For general inquiries, it is a difficult task to institute an in-depth search without knowing a place name for your ancestor when researching the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Most records are arranged by town or district locations and the vast majority of these are housed in a multitude of regional archives and libraries. In some minor circumstances we have a few limited province-wide indexes that, at minimum, will provide us with a distribution of the family name and most of these constitute pre-1900 information; at best, a pioneer ancestor might be located. This is always first priority, to locate the family, and these index searches are covered by the minimum advance retainer we request. Your chances at success are much better, however, if you know a town name or provincial district by which to isolate the search better.

If you do know a place-name, you’ll receive some research and additional research suggestions based on information you’ve supplied. In this case, the minimum retainer covers evaluation of your information, a preliminary research plan, implementation of some basic research strategies and evaluation of those research results in the Report.