Place Pages in Historical Records - Are they current?
I am teaching a genealogy class online and part of an assignment is to find a "Place page" by searching by place in Historical Records. I was surprised when one of my students pointed out that for Alberta, Canada, it has NO Indexed Historical Records listed. I'm sure this is an error. It made me wonder—How often are these Place Pages updated? Are they up-to-date? I enjoy these place pages and find them helpful, and I like to show them when teaching others about genealogy.
Here is a link to the Alberta, Canada page: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/location/canada/alberta
Does anyone know whether the Place pages in Historical Records are being updated? Should I be looking elsewhere for collections by location?
-Adrianne Erickson
Best Answers
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@Adrianne Erickson - I got concerned myself when I followed your Alberta link and saw "No collections". However, if you do the old standby of searching for John Smith, you will find plenty of John Smith records in Alberta.
I'm not sure what is going on but would take a bet that the collections that do give answers for Alberta are linked to either places smaller than Alberta or at the level of the whole of Canada.
I'm not sure what to suggest as an alternative because it depends on what you want - are you looking for specific people who happen to be living in Alberta or are you doing a population study for Alberta?
I would suggest just trying things to see what happens... You can't break anything and it's a useful lesson to learn that sometimes there aren't enough words to describe things simply.
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@Adrianne Erickson - I've just been trying to get my head round this a little bit more, and it's … odd. And potentially misleading.
If you go, e.g., to https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/ you can see a Find A Collection area in the bottom left (it's bottom left on my screen - your mileage may vary…) . If you enter "Alberta" in the Collection Title box, there is nothing. But this does not mean that there's no data for Alberta, instead it seems to mean that there are no collections that have "Alberta" as part of their name. (Contradictions welcomed!).
If you go up a level and look at collections with "Canada" in their name, you will find several Canadian census collections, and the relevant ones do appear to include data for Alberta. FindAGrave is another collection that includes records for Alberta (38 records for people named Windsor in Alberta, e.g.)
The weird part is that if you try to enter other province names (like Ontario, e.g.) in the Collection Title box, you will see a number of collections with Ontario in the collection name - such as collections for births in Ontario. So it does look as if there are no Alberta-specific vital record (say) collections. That's odd… But there is plenty of Alberta data in things like censuses, FindAGrave, "Canada, Border Entry Lists, 1908-1918", etc. So Alberta seems odd to me (when compared to Ontario etc) but potentially misleading because there is plenty of Alberta data - it's just not named as such because that data is in Canada wide collections.
To work through an example: if you go to the URL you had on https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/location/canada/alberta, yes, it says "No collections found", but if you ignore that and enter a "Last Name" of Bruce (to take a totally random example!!!) in Last Names of the Indexed Historical Records box, and press "Search", then you get 2165 records from various collections such as censuses, FindAGrave, "Canada, Border Entry Lists, 1908-1918", etc.
So, I think that the learning point is that just because there are no collections with "Alberta" in the title, doesn't mean that there are no collections containing Alberta data.
(This does suggest that it might be kind of hard finding Alberta vital records.)
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Answers
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@Adrianne Erickson If you search Collections, there is only one for Alberta. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/list?count=20&cqs=alberta
It is showing on the location page only under Catalog material. I do not know how often the location pages are updated, but it would be wise to search all collections to pick up recent additions.
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There was a serious problem with those location research landing pages a couple of years ago. The locations were all jumbled. Those pages may still be recovering from that issue.
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/145506/error-report-placename-standardization0 -
@Adrian Bruce1 That was very helpful! I really appreciate your help with this and that you looked into it for me.
I know now to explain to my students that although it says "No collections found" under Indexed Historical Records, there are still many collections that include the province of Alberta. I also appreciate the tip to go broader, such as Canada records, when more specific locations are not found.
It is a relief that there are indeed many collections that include Alberta. Thank you very much!
-Adrianne
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