th anniversary of VJ Day.

The additional documents greatly enhance the collection of records and researchers can now discover more about their relatives who fought and died during the two world wars.

The records are available through the “Casualty Search” option on the CWGC website and they offer a unique insight into the process of commemoration undertaken by the CWGC after the wars. If you have previously downloaded documents from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website concerning a war casualty, be sure to go back and look again now that these additional records have been added.

Family Search Records Update

FamilySearch has added to its collections more than 2.9 million indexed records and images for Australia, Canada, Peru, and the United States. The entire article, including links to all the new records can be read by clicking here.

Of notable interest to most of us is the fact that the Canada Passengers List collection from 1881 – 1922 has been updated. There is now a total of 191,573 records. Most of us are either first or second-generation immigrants or our ancestors were immigrants to Canada so it is definitely worth a search through the records to find any of your ancestors on a passenger list.

Good luck with your search – you may just find the passenger list for that elusive ancestor we all seem to have!

Canadian Headstones Cemetery Records Updated

Over 1200 photographs and transcriptions from Yates Cemetery in Parksville have been added to Canadian Headstones. All headstones prior to 1992 in Qualicum Beach Municipal Cemetery are also recorded. See Local Resources for links.