Recently a friend and genealogy colleague reached out to me with a bit of a land related question concerning the ancestor of some of her cousins. She was trying to find a location of where her cousins' great-grandfather, William Tegerdine, who died in 1891 in Almonte, Ontario, Canada, resided so that the cousins could possibly visit where William lived before his death.
It sounds like a straight forward proposition. Except at this point, all we know is that William Tegerdine lived in Almonte based on the census returns and registrations of his children's births.
Here is how I approached this genealogy question...
First of all, I'm being a bit "lazy". I'm doing all this research from the comfort of my home.
Although we have the population schedules available for the 1881 and 1891 censuses of Canada, the agricultural schedules were not put onto microfilm to be later digitized for our use today. That means we need to look elsewhere. Possibly we could look at town or county directories or even the tax assessments to find out where he lived. I could have also re-examined the birth registrations of his children to see if my friend missed anything — unlikely she did since she's a good researcher.
Instead, I turned to the Full Text Search on FamilySearch to see if I can find any references to his name using the keywords "+tegerdine" (without any quotes).
There are 350 results from all the full text searchable collections. A few too many to scan through for me, so I filtered on the place "Canada" and then "Ontario". Now there are only two records to read. For one of the full text search results, it indicated that it was from the 1887. That looks interesting.
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| Screen capture of the FamilySearch Full Text Search results for "+tegerdine" for the year 1887 result showing instrument 5105 from the virtual "Almonte. Land Records 1892–1893, 1887–1889, 1889–1892" collection. | |
Fortunately the handwriting is not too bad to read but there was a bit to read and I'm doing this fairly quickly. That will cause me troubles fairly quickly though!
About half way down the instrument on that page, I came across the location of the property: "...composed of a part of the west half of Lot Number sixteen in the Ninth concession of the Township of Ramsay..."
Well that was easy!
I could now turn to the land abstract index books for Ramsay township that are found on FamilySearch. I could also have used those same historical books found on OnLand for Lanark (LRO 27). The only challenge with the Lanark County abstract index books on FamilySearch, at least for me, is that we have to know if the location is in the South or North part of the county. For Ramsay township, we find that township in the Abstract index books, ca. 1820-1959 books by the Registrar of Deeds (North).
But I quickly ran into a problem.
I couldn't find his name listed in any of the pages for Lot 16 on the 9th Concession. Maybe I had read the writing wrong.
I sort of did read it wrong. Or more correctly, I didn't read it all for a few words later it continued, "...and may be better known as being Town Lot number one hundred and thirty nine on Hope Street in the Cameron Section of the aforesaid Town of Almonte..."
That is an important detail. It also highlights why one should read the whole document and not just latch onto the first detail that may be of interest. And yes, I'm very guilty of not always doing that, especially in this case! I probably should paid attention to the computer generated transcription provided by FamilySearch. Those transcriptions aren't perfect by a long shot but they can help us when quickly glancing at a document.
There are several abstract index books also available on FamilySearch for Almonte. Fortunately near the front of the first two books I looked at the registrar has written which surveys or areas the specific book includes. I found that volume 2 states "Cameron Survey from 1 to 226".
Within just a few minutes I was able to locate Lot No 139 Cameron Survey on Image Group Number (DGS) 8636227, image 470 of 620 and there was instrument 5105 listed in the abstract. That's the same instrument that we had found by doing the Full Text Search using his last name.
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| Lanark County (North), Ontario, Abstract index books, ca. 1820-1959, Almonte Abstract Register Volume 2, p. 139, Town of Almonte, Lot No. 139, Cameron Survey; digital images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3H6-5SPT-V : accessed 9 Oct 2025); DGS 8636227, image 470 of 620. |
What is interesting is that there are several other instruments that the Full Text Search didn't identify. For example, it missed instrument 5106. That's because the handwriting recognition transcribed his name of "Legerdine". That instrument is valuable since it provides the name of William's wife, Rhoda, so that I could confirm I'm chasing the right family — and I am.
If I had used "tegerdine legerdine" (without quotes) in my Full Text Search I would have come across this record. Curiously, using "?egerine" (without quotes) in the Full Text Search actually returned this error message on FamilySearch, "Sorry, we encountered a problem. The question mark and asterisk are wildcard symbols and cannot be used as the first letter of a search term. Please modify your search and try again." Hmmm, an interesting quirk in the search.
