If you didn’t find your relative in FamilySearch’s Ontario Tax Assessment Rolls, 1834-1899 collection, now may be the time give it another try.
Since November, more than 1.3 million additional records have been added to the online collection — an increase of more than 50 percent — for a grand total of 3,774,415 records.
These records can be searched by name and may include the age, occupation, and possibly the religious affiliation of the head of household along with information about his lands, home, family members (by age categories) crops, and animals.
This collection was first made available in February 2021 with about 40,000 records. Thanks to volunteer transcribers, it is searchable by name.
From these records, I learned my Irish Catholic great-great-grandfather, William Halley, rented the home where he and his family lived in 1876. The building measured about 19 feet by 20 feet, and it sat on a 19 x 31-foot lot at the corner of Shuter and Bond streets in Toronto, across the street from the beautiful St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica that was built about 20 years earlier.
After making this discovery, I spent part of the afternoon researching the church and neighbourhood. When you’re a genealogist, eating dinner at a reasonable hour is highly overrated.
