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While the old records at the Nipissing District Land Registry Office were being inventoried by members of APOLROD (Association for the Preservation of Ontario Land Registry Office Documents), three old registers were discovered which contain important information relating to early settlers.  The Land Registrar gave permission for these books to be photocopied and the information is provided here for research purposes.

The first book contains an index of births, marriages and deaths in the Nipissing District; the second contains the original entries for 56 births; and the third contains the original entries for 27 marriages.  The book containing the original entries for the 26 deaths has not been located as of November 1997.

The period covered by these records is:

Births                    February 1871 to March 1881

Marriages             January 1871 to July 1883

Deaths                  February 1871 to December 1881

This publication starts with the index followed by the original entries for births and marriages.

Please note that this publication contains handwritten items so it is not searchable.

This index has been prepared to assist researchers in locating cemeteries in the Districts of Muskoka, Nipissing & Parry Sound and is completely searchable

The book “North Bay, Past-Present-Prospective” was compiled by W.K.P. Kennedy and published in 1961 by the T.H. Best Printing Company Ltd.  The “Original Index” to this book was compiled c. 1982 by a committee of members of the Ontario Genealogical Society, Nipissing District Branch consisting of R. Blair, M. Gartner, I. Milne and others. The task was a monumental undertaking considering that it was all hand done. Many thanks should be given to these women for their long hours and tireless work. The usefulness of the “Original Index” has been demonstrated many times, as club members sought evidence of their relatives and ancestors. In addition it was used as the basis for the compilation of this current Index rev. 1992.

This Index, rev. 1992, consists of two sections;

1. Names Index
2. Associations and Businesses Index.

It is an attempt to reflect accurately the names exactly as shown in Kennedy’s original work. Printing errors, however, did occur in the book. Readers of the Index would therefore be well advised to search for all possible alternate spellings of surnames and first names for the individuals in whom they are interested, and then draw their own conclusion as to which references apply. Two lists in the original book were not indexed.  They are:  Pioneers page 12B and Enlisted Men page 280. 

This Index was compiled for O.G.S. Nipissing District Branch, and was produced on a computer using MSWORKS and MSWORD.  The computer work was done by C.F. Prong and D.R. Prong, both O.G.S. members. Proof readers were:  C. Buffett, D. Carney, M. Gartner, B. Moore, and A. Staines, all members of the Branch.  Their input to this project is greatly appreciated.

Please note that this publication has been OCR’d so it is now fully searchab

This wonderful and very well done publication was compiled and edited by Thomas W. Carkner.  It is 991 pages of North Bay information obtained from various newspapers across Canada including the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Globe, Manitoba Free Press, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Daily World and others.

North Bay in the News has been made available in our Members Only section with permission of Mr. Carkner.  It has been OCR’d and is fully searchable.

This list was prepared, using the last revised assessment rolls for Sturgeon Falls, to show a list of all people eligible to vote for Members of the Legislative Assembly and/or at a Municipal election in 1913.  It includes the roll number, if eligible to be a juror, name, occupation, lot, concession or street name, “title to vote” (more on this below) and the post office number (as per chart on page two.)  Women could only vote in Municipal elections and only if they were widows.  It is completely searchable.

Title to Vote:

• MFF  Legislative Assembly & Municipal elections – Freeholder
• MFT  Legislative Assembly & Municipal elections – Tenant
• MF    Legislative Assembly only
• F       Municipal Election only – Freeholder
• T       Municipal Election only – Tenant

With the permission of the writer François Castilloux, here is some background information on the booklet from which this digital scan came from:

“This document has about 20 pages and is a little booklet containing the list of registered voters for the 1913 elections. The booklet is called “Voters’ List of the Municipality of Sturgeon Falls of Sturgeon Falls, District of Nipissing, for the year 1913”. This booklet is 101 years old [at the time the article was written] and has been well preserved. It was prepared in 1913 by the poll clerk J.D. Cockburn. The latter is an unavoidable character of Sturgeon Falls pioneer history and we will return to him further. The booklet was printed in 1913 by a local printer: the Sturgeon Falls Advertiser. The pages are fine papers interlaced by a red cardboard making the front and back cover. The number of copies is unknown. The only copy that I have seen belongs to the Nipissing District Branch collection which I thank dearly.

