Exploring Canadian Land Petitions

I recently took part in a wonderful webinar and one of the (many) things I learned was that the Libraries and Archives of Canada has digitized Upper Canada Land Petitions.

My father has several Loyalist branches through his great-grandmother, Marion Wood Allen.  Each of those branches came to Ontario (Upper Canada) following the Revolutionary War and filed land petitions.

I had used the LAC to find my ancestors land petition information before, but I had no idea, until the webinar, that I could actually see the original record online as well.

With my new found information in hand I went looking for the original land petitions.  One person I looked for was Jacob Beam.  He had several land petition results, below is one of them:

Notice the microfilm, C-1620.  When I went to the Microform Digitization page, I searched by that number:

From there, I clicked on c-1620.  This brought up the original images, all 1,084 images in that file.  Once I got the hang of searching, it actually became pretty easy to find my petition among the many other petitions.    I would search by bundle (note that Jacob's is listed as B3 above) and then petition number (Jacob's is given as 143 above).  What is nice is that each page in the petition are marked with the petition number in the corner:

Above is the first page of Jacob's file (digitized image 112) with the petition number in the corner.

Yet another webinar I'm glad I took!  It should be noted that more than just Upper Canada Land Petitions have been digitized, a full list is here.