Vital Records Availability - Canada and USA

Vital records (birth, marriage, death) as issued by provincial or state governments are very useful to the family historian.  They may not always be accurate (in time of grief do you really think the informant can necessraily remember the maiden name of her mother's mother?), but they are an official source so folks are less likely to deliberately mis-state the truth.

After seeing FamilyTreeMagazine's very handy chart of the availabilities of American BMD records as they're called, I thought I'd put something together that's useful for Mennonite families in western Canada (BC to ON).  It includes initial year just like FTM's, but it also includes the privacy blackout period when the public are not able to acquire the records unless they can demonstrate close kinship with the person in the record.

The following chart shows the first year for which Vital Records were officially kept by the various Canadian provinces. In all cases privacy legislation keeps them from being freely available, so the parenthetical period indicates the age of the record that may be acquired/purchased by the general public. Records that are more recent may also be acquired/purchased, but proof of close kinship is generally required.

	Birth	Marriage	Death
BC	1872 ( 120 yrs)	1872 ( 75 yrs)	1872 (20 yrs)
AB	1850 ( 100 yrs)	1890 ( 75 yrs)	1890 ( 50 yrs)
SK	? ( 100 yrs)	? ( 100 yrs)	? ( 70 yrs)
MB	1882 ( 100 yrs)	1882 (80yrs)	1882 ( 70 yrs)
ON *	1869 (100 yrs)	1869** ( 75)	1869 ( 65 yrs)

Permanent links to these resources can be found on our companion website, the Mennonite Genealogical Data Index under USA, and the specific Canadian provinces.

In kinship, Judii Rempel - for Mennonite Historical Society of alberta