Land Settlement in Upper Canada 1783-1840. By George Patterson (on CD)

$18.00

Cat No.:   CA0227: (See also product CA0227-DL for this "book" as a downloadable file and save the mailing cost.)

The author of this book, George Patterson, scoured the Ontario Archives to put together this report, initially presented to the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and the Provincial Treasurer, but which now provides us with an unbiased, factual, account of the planning and allocation of settlement land in Upper Canada, today called Ontario.

This is the book which all serious genealogical researchers in Ontario need in order to make sense of the layout of the counties, townships, towns and villages and to understand how their ancestors land allocations were determined. This, in fact, is the key to so many of the otherwise baffling facts we find on the maps and in the records of Ontario.

The report does not hide that there were many shortfalls in the land allocation processes used by the newly created Upper Canada parliament, that there were many special interests involved, that in some cases land allocations were fraudulently granted and that, on a larger scale, political dealing was the cause of a significant amount of civil unrest. Three specific areas singled out in this last category are overgenerous grants to U.E. Loyalists, the granting of free land to military retirees and the allocation of clergy reserves. Many other instances are cited but they mostly gave rise to local or individual disfavor. On the other hand, it also points out that efforts were made to make and control an ever increasing number of requests for settlement land over an enormous area.

It would, of course, be impossible to report on this subject without reference to the various agreements and arrangements made with the area’s indigenous peoples and significant space is given to recording the facts of these negotiations.

For all the inequity and errors revealed in the process, nevertheless the report does provide a valuable picture of the development of the politico-social structure of Ontario, both in the early settling of the Loyalists and in the latter settling of the various national groups as they arrived from areas such as Scotland, Ireland and the other recognized areas of persecution in Europe.

The book is clearly written and comes with an extensive index. Nevertheless we have made it searchable and enabled our FastFind technology to speed you to the facts. It also contains fold out maps and reproductions of many of the original granting documents and announcements as well as samples of signatures of many of the key individuals whose names may appear on historic records. The various facts are well cited as they are divulged and the extensive bibliography provides the key to further research and reading.

See also CA0226

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No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-897405-30-7 ;