"Old School" Research With a Modern Twist

Microfilm reader in the Wroclaw University library (photo by David Lisbona from Haifa, Israel / CC BY)

In my post Ontario Parish Registers: LAC and Héritage I referenced the Héritage site and their collection of Ontario Parish Registers on microfilm. However, with some of the questions I received about using Héritage, I find that a follow up post is necessary to clarify some things and to aid researchers in using the site.

The first thing I noticed with many of the questions is that we really are fortunate to have sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Findmypast along with many others to aid us in our research. On those sites, due to the efforts of transcribers, often we just have to type in a name and a list of records appear. Don't get me wrong, this is a wonderful thing since, not even 20 years ago, we used to rely on indexes in books created and published by genealogy and family history societies to help us find people in the census records. But we have become spoiled.

The Héritage site isn't like that. This site is a collection of digitized microfilms that we have to wade through like we used to, and some of us still do at times, to locate the nuggets of information we seek. Sometimes we might find an index and a more detailed description of what is on the microfilm at the start of the reel but there are no guarantees.

So let's walk through using the site by way of one of the questions raised:

I went to the sites linked to your post to find an odd outlier in your list - "Roman Catholic Mission, Berlin (later Kitchener), BD 1860".

The search function seems to have failed me.

Is there any way I can find a more detailed description of this, in particular outside dates?

First of all, this is a completely reasonable question and I'm not picking on the poster. Actually, I'm glad this question was posed. The challenge faced is how the Héritage site functions. In my previous post I only gave the short descriptions from the initial index pages on the reel but not how to actually find the pages from the microfilms.

From my prior post I can see that the microfilm that contains the information from "Roman Catholic Mission, Berlin (later Kitchener), BD 1860" is C-15758. So how about we hop over to Héritage and put that microfilm reel number in to the search. One thing that I've found on this site is that to find a microfilm you get better results if you put the microfilm number in quotes like "C-15758".

Screen capture of search results for "C-15758" on Héritage.

Clicking on "Parish registers: Ontario : C-15758" brings us to the first image on that digitized reel.

Screen capture of the starting page for microfilm C-15758 on Héritage.

Many but not of the digitized microfilms will have a start image like this. Sometimes there will be information that can aid us, other times, not really.

On the web page you can see the number of pages, 232, a View tab, which we are looking at, an About tab, and ways of moving through this digitized microfilm reel plus zooming out and in of the images.

If you click on the About tab, you will see details about the microfilm. Note, this not necessarily in depth details like a table of contents but a brief description about the microfilm.

Screen capture of the About tab for microfilm C-15758 on Héritage.

For the question that was raise, "Is there any way I can find a more detailed description of this, in particular outside dates?" I had to click the arrows to navigate through the images until I happened upon image 18 where I saw:

Extract of C-15758, image 18 on Héritage detailing the information from "Roman Catholic Mission, Berlin (later Kitchener), BD 1860"

Here we learn about where the information came from, Rev. Eugene Funcken, the locations, and the number of baptisms and deaths recorded.

It is important to note that not all indexes had this kind of details. It all depends on the level of effort the person that created the documents to help those that ended up using the microfilms. I really don't think they weren't expecting us genealogists and family historians to rely on their efforts so many years later.

So the question is answered but what about actually seeing the information from Rev. Eugene Funcken? That goes back to cranking the handle, or in our case, clicking the next button. We have to look at each page and hopefully find the information we are looking for before giving up, your patience will often be rewarded. With only 232 pages in total and we've already looked at 18 it really isn't too bad.

Sometimes you will see pages like this:

Extract of C-15758, image 78 on Héritage

These sorts of pages will help you as you navigate through the pages. They provide a description that is often quite handy for your source citations and can also help you figure out if the next section is the one you are looking for. From the detailed index I learned that it is number 48 that I want and this section is numbers 25-54 so we are probably getting closer to the microfilmed pages we are looking for.

Finally on image 122 I see the following:

Extract of C-15758, image 122 on Héritage.

This appears to be the start of the Return of Baptisms solemnized by Rev. E. Funcken of the Roman Catholic Mission of Berlin, Waterloo County.

If you want to save the image, at least in Firefox and Chrome, right clicking on the image and selecting "Save image as" from your browser's popup window will allow you to save the image to your computer for safe keeping and later review.

Keep in mind that not all digitized reels will be as easy to navigate and find the information you are hoping to find.

Just a second...you mean to say that was easy???

It was relatively easy since there were good index pages with descriptions and the number of pages on the microfilm was fairly small. Going through 1200 pages with horrible handwriting can be really challenging but doable with time and patience (and sometimes a good drink or two!)

So don't shy away from these non-computer indexed collections that once only existed on paper and then on microfilm in archives in often far away places. Once you get the hang of using a site like Héritage or even the digitized microfilm reels found on FamilySearch your horizons will be expanded with all sorts of new records within your grasp.