Saturday 19 September 2015

UE Loyalist lineages: Now easy to research online for free! Part IV


The fourth in an eight part series to help people with potential UE Loyalist lines access the wealth of documentation available online for free, as well as offline sources that can provide further evidence linking generations.


Step 3: Google, using township name


By the end of Step 2 hopefully you have names of a 19th century Canadian ancestor or couple, and some location information as well as key dates. Start Googling.

As the figure in Part 1 demonstrated, UELs can be expected to have in the range of 180,000 grandchildren and 500,000 great grandchildren in the 19th century, and perhaps 26 million descendants living today. The odds that many UEL descendants are mentioned on the web are actually pretty good. Even if your ancestors turn out not to be descended from UELs, this step has potential to kick up useful information about their origins.

Query the name as well as whatever location information you've uncovered, preferably a township name. Add any known birth, marriage, or death years. Add the term "loyalist"/"UEL" to see if they pop up in the context of a UEL's descendants listing. You could uncover posts by your cousins seeking assistance researching the family, as well as secondary content sites providing information (including some of the county histories mentioned in Part I, if your research extends far enough back, to a generation that was alive by the time those were written).

Google really is the universal genealogical index (all due respect to the IGI) and it is foolish not to use it, albeit with careful analysis of whether the results generated really do pertain to your line.

Continue to Step 4...

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