Finding Your Ancestors’ Original Ontario Land Grant from the Crown
by Pamela Wright
Land grants, or patents, from the crown were one way that the King (or later Queen) could reward their subjects. The early settlement in Ontario reflects this. However, before land could be given out it was surveyed and organized into counties, townships, concessions, and lots. I am not sure when the surveying started, but some of the earliest land grants in Ontario are in the mid 1790’s. For the most part, the counties and townships still exist as when they were first organized. However, we do not generally hear the term concession used much in modern times, but they were part of the way the land was surveyed and how the land grants are organized online. You need to understand the system in order to get to the documents, since the historical documents are organized by county-township-concession.
Before roughly 1999, the original land grants and subsequent disposition of the land (sale, inheritance, foreclosure etc.) were in hand written books. I am not sure when hand writing was supplanted by typing, but by 1999, Ontario had transcribed the original hand written documents into typed ones. Around 2009, these typed pages were scanned and are now available online for all land transactions up to that time. However, they are not searchable by names, which means you have to have some idea where your ancestor settled, if you want to at least narrow down the possible concession where your family might be found.
We are going to use the county of Leeds (now Leeds and Grenville) as an example to find an original land grant.
- Go to the Ontario Land Records web site at https://www.onland.ca/ui/ to search for land records. The opening window should look like the one to the left.
- In the box that says “Where would you like to look?”, put in the county name. When we type in or use the drop-down menu to select a location, Leeds, it comes up and includes an LRO (Land Registry Office) number. In this case, Leeds is LRO28. The LRO number is nice to know, but not necessary unless you want to get copies of the original hand written land grant.
- You will be asked “Where do you want to search?” Choose ‘Historical Books’ (red arrows, either place will work.
4. To the left, you will see a ‘Search Books’ section. The Book Category defaults to ‘Abstract/Parcel Register Book’ (red arrow). Leave that as is, the other selections are too modern. Note: If you already know the book number than you can search on that either from the bottom of the Search Books menu or the window to the right.
5. Next is ‘Property Description (Optional)’. Drop the menu down and select ‘Concession’ (red arrow). Another box “Select Type” will come up, but you will not need to enter anything in it. Click on ‘search books’ (bottom red arrow.
Note: If you know the concession number you can put that in next to that selection. If you know the lot number, you can put that in. However, stay away from ‘Other Information’. That seems to be for the more modern records.
6. You will now be at a list of all the available books for the county organized by township and then concession number. Without more information, this is your starting point.
Here we will use Lansdowne Concession 1 as an example of what the actual documents look like.
The Documents
Above is the what you would see when you opened one of the concession books. We opened book 49, which is listed in the upper right corner just under ‘Abstract/Parcel Register Book.’
There are multiple navigation tools. Viewing tools are to the left of the scanned image. We have not enlarged the image so the minus tool is greyed out.
The Page Tools allow you to flip between pages. This is page 28 of 288 pages in the book.
You can type in a page number, hit return and go to that page directly. You can go back to the concession list using the upper left return to search results link.
The right hand bar is for ordering copies of the pages. Any page that you view cannot be downloaded directly. For example, what you see above is a screen shot and therefore was originally low resolution. While some enhancement was done, it is still not very clear. However, for most genealogical work, you want the original, hand written documents. This document can help find those.
While I have not requested copies of an original hand-written patent, there was one attached to Escott, book 63, which is shown on the next page. As near as I can tell, knowing the concession information, the lot, the name of the grantee, and the date should get you to the original documents. I am not sure why this original was included, but it gives us an example of what an original patent looked like, albeit in low resolution.
The compilation of original patent recipients for some of the concessions were taken from these documents. The files include the book numbers, concession numbers, and the page numbers for both the online scan file and the hard copy book (found in the upper right corner of most of the scanned pages). The easiest way to get to your ancestor’s original patent will be by using the book number and then the scanned page number.
Download a copy of these instructions