The Virtual Nordic Genealogy Conference 2020 is coming soon - beginning 26 September. See the Conference website for registration and details.
https://www.nordicmuseum.org/genealogyconference
To celebrate, here, over the next 10 days, I'm going to feature one daily tip or source for Scandinavian family history research in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada (LAC), our free national genealogy source, should always be your first stop. While not everything or everyone is indexed or mentioned on LAC, many are. And more and more records are being digitized and made available free on LAC.
And more importantly, LAC can point you towards genealogical and historical information and access to federal (national/Dominion) Canadian records for immigration, naturalization and citizenship, and homesteading, and military records, and often towards provincial and regional sources too. And with each index or database, LAC provides additional contextual information which may prove vital to a successful search and to your own research.
The new LAC Collection Search includes options for Genealogy, Images and Library, or All, for all of these. The new Advanced Search gives more options including year or time period, and will let you search only for items on-line, if you want. You can also search Co-Lab contributions (or exclude), Co-Lab is Library and Archives Canada's tool to let researchers "transcribe, tag, translate and describe digitized images in Library and Archives Canada’s collection".1
I do suggest you take a little time to check out the images available. Many are searchable by place name, or a nationality, if applicable. Few include information with people's names; often there is only a range of dates.
It's worth looking as in the best case, you may be able to identify someone, or perhaps the image may add to your understanding of the time period or place, or to other documents which may be helpful.
Here, for instance, is a photograph identified only as a: Nine-year-old boy who travelled alone from Finland to Canada. The date is given as 1920s; photographer unknown. Accession number:1936-271 NPC; Item ID number:3193420. Department of the Interior Fonds,2 Photographic Records. (No restrictions on use; out of copyright.) For more about Canadian Immigration records at LAC, see below.3
Do you have a family story about a young Finnish boy going alone to Canada? While unusual enough for comment, children travelling alone are not unknown. Sometimes they are mentioned in newspapers, as was a nine year old Polish boy sent to live with family in Ottawa in 1925.4 So far, I haven't found any articles about the young Finn though.
References
1. Co-Lab link, in English and French: https://co-lab.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng
2. From 1873 to the 1930s in Canada, the Department of the Interior was responsible for federal land management in the lands then known as the North West Territories (including homesteading), immigration, Indian affairs including "control and management of the lands and property of Indians in Canada" and of all specified Crown lands (including natural resources) and of the Geological Survey of Canada. "An Act to provide for the establishment of "The Department of the Interior."
4. The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Saturday, 21 November, 1925, p. 23.
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