Alberta, Canada - Proliferate Details



From the University of Alberta in Canada, is a very significance online site titled Peel’s Prairie Provinces which should help any family researcher learn more about the western Canadian province of Alberta.  There are several categories including images, newspapers, books, postcards, city directories, Illustrated War News of 1885, railways and general history.

The fully searchable collection has over 3.5 million newspaper articles, 7,500 digitized books with over 10,000 bibliographic records and 16,298 images. Select at the top of the Home Page which category you want to explore. The one listed as ‘Featured Collections’ has some the best variety of images and information.


The search box at the upper right side has you select a keyword or surname and which category you need searched for any related material. Just placing the keyword ‘Indian’ for images resulted in 265 photos. Placing the surname ‘Johnson’ under bibliography produced 1,567 items.


The best feature is the large selection of newspaper articles from Alberta.  Just about all issues from numerous newspapers have the full scan of each page. Any section of the page then can be enlarged for earlier viewing. A hard copy print can be made of each page for that section of the newspaper. When attempting to locate a certain person put in a surname in the ‘keywords’ search box and a search year.  If anything is found the name of the newspaper, the full date, and page appear with a brief summary. Click on a selection and up comes that article with the search name highlighted in red.  This aspect is always a welcomed aid to any researcher. Besides names place about certain events such as the ‘Spanish influence’ outbreak of 1918 -1919, very interesting to see how the people of the region handled such an event.


Another excellent source are the city directories, titled ‘Henderson‘s Directories‘. Here will be found all the businesses, government offices, police stations, clubs, schools, churches and recreational facilities in Alberta dating back to 1905, many with individual advertisements. The cities covered are Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Brandon, Winnipeg, along with towns in the Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Northwest Territories. This is the full text and images scanned and searchable. The citizens of each town, their home and business addresses are also in each directory.  City directories are always a super asset for any researcher.

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