As reported previously the Ontario Ministry of Government and Consumer Services has decided to discontinue the land registration counter services at all Land Registry Offices (LROs) effective 9 October 2020.
At a 15 July meeting, OGS representatives were told that the records currently held in these facilities will remain in the community and that a plan is being developed in conjunction with Archives of Ontario for the digitization and long term storage of these records.
A tweet by Jane MacNamara (#LandRecordOfficesClosure) indicates that additional ammunition would be helpful in ensuring these records are preserved and access is retained.
If you have an example of how these Ontario land records were important for your family history investigations please help by forwarding the story to Heather.Mctavish.Taylor@ogs.on.ca with a copy to Jane MacNamara at toronto@ogs.on.ca. A single paragraph would be fine.
A word of advice from Bruce Elliott. The LROs are presently open on reduced hours due to COVID-19. For Carleton County the Courthouse downtown is open on weekday mornings from 9:30am. If you need access do so before 9 October as there may not be any availability for some unknown length of time subsequently.
3 comments:
Good advice John.
There is no question that land records have helped me enormously over the years, for example to search the title of the first house I grew up in, which my grandfather bought in 1922, part of the original John Cole farm in Westboro. I never knew my grandfather, as he died two months before I was born. Cheers, BT
I may be wrong here, but as a former Conveyancer covering the entire province, I was overjoyed to read that all the Ontario Land Records had been digitized and were now available online. I've used them both in the Registry Offices and online and see no problem with closing counter service. There hasn't been much service there in the past while anyway. For years we no longer had the original documents but had to live with badly scanned microfilm or microfiche. I was advised that the original documents had been destroyed. That is the big tragedy. I was lucky enough to photocopy some of the really important early land grants and have kept them for posterity.
As the Chair of Gravenhurst Archives, an independent, volunteer-led organization in operation for 42 years, I could not begin to count the number of requests we receive from people looking for information on family homes and family farms in our area. People are usually looking for dates when family members owned a particular property and when a house was built. Although we regularly use the ONLAND database, I find that some of the records have been poorly digitized and that some are barely legible if at all. I was happier when able to see the original ledgers, unwieldy though they were. The hand writing was so much easier to read when seen in its original form, though admittedly a magnifying glass was sometimes needed. Photocopying the documents was difficult because of the size and weight of the ledgers, but we did end up with legible, usable information which is not always true today. I am desperately hoping that Gravenhurst Archives will be able to find a way to get the ledgers for our area and preserve them in our climate-controlled office for the sake of future generations of researchers and genealogists.
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