At the time, the poll clerk had a very important role to set up an election and was responsible to make the voters’ list. This list contains all citizens who are registered to vote. Sturgeon Falls citizens who paid municipal taxes in 1913 were automatically registered on the voters’ list. These names came from the Assessment Roll of the town. The remaining citizens eligible to vote could subscribe to the voters’ list by going to a post office of Canada Post and fill out the registrations. After, the post office sent the registrations to the poll clerk in question who added the remaining citizens on the voters’ list.

J.D. Cockburn made the voters’ list in a format stipulated by the laws. Before the voters’ list, the document had to present a Schedule of Post Offices. This section enumerates the post offices that sent registrations to J.D. Cockburn and in the order received by him. We will look at this section first because it shows what kind of mobility Sturgeon Falls citizens had in 1913 and it indicates the locations where they operated. Obviously, the Sturgeon Falls Post Office is the first one on the list, Smoky Falls (today Crystal Falls) is third, Sudbury ninth, North Bay tenth, Cache Bay sixteenth, Verner twenty first and River Valley twenty fourth. The schedule also contain faraway post offices such as Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa, Toronto, Quebec and even New York, Vermont and London, England. The schedule contains a total of 39 post offices.

After this section we have the much awaited voters’ list. This list is organized by wards and extends on more than 20 pages. It contains a total of 762 names and each name is presented on one line with the occupation of the voter and the address of his or her property. At the time, Sturgeon Falls had three wards i.e. Michaud Ward, Holditch Ward and Cockburn Ward.  Holditch Ward contains 270 voters, Michaud Ward 193, Cockburn Ward 189. For each ward, the names of voters are presented in two parts. The first part is always the longest and contains the majority of voters i.e. men. The second part is always the shortest and contains widows and a few other exceptions. In 1913, only men 21 years of age or older were eligible to vote. The only women eligible to vote were widows because a widow obtained the voting right of her deceased husband. The 1913 Sturgeon Falls election was the last of this kind. In 1917, women gained the right to vote in provincial and municipal elections.

This voters’ list contains names that represent our ancestors and some pioneer families of Sturgeon Falls. The majority of names have a British or French origin except for a few of Ojibwa, German or Scandinavian descent. We find many well-known citizens and their address like J.D. Cockburn himself, H.R. McEvoy who surveyed Field Township, the retailers Joseph Michaud and Georges Lévesque, the manufacturer John Parker, the politician Zotique Mageau, the First Nation Chief Alexandre Dokis, Rev

In June of 1843, representatives at the Annual Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada resolved that a General Register of births and baptisms be kept at the Conference office in Toronto. Each year, every ordained minister was provided with a ruled book in which he was required to make uniform entries of births and baptisms. At the end of the year, the minister returned this book to the Conference Office and the entries were copied into the General Register.

The original WMBR, which includes baptisms primarily in Ontario but also in parts of Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan, is located in the United Church/Victoria University Archives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The pages of the four volumes are arranged by township, town, village and circuit. The pages are not necessarily in chronological order, nor are the geographic locations in alphabetical order. There are about 2,970 numbered pages with about 127,000 entries. Each page provides lines for 43 entries; parts of some pages are blank.

• Entries in the 815 pages of Volume 1 are dated from 1826 to the 1850s.
• Entries in the 858 pages of Volume 2 are dated in the 1840s and 1860s.
• Entries in the 810 pages of Volume 3 are dated from the 1850s to the 1870s.
• Entries in the 487 pages of Volume 4 are dated from the 1860s to 1910.

The General Register contains records of births and baptisms of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada up to 1874, of the Methodist Church of Canada for the period 1874 to 1884 and of the Methodist Church (Canada) up until 1910. For the most part, entries are arranged according to the circuit, township, town or city in which the birth and/or baptism took place.

This transcription is completely searchable.