Cape Breton Resources

I've found that the Cape Breton Genealogical & Historical Association site is by far the site with the greatest amount of information concerning people who settled on that island. It is a paid membership site ($25 Canadian/year), but as the Home Page blurb on the Members' site indicates:

"Our member's web site consists of over 600,000 pages of material transcribed from original documents and other types of material useful to researchers; over 25 GB of information related to Cape Breton. This site has the largest collection of Cape Breton genealogy information available anywhere.
Our records include an ever increasing collection of Cape Breton related material. No site can have every record for an area, however, our records are vast and increase each month. We have the following types of records - books, cemetery records, census records, monthly magazine the Ezine, family trees, historical records, land grants, maps, helpful links to other sites, military records, newspaper items, obits, parish records, school records and more.
You must be a member of the CBGHA to view the records on this site. New members are welcome! Click on Membership on the right side of this page to join."

It has more than 100 pages of indexed photographs of cemetery headstones, ships & shipping, land maps and many other categories of family data, including old and recent obituaries. They produce a monthly newsletter (ezine) of member contributions, many of which are partial family histories. They also offer two 1871 Census CDs (Cape Breton County & Richmond County), five CDs of Cape Breton County Marriages, dating between 1850 and 1902, one of Inverness County Marriages between 1862 and 1908, one of Richmond County Marriages between 1849 and 1918, and one for Victoria County Marriages between 1864 and 1918. The marriage CDs provide photocopies of the Clergyman's Marriage Registration Slip, which usually contains a wealth of family information. Often, there are three other photocopies of records concerning the marriage.

Although many of the folks who colonized the Island of Cape Breton (now part of Nova Scotia), are of Scottish ancestry, there are many familes who have English roots, either directly from the UK or from the UK via Newfoundland (particularly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries).

I am a paying member of that site (and have been for some years), but am not part of the administration or web management team. I just wanted to make people on the forum aware of the potential gold mine of information that exists on that site.

Robert

 

The CBGHA site indicated above is currently making the marriage records for Cape Breton County between 1850 & 1912 freely available to all members via a link in their on-line March e-zine. It is currently a work in progress, but the records from the 1850s to 1886 are all now available as JPG files of the original documents and contain the signatures of the parties involved (or their "mark"), as well as the identification of the officiating clergyman, the official witnesses and the names of the parents, their residence and the occupation of the grooms and the fathers of both parties - a veritable treasure trove!

 

Thanks Robert , I am involved in those serving in the C.E.F. in WWI and any links are always welcome. Cape Breton isn't on my radar yet in any detail as I am concentrating on the overall effect of the Halifax Explosion, Dec 6 1917 on those serving in the C.E.F. at the time.