Oh, dear Canada! Your free databases are aplenty

I can say with confidence that the website of Canada’s national archives is so much better than the website of  U.S. National Archives. The information available on this website beats paying for the expensive Ancestry.com’s annual membership that covers international document access.

For starters, Library and Archives Canada has a great resource for those researching Ukrainian relatives who immigrated to Canada. The Likacheff-Ragosine-Mathers collection contains documents that the Canadian consular offices of Russia created between 1898 and 1922.

The collection’s database provides an immigrant’s full name, marital status, gender, religion and hometown, in addition to the file number needed to obtain the record. The collection includes about 11,400 files on Jewish, Ukrainian and Finnish immigrants who arrived from Russia.

Some databases for naturalization records also can be found on Library and Archives Canada. Naturalization of immigrants that occurred between 1915 and 1936 can be searched by name here. More than 30,000 Russian immigrants were naturalized in Canada between 1915 and 1932.

A second database for naturalization record information from 1936 to 1951 can be searched by date. The database provides the name, country of origin, date of naturalization, occupation, town of residence, certificate number and series for each immigrant.

Naturalization records can be easy obtained through Library and Archives Canada. The procedure for obtaining the records are posted here. The general information on naturalization on the website also is helpful.

If relatives were naturalized before 1915 or after 1951, Citizenship and Immigration Canada can conduct a search for you.

Library and Archives Canada also provides a database of  immigrants who arrived between 1925 and 1935 here. The name, age, gender, nationality and date, port and ship of arrival are posted for each immigrant, whose file number also is listed.

Library and Archives Canada offers a search engine that combs through all genealogical database here. This search engine will not catch everything because some of the genealogical documents  are posted on PDF files such as the naturalization records of 1935 to 1951.

The wealth of online archival information continues on two more websites: AMICUS and CAIN.  The database of AMICUS has more than 30 million records from 1,300 Canadian libraries. The search engine for Canadian Archival Information Network (CAIN) will check more than 800 archival institutions.  This is just an amazing amount of information for researching relatives.