Types of Archival Documents and How to Use Them

Many of the examples below of specific record names reference documents from Catholic groups, but similar records will exist from other Religious Organisations, though they may be referred to in different ways. In general religious organisations produce the following types of records which are of interest to those investigating residential schools: 

• Mission records: These are records related to the day to day operation of a particular mission. Sometimes mission records include lists of individuals attending that particular mission for church services or other services (historically missions provided social services and health services in small communities) and also correspondences and other administrative records. Mission records can also include burial records.  
  • Mission records may also include daily log books/account books. The Catholic Church termed these a codex historicus and logged the daily activities at a particular mission or parish. 
• Sacramental records: These are records related to the “sacraments” such as communion records, baptismal records, and marriage records. 
• Priest's papers and letters: These are personal correspondences between priests and other mission officials that may contain information about the operation of a mission or who was working at a mission at a particular period of time. 
• Family information: For the Catholic orders this is sometimes called a libre animarum which is a document that contains genealogy/family information for a family that attended a particular mission or parish.  

• Birth, Death, or Marriage Certificates are governmental records of birth, death, or marriage that are kept by a provincial or territorial government. In earlier time periods, these vital statistics records may be considered the same as the sacramental records held by Religious Organisations. In more recent years, these records are considered separate entities, and so you may have a governmental record (birth certificate) and a sacramental record (baptism) held by the two different entities. 
  • These records may have rules on access that are generally defined by how old the records are, so access may be restricted and a special request may need to bve submitted in order to access the documents. Statistics Canada has produced a listing containing information for vital statistics records for each province and territory that can be found here. 
• Band Lists or Annuity Payments: Membership records or annuity payment lists can be helpful in determining if a child who was discharged from residential school continued to be active in their community, despite very few other archival records. These records are often held by Library and Archives Canada. They have a guide to help identify and access these types of records for First Nations genealogy.
• Census Data: May also help to identify an individual's whereabouts at particular points in time. These can be helpful when trying to identify where an individual may have been after disappearing from the residential school records, or to identify non-Treaty or Métis individuals who were not recorded in the Quarterly Returns of schools. These documents are held by Library and Archives Canada, and a guide to their use can be found here.

As explained in Archival Research for Unmarked Graves and Missing Children, land use records such as old maps, land title transfers, development records, building blueprints, aerial imagery, survey maps, land sale documents are all helpful in understanding how the landscape changed over time. As mentioned, understanding landscape change is central to determining which technologies may be useful for searching for unmarked graves in particular locations. 

• Land use records: These records will usually be found at the relevant provincial or territorial archive. This includes records such as land titles, land development records, and records of land sale or current leases on land parcels, all which can help you to piece together how the landscape of the residential school has changed over time or been altered. This is an important component of the process of determining locations of interest for ground searches and geophysical surveys.
• Maps and Survey Plans: Old maps and survey plans can be found in various different archives, depending on the jurisdiction of who owned the land and who commissioned the map or survey at a particular time. Records relating to Crown Land (such as Reserve boundaries and maps) are often kept at Library and Archives Canada or other Federal departments, such as Indigenous Services Canada. Sometimes, municipal or provincial governments will have maps and survey plans of the surrounding area in their Lands Departments records which cannot be found in archival institutions, as these types of documents are often generated by governmental departments and not often accessioned into archival collections.
• Aerial Imagery: Some of the most helpful documents for landscape reconstruction are aerial photos. Before satellite imagery, aerial photos of the land were taken by the Canadian Government to provide an inventory of natural resources and were used to create maps of the land. Aerial imagery is often widely available for most parts of Canada after the 1940s, but some parts of Canada have aerial imagery starting from the 1900s. Aerial photos are often stored in Governmental repositories (such as Natural Resources Canada, or Provincial Government repositories) rather than stored in archives like other records might be. For additional information on how to understand and order aerial photos in Alberta, please see the IPIA Guide to Ordering Aerial Photos.

These types of records are likely not held at the NCTR and are also unlikely to be found in searches related to residential schools. However, it is known that many students were discharged from residential school to the care of hospitals and other similar institutions. Tracing a child’s presence through archival records may mean accessing records from institutions not typically associated with residential school. This is where background research is especially important -  knowing the hospitals or other institutions within the same geographic vicinity of a residential school, or reading correspondences or other reports from a particular school which name other institutions can be helpful in knowing what other institutional records you may need to access for your research question. A list of documents relating to the operation of hospitals in the western provinces and territories can be found here .

Once you know the place you are looking for information from, it is useful to distinguish what organisation ran the institution and begin to find information about its history. Some hospitals were run by religious orders before being taken over by the government, and the same is true for other schools or institutions. Generally speaking, starting with a provincial or territorial archive is a good place to start, as often institutions that did not fall within the IRSSA were provincially administered (or the province or territory took over administration from the church). There were, of course, several hospitals which were at one point administered by the Federal government. 

