Although the name, BC Sessional Papers, sounds like a collection of extremely dry and boring documents, you should explore this online resource if your ancestors lived in British Columbia. Doing so could help you learn about the town where your family once lived — and even what the weather was like.
These sessional papers are provincial legislative documents that have been digitized, from 1878 to 1931, and made available on the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) website. They capture the economical, historical, political, and cultural atmosphere of British Columbia history.
This summer, UBC will begin to digitize the sessional papers from 1933 to 1952. This phase will include fold-out maps and charts.
Voters’ lists like this one for Kootenay District in 1881 are a treasure trove for genealogists. Source: BC Sessional Papers : https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/bcsessional.
Some of the items you may find in sessional papers include birth, marriage and death registries, reports, graphs, maps, and photographs related immigration, mining, fisheries, famers’ institutes, education, voters’ lists, school reports, and the Canadian Pacific Railway.
On UBC’s website, the collection is described as the following: “The Sessional Papers include official committee reports, orders of the day, petitions and papers presented, records of land sales, correspondence, budgetary estimates, proclamations, maps, voters lists by district, and departmental annual reports.”
Search for town names and other keywords
You can search by name, town, district, or other keyword.
Searching for “Bella Coola Valley” will uncover the names of a number of settlers who lived there on December 31, 1895. (There were 64.)
A search for “weather” leads to an annual report from the Department of Agriculture where you can read about “Grasshopper Outbreaks” in the Okanagan Valley in 1924.
Filter by date
When you enter a keyword in the Search box and click on the magnifying glass next to it, a series of filters in the left margin, next to the results, appears. The best filter for genealogists is probably the date filter that allows you to narrow down the results to the period when your ancestors lived in the province or a particular town or district.
Finding electoral lists
One of my favourite finds was the List of Persons Entitled to Vote in the Vancouver City Electoral District. 8th June 1894. Similar lists are available for other years and for other towns, such as New Westminister, Nanimo, Kootenay, Lillooet, and Chilliwack.
To find electoral lists for Chilliwack, for example, use quotation marks and the following words in the search box:
“list of persons entitled to vote” “chilliwack”
Once you open an electoral list — or any sessional paper, you can narrow down your search even further by name, street, or occupation. Of course, since women could not vote at the time, only men are listed.
Optimal character recognition
Be aware that your search results are only as good as the OCR — Optimal Character Recognition. In one case, PROVINCE was interpreted as PROVINCC.
You can start your search of the British Columbia Sessional Papers here. Even if you don’t find any of your ancestors, you’ll be pleased you looked.