That should be it, right? I have a location of Lot 139 on Hope Street in Almonte, Lanark County, Ontario, Canada.
Except when I put in that address into Google Maps, it put me in the water. The address numbers on a present day map for Hope Street go from about 271 to 412. It seems like the lot numbers don't match the street address numbers. Sigh.
Looking at the abstract register page for the lot, I see that Rhoda Tegerdine still owned that property until 1907 so maybe the 1901 census of Canada would have a street address for me in Schedule 2.
Schedule 2 you say? Most folks only know about schedule 1, the Population schedule, of the 1901 census of Canada. The challenge with schedule 2 is that it doesn't have names on it but refers back to the page and line number of the head of household in the Population schedule. In my 2021 blog post "Finding the Concession and Lot in Ontario in the 1901 Census" I wrote about how we can use schedule 2 in our research. A number of the URLs pointing to pages on the Library and Archives Canada site have changed since I wrote that blog post due to the revamp of the LAC site in 2022, but the links to the schedule 2 PDF finding aids for the provinces still work (for now).
In searching for Rhoda Tegerdine in the 1901 census of Canada I found her and her family residing in Ward 1 in the Town of
Almonte in polling division 2 of sub-district A in the Lanark
North (80) district on page 3, line 36 in dwelling 32 as
family 32 (https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.redirect?app=census&id=36646761&lang=eng&ecopy=z000076057). Using the schedule 2 finding aid for Ontario, I found that the images for that sub-district and division started at https://data2.collectionscanada.ca/1901/z/z002/jpg/z000076052.jpg. Looking for the entry in schedule 2 for the household that is found on page 3, line 36 in schedule 1, I found her address is recorded as "138-139 Hope".
Great. Not the modern address I was looking for. It seems that the lot number was still being used. But "138-139"? I know about lot 139 from my search on his last name where I found the instrument and subsequently the abstract register page.
Back to the FamilySearch images of the abstract registers I went.
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| Lanark County (North), Ontario, Abstract index books, ca.
1820-1959, Almonte Abstract Register Volume 2, p. 138, Town of Almonte,
Lot No. 138, Cameron Survey; digital images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3H6-5S5J-P : accessed 9 Oct 2025); DGS 8636227, image 470 of 620. |
There is his name starting with instrument 5702. Yet another instrument missed by the full text search since the name was automagically transcribed as Legerdine. The computers aren't quite there to take over the role of a good researcher.
But we still don't know exactly where the Tegerdine family lived on Hope Street.
I next turned to maps. Keep in mind that I'm doing this all from the comfort of my home and I really don't want to have to travel anywhere at this point to look at material that isn't online.
I checked all sorts of maps, including a distorted image of a fire insurance plan for Almonte that I came across. No luck.
That's when I remembered that OnLand has maps associated with the Property search page. I've used these maps a few times in the past when attempting to locate an urban property. They can be sometimes a pain to use but in this case, it really worked out well.
After I selected Lanark (LRO 27) as my virtual land registry office on OnLand, I went to Property and then Map. Before clicking 'View Map" I clicked on the Area list and to my pleasant surprise I found that Almonte was one of the specific areas I could focus on. Going to that map I could search by the street name without having to worry about picking the right Hope street in Lanark County. I started typing "Hope" and it gave me the option of "Hope Street" or "Hope St". I chose the first and this map appeared with Hope Street highlighted.
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| Partial screen capture of the Ontario Electronic Property Index Map for Lanark (LRO 27), Almonte with Hope Street highlighted. |
There I could see the lot numbers and even street names. For lots 138 and 139 we can see that they are basically on the corner of Hope Street and St. Andrews Street.
Finally I could use Google Maps to find the corner of Hope Street and St. Andrew's Street.
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| Screen capture from Google Maps showing the intersection of Hope Street and St. Andrews Street in Almonte, Ontario, Canada. |
Not bad for about two and a half hours of research over two days. The first hour and a half was spent researching the land records. The last hour was trying to find an online map that had the lot numbers on it. Once I remembered OnLand did, it took me less than 5 minutes to get an exact location of those lots on a modern map.
My friend's cousins can now visit the same lots their great-grandfather, William Tegerdine, and family resided on in Almonte.
Yes, I started with what could be called AI assisted results for the first breakthrough. That saved possibly days or even weeks of effort, but it took actual knowledge and research to put all the pieces together to come up with an answer for my friend.
Finally, this is a reminder to "Stop searching, and start researching" when you have challenging research problems.
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