The Ontario Archives: Scope of Its Operations

This 1,436-page monument contains something extraordinary: the hearing records of over twelve hundred people who fled to Canada during and after the American Revolution. Alexander Fraser, Ontario's first Provincial Archivist, compiled not dry bureaucratic files but the raw testimony of refugees - their names, origins, reasons for leaving, confiscated properties, occupations, family connections, and the intimate details of their disrupted lives. These are the commissioners' notes from 1783 to 1790, packed with biographical, genealogical, and historical gold. But the book is also Fraser's rigorous account of how Ontario built its archival infrastructure - why these records mattered, how they were preserved, and what a provincial archives should accomplish. It's both a primary source of immense value and a meditation on memory itself. For genealogists tracing Loyalist ancestors, for historians studying early Canadian settlement, or for anyone curious about the human wreckage of revolution, these pages hold voices that might otherwise have been lost entirely.