u/Serious_Picture1646

Let's just say I belong to an organization that gives out an award on a yearly basis. If I don't get it right away, I can live with that, and candidly there are a few people in the group who probably deserve it as least as much as I do; I can wait my turn if need be.

That said, I don't want my hard work to go ignored. What are some GoM spells I could use to ensure that it is recognized by the leadership, who decide who gets this award, and that I'm on their minds when they make that decision?

This is a bit of a rant so thank you for indulging me if you choose to read this. My ancestor William Reed Smith (1826-1894) was a Mormon pioneer who had been born in Yonge, Upper Canada. His (first) wife, Emeline Leavitt (1832-1888) from whom I am also descended, was apparently born in Hatley, Quebec. (I found an Emeline Leavitt baptized in Hatley, Quebec on Familysearch, but no parents' names were listed; I will probably have to revisit her later.)

Perhaps if I am lucky this man having had thirty children means that some distant cousin of mine will come across this and will have already found Canadian documentation, but for now, I just want to vent and marvel at how ridiculously difficult finding documentation can get. It feels like it should be easy: in today's meticulously recorded Western civilization, even household pets have documentation that lists a date of birth. Yet much of the world still does not issue birth certificates as we know them, and many people from some countries have no idea what their date of birth is: dates of birth are often issued arbitrarily (usually January 1st) to refugees who fit this description.

Anyway, back to William Reed Smith. His case is infuriating. First, I can find no record of his baptism in spite of him having been born in Upper Canada, as was his father. All my documentation listing his birthplace as Canada is, so far, from the US government or the LDS church. But nary a Canadian baptismal record can be found (so far).

It gets worse with the second discovery. In his forties, he leaves newly-settled Utah to serve as a missionary in the United Kingdom and mentions in correspondence that he stopped to visit his older sisters who were still in Canada on the way there, but ship records apparently do not list birthplaces: I was hoping that that would count as a Canadian government document recognizing him as having been born there, but no luck.

Third and finally, and most infuriating of all, LDS President John Taylor asks him and a guy named Charles Ora Card to go to what is now Alberta and to set up Mormon settlements there. They found Cardston, Alberta, which is named after Card, and William Reed Smith apparently purchased land that later became Spring Coulee. Yet as I look through Alberta's land records, I am unable to find his name in the index, and archive.org's enormous stash of microfilm is unindexed and an absolute mess of tens of thousands of pages. Even if there were a record of him owning land there, would it list his birthplace as Canada? Would he just have been considered an American who happened to buy a bit of land there by that point, and so homestead record would have been issued? If I had found a land grant with his name and birthplace, issued by the Canadian government, that would in theory have been the key piece of the puzzle: a later document, from the Canadian government instead of a church, recognizing his birthplace as Canada, even if decades after the fact. Yet even in the 1880s, things as big as a town being founded seem to go largely undocumented, at least by the standards of our time.

Anyways, I hope this serves as an illustration of how frustrating searching for documentation pre-20th century (that's a very ballpark estimate) can be for some of us. And if anyone happens to be able to point me in the right direction, I would be most thankful.

tl;dr: My ancestor founded an entire village (Spring Coulee, Alberta) and even with that, I can't find Canadian government documentation (so far).

Where to begin? My Gen0s were a couple who were both born in Upper Canada in the 1820s/30s, but were married in the US. My great x3 grandmother's parents were both born and both died in the US, but my great x3 grandfather's father (my great x4 grandfather) was born and buried in Upper Canada. Further, his father and his father in law (my 5x great grandfathers) were both United Empire Loyalists, one of them a major in a militia in the War of 1812.

So far, I've located some US censuses mentioning Gen0's birthplaces as Canada, and Gen1's death cert lists her parents as having been born in Canada, and that's all well and good but I want as much Canadian-side info as possible. I've found a will that appears to be Gen0's grandfather mentioning his daughter/Gen0's mother, but I had to dig deep and use a Google Search that led me to some little random genealogy page that someone had indexed the following link on: (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSV5-BS3C-8?i=28&cat=218477&lang=en)

I had no idea this will existed and my searches for my ancestor's names had not yielded it on FamilySearch; it only showed up because I googled them. I'm now worried that I may have to search through indefinite reams of microfilm records from the Ontario Archives. I'm happy to hire a professional if the price is reasonable, but I'm just confused at this point. Did I miss an easier way to search? Am I going to need to set aside a few days at the Ontario Archives and go in person? Sorry for the need for hand-holding but these 19th century records are just brutal.

Edit: TL;DR: I ran across a will largely by chance in a massive trove of microfilmed records, shown in the link above. I have no idea how I would have found it searching through FamilySearch, and I feel like the more I search the more I sink in the genealogical quicksand. I hope someone here will be kind enough to tell me how I could have found it so I'm not manually typing in different URLs hoping I just happen to stumble on the right 1,000-page microfilm record.