• Photographs: Local museums and archives for specific communities often have large collections of photographs that have been donated or obtained for their collections. Municipalities or towns often have historical aerial photos or other photographs of the community and surrounding areas within museums and archives. Where residential schools used to be located and now a community or town has built over the site, historical photographs of the community and how it has changed across time is especially useful if you are looking to find locations to do subsurface geophysical surveying to locate burials.  
  • Presbyterian Church in Canada Residential School Photograph Collection 
  • United Church of Canada - Residential School Images Collection 
  • Finding Residential School Photographs on Library and Archives Canada Collection Search 
• Community history books: These are books that were produced by small communities and contain histories of those communities and acted somewhat like a “yellow pages.” This means that they have biographical information about individuals in the community and often contain photographs, maps, and sometimes information about the mission or residential school in or nearby the community. These books can also contain aerial photos and other historical information that is likely to be accurate as these books themselves are somewhat historical in nature and were produced around the time period that they are discussing. Some of the books also contain information about other schools in the area and can have names of those who attended.  
  • For example: Alberta Published Local Histories - Alberta Genealogical Society 
  • UCalgary Digital Collections - Local Histories 
• Oral histories: While the vast majority of oral histories are held by knowledge keepers in the community, some oral histories that have been recorded or transcribed may be available at local community archives, university archives, or provincial or territorial archives. These can be very helpful sources of information, especially if those knowledge keepers are no longer with us.
• Community burial records and vital statistics: These are records that might be found at smaller community archives in locations nearby to the residential school you are researching. Additionally, many genealogical societies have collected records from community cemeteries that can be very useful, especially when burial records from provincial or territorial archives might be more difficult to gain access to.

• Private Collections: In our experience searching for archival records and trying to find information and sources of information, private collections have often been unexpected sources of information. For example, an individual who once worked at a residential school had donated their personal papers to an archive. These records contained photos of children, hand drawn maps, and other historical information within personal correspondence documents arranged in a scrapbook of sorts. However, since private collections are not archived according to topic, these types of collections would not normally be considered records relating to the operation of residential schools and are often left out of finding aids or curated collections. They often also include a wide variety of other types of records that are unrelated to residential schools. 
  
• Legal Records: These records can be varied but in the event that the RCMP or other government officials were involved at a residential school, legal records might provide further insight into events or occurrences that took place at the school or institution. Where law enforcement investigated occurrences at a school, the associated legal records might be present within archive collections that include court records or police records. Legal records are usually held in governmental collections at the province or territory archive in which they were created. Some legal records can also be found within the NCTR collections but might be difficult to distinguish from other government documents. 
• Museum Collections - Objects: Museums typically focus on preserving material culture and objects, so there are unlikely to be many archival records in these locations. However, some museum collections may contain objects that tell the story of residential schools and children's experiences. For example, this article outlines the experience of one curator finding some of the ceramics that were created at residential schools by children who attended them in Nova Scotia. The Witness Blanket is another example of material objects from the residential school system in the form of a collection. Another example comes from the museum in Vernon, discussed in this article. While these may not provide as much direct evidence as archival records for identifying children who attended these places, they can be helpful to provide additional context about their experiences. Please note that many museums often have collections that are not made available to the public, but requests can be made to access those collections.  
  • Museums may also have photograph collections - for example, see this finding aid from the Thundary Bay Museum: St Joseph’s Boarding School Fonds

• School Narratives: Provides a summary of a residential school’s history, including notable events, name variations, enrollment statistics, funding sources, names of employees, and sources for relevant documents held by the NCTR. 
• Quarterly Returns (Attendance records): The NCTR holds some (not all) of the quarterly returns produced by a residential school or day school. These were documents that were completed at the institutions and sent to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. Each quarter, the names of students are listed and the days they attended school. If children remained at home or went to hospital due to illness, this is also noted. 
• Department of Indian Affairs Records: These are records that can be found at the NCTR and at Library and Archives Canada and generally contain administrative information for residential schools or other institutions that were run by the Department of Indian Affairs. These typically include: 
  • Reports and attendance lists 
  • Financial reports 
  • Building and maintenance reports 
  • Correspondences  
• Maps and blueprints of school grounds and buildings: When residential schools were being built, there were often maps and plans produced that describe what the institution looked like when it was first built, or during subsequent construction. This is a good starting point to start to identify how a site might have changed over time, by identifying the number and placement of buildings on a landscape, especially if they are no longer standing.
• Death records: These records are different from death records issued by the Provincial government and are records issued by the residential school when a child passes away in their care. If the child passed away after being transferred to hospital, a death record is not issued or kept by the school.These records are not publicly available on the NCTR website and will require a formal agreement for access. 
• Photographs: Historic photographs can help with identification of children who attended residential schools or reconstruction of landscape features, depending on what they are photos of. They are also an important documentation of
• TRC Final Reports: What is especially useful about the final reports for archival research is that all sources used are cited. The sources cited in the reports can help you identify the records that are held within the NCTR’s collections, or identify records that might have duplicates at other archives you want to look at.

• Records of excluded institutions: Records for institutions that were not included within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. This includes Day School records, unrecognised residential schools, orphanage records, and Indian hospital records, among others. For a full listing of all the institutions that requested to be included click here. 
• Vital statistics records: Examples include birth records, marriage records, death records, burial records, census data, and band lists. These are often held by Provincial or Federal archives. Vital statistics records can provide information about children attending IRS. Depending on the type of record and which location it came from, death records can sometimes contain burial location and cause of death, but not always. Burial records will usually give a date of death and provide some biographical information, however, like all records related to residential schools, can be inconsistent and depend on the record producer. 
• Personal papers/collections: These would include records that were collected by an individual and held within a family or other donated to an archive when an individual passed away. Sometimes employees at these institutions generated personal collections related to their work. For example, see Tremain Family fonds - NWT Archives.
  
• Sacramental records: Relate to births, baptisms, marriages, and burials conducted by religious organisations. These are often held either at Provincial/Territorial or Religious Organisation archives.