70 years of historic official records of Canadian immigration now indexed and made available online

In a world first, Canada's leading family history website www.ancestry.ca has launched 70 years of historic official records of Canadian immigration by ship and overland that is now fully indexed and searchable online.

The website has launched Canadian Passenger Lists between 1865 and 1935, which contains more than 7.2 million names, including 5.6 million of those who traveled from around the world to start a new life in Canada. These lists, which are originally held by the Library and Archives Canada (LAC), are the official records of arrival of the majority of people accepted as immigrants in Canada during the key immigration period of 1865-1935.

An estimated 11.6 million Canadians or 37 per cent of its current population have ancestors included in this collection, which also includes records for many vacationers and travelers, business people, crew members and historical figures such as foreign leaders, scientists and celebrities.

The collection includes passenger lists from all the major ports of arrival including Halifax, Saint John, North Sydney, Quebec City, Montreal, Vancouver, Victoria and even east coast ports in the US where many arrived before proceeding directly to Canada overland.

The main immigrant nationalities arriving in Canada during this period of rapid growth were British, Irish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Chinese and Polish (the majority of French immigrants, the second largest Canadian immigrant population, arrived prior to 1865).

Contained in the collection are records for a number of ships which tragically never made it to their final Canadian destinations, including that of RMS The Empress of Ireland, a passenger ship which was rammed in dense fog on the St. Lawrence River near Quebec on the 29th of May 1914 and sank in just 14 minutes. 1,012 passengers and crew drowned - a larger loss of life than when RMS Titanic sank.

Individual records include information such as the passenger's first and last name, estimated birth year, year of arrival, port of arrival and departure, ship name, occupation, final destination in Canada and other family members listed with their relationship indicated.

The collection is fully indexed by name, month, year, ship and port of origin, and arrival of more than 4,000 ships, and includes original images for more than 310,000 pages of historical records. It is the first time that these records have been indexed and made available online.

Digitizing and indexing the collection took approximately 83,000 man hours, or the equivalent of a person working 24 hours a day, seven days a week for almost 10 years.

www.ancestry.ca was launched in January 2006 and has 400 million Canadian names in such collections as the 1851, 1891, 1901, 1906 and 1911 Censuses of Canada, Ontario and British Columbia vital records from as early as 1813, Quebec vital records (The Drouin collection), 1621-1957 and U.S. / Canada Border Crossings from 1895 to 1956.

The website is part of the global network of Ancestry websites (wholly owned by The Generations Network Inc.), which contains seven billion names in 26,000 historical record collections. To date more than 6.5 million family trees have been created and 650 million names and 10 million photographs uploaded. 6.5 million Unique visitors logged on to an Ancestry websites in June 2008.

The Ancestry global network of family history websites: www.ancestry.ca in Canada, www.ancestry.co.uk in the UK, www.ancestry.com.au in Australia, www.ancestry.com in the US, www.ancestry.de in Germany, www.ancestry.it in Italy, www.ancestry.fr in France, www.ancestry.se in Sweden, and www.jiapu.cn in China.