Why doesn the Archives have the records of all local churches?
• Some records can be found at active United Church congregations who have not transferred their records to the Archives. • Some congregations have mistakenly transferred their records to local museums or regional archives. • Unfortunately, some local church records have been lost or destroyed by natural disasters before reaching the safety of the Archives. • Why aren’t all Local Church Records microfilmed? Due to privacy concerns, only those minute books and vital record books (primarily baptisms, marriages and burials) having entries beginning and ending before 1925 have been microfilmed and made available to the public through interlibrary loan. Search our holdings for availability. • Why aren’t there many baptism, marriage or burial records predating 1896? There are few early local church records for nineteenth-century churches. In 1869, Ontario legislation required the reporting of all marriages. It was not until 1896 that the legal requirement for keeping all church registers was
