Over the next few months, ‘From the Vault’ will present a series of articles about tracing the ownership of a piece of property and how a little research can produce a picture of previous owners.

This will not be the traditional method of tracing ownership backwards from the present – rather, this is an illustration of how by using existing records, one can learn about a pioneer, ancestor or just previous owners and the records that they have left behind. Much, if not all of these can be found in local archives and libraries for every township in Southern Ontario.

As a ‘new’ Canadian, I have no ancestors who lived in Flamborough, so this series of articles is based on tracing the ownership of Lot 8, Concession 5 in East Flamborough, just north of Waterdown and how the history associated with it has been traced and is part of the story of the development of the township from the time it was opened to Upper Canada settlers.

To begin, an introduction to early Upper Canada history and how land records began. Following the end of the American War of Independence, many residents who had supported the British were forced to flee. Branded as traitors by the American patriots, these ‘Loyalists’ headed northwards for safety. Faced with the challenge and responsibility for these ‘refugees’, the British government recognized that the legal ownership of the land west of Quebec had to be established before being offered for settlement.

By ‘The New Purchase,’ the British Crown on May 22, 1784, at the cost of one-tenth of a penny per acre, obtained all the land from the Niagara River to the Head-of-the-Lake from the migratory Mississaugas, so there would be property available for the Loyalists, who were housed in camps at Niagara. Four years later, all the land west of Quebec was divided into administrative districts, with Land Boards established to “receive and report on the applications of petitioners for a land grant.”

With the formal creation of Upper Canada in 1791, Lt. Governor John Graves Simcoe chose Augustus Jones to be his Provincial Land Surveyor and gave him instructions to begin at the Niagara River and layout a series of townships fronting onto Lake Ontario, as far as ‘The Purchase Line’ (the present-day boundary between East Flamborough Township and Halton County), with East Flamborough being the final township of the survey.

Sylvia Wray is the former archivist with the Flamborough Archives. She can be reached through the Archives at archives@flamboroughhistory.com.

This article was originally published in the Flamborough Review, 29 May 2014.