Ontario Ancestors volunteers and FamilySearch staff have digitized 257 Vernon’s Directories for municipalities in the province of Ontario, although they still have a lot more work ahead of them. That’s an increase of 68 directories since July, with more than 1,000 directories left to digitize.
The entire project is expected to take more than two years to complete.
Vernon Directories can be an excellent resource for finding ancestors between the census years. They were published yearly, by city, from the 1890s to 2014.
Directories that have been digitized so far, ranging from 1912 to 2012, include Barrie/Orillia, Belleville, Berlin (Kitchener), Brantford/Paris, Brockville, Chatham, Galt, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Oshawa/Whitby, Pembroke, Sault Ste. Marie, Simcoe, Stratford, Timmins, Trenton, and Wallaceburg.
Search
It is easy to do a preliminary search, but a free FamilySearch account is required to view each individual directory. If you don’t log in to your account, you won’t be able to look at the pages inside the directories.
While one can search for family names, streets, and other keywords within each directory, a global search of the entire collection for directories for a particular city is much less effective.
A search for Belleville, for example, finds every directory that mentions Belleville, producing 166 results that include London and Brockville directories.
Collaborative initiative
Ontario Ancestors and Library and Archives Canada (LAC) first announced in February 2019 they were working with FamilySearch to digitize the directories.
Ontario Ancestors approached Vernon to request rights to digitize the historical publications. The publisher granted permission with the condition that Ontario Ancestors not monetize or profit from the digitized works.
FamilySearch quickly emerged as a great partner, due to its optical character recognition scanning technology that will make the digitized images every-word searchable.
Ontario Ancestors also approached LAC for the project, since the organization holds one of the biggest collections of Vernon directories in Ontario. In addition to providing access to its collection, LAC is hosting the digitization project.
John D. Reid recently wrote about the project, and the steps involved, in his blog post, Scanning Vernon’s Directories at LAC. He mentioned they were working at the time on the Hamilton directories, which is one of the largest collections.
