Taking Centre Stage

For help tracing your roots in Canada, look to the library — the Library and Archives of Canada <www.nlc-bnc.ca>, that is. Its Canadian Genealogy Centre Web site <www.genealogy.gc.ca> features abundant tools for family historians, including a research area, training area, hyperlinks to useful resources, a discussion board, a what’s new page and guided tours. The site’s centerpiece is a nationwide name index to the 1901 census, which links to digitized images of original census pages. Canada’s library and archives — the agencies charged with collecting and preserving the country’s published heritage — developed this new tool to improve access to their holdings and services. The site launched in late March at Gene-O-Rama 2003, a conference presented by the Ottawa Branch Ontario Genealogical Society and the Ottawa Public Library.