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York University Libraries > Help with Research > Guide to Finding Primary Resources > Canadian Primary Sources

Canadian Primary Sources

Sources selected below include government documents, reports, information about locating past census, papers, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, photographs and other Canadian related primary documents.  Sources are organized by time periods.

PRE-CONFEDERATION (pre-1867)

Exploration and Colonization (1400-1867)

Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment:: Contains over 1400 authors and over 100 000 pages of primary works: letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts as well as images of early encounters. With the exception of indexes, all parts of a source are included. Time period covered is from 1534 – 1860.

Early Canadiana Online: digital library of primary sources from Canada’s early heritage. It covers the time period from the first European settlers to the early 20th century and includes things like government reports, letters, diaries newspapers, magazines and church documents.

Champlain Society Digital Collection: Eighty-three volumes relating to exploration and discovery over a span of three centuries of Canadian history.

In Pursuit of Adventure: The Fur Trade in Canada and the North West Company : scholarly research site documenting the age of the fur trade in Canada by examining the exploits of the North West Company and other Montreal-based fur trading companies during the late 18th and early 19th century. Includes the full texts of 38 manuscripts that are known collectively as the Masson Papers and cover the period ca 1790-1820.

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories:includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Click on “Places” in the Table of Contents for works written in Canada.

North American Women’s Letters & Diaries: includes the immediate experiences of 1,017 women, as revealed in approximately 120,000 pages of diaries and letters from colonial times to 1950. This is a massive, ongoing project to catalog and index Canadian and American women’s diaries and correspondence over centuries. Includes letters from Susannah Moodie.

Digital Library of Canada: Exploration and Settlement: Library and Archives Canada online collection of exhibitions around the theme of exploration and settlement that include materials on statistics, past census, government documents, images, reports and other significant primary Canadian sources.  .

Census:The Microtext dept on the first floor of the Scott Library has microfilm reels containing copies of the actual census data for selected years between 1842 -1891, plus for all of 1901. You should use the catalogue of microfilmed records of data from census years in the period 1666-1901 (available from the Library and Archives of Canada) to identify the particular reel of interest.

E-STAT:contains statistics from the 1665-1666 census of New France, the censuses (from 1685 through 1767) of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Upper and Lower Canada, and the 1861 census of Upper and Lower Canada. Data in print form are available in the Scott Library.

POST-CONFEDERATION (1867-present)

Nation Building (1867-1914)

Canada in the Making: History of Canada through the words of the men and women who shaped the nation. Built around the Government Documents collection of the Early Canadiana Online collection, it integrates narrative text with links to primary source texts. Covers Canada’s Constitutional History; Aboriginals: Treaties and Relations; Pioneers and Immigrants.

First Among Equals: The Prime Minister in Canadian Life and Politics: Speeches:Selected speeches of Canadian prime ministers arranged alphabetically by subject.

Indian Affairs Annual Reports, 1864-1990 (Canada): Contains the complete annual reports for the department from 1967 to 1990 and also contains the annual reports for the Indian Affairs portfolio for the years 1864 to 1966.

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Click on “Places” in the Table of Contents for works written in Canada.

North American Women’s Letters & Diaries: Includes the immediate experiences of 1,017 women, as revealed in approximately 120,000 pages of diaries and letters from colonial times to 1950. This is a massive, ongoing project to catalog and index Canadian and American women’s diaries and correspondence over centuries. Includes letters from Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Toronto Star: Pages of the Past:Electronic newspaper archive of The Toronto Star, covering the years 1892-2000. Includes stories, editorial and opinion pieces,advertisements, birth and death notices. Results are displayed as images (photographs) of an entire newspaper page.

Globe and Mail-Canada’s Heritage from 1844: Covering 1844-2000, this resource is a full-page searchable archive of the Globe & Mail.

Paper of Record: digitized international collection of 18th and 19th century newspaper articles. Click on Search Archives for a list of Canadian newspapers covered. Includes the Canada Gazette from 1867-1869.

African-American Newspapers:Restrict your search to the Provincial Freeman, a 19th century anti-slavery newspaper published in Windsor and Toronto.

Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1893-1950 : rich historical source that describe Canadian and world events from the unique perspective of Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister.

Libris Canadiana: Provides word, title, author and subject access to material published in a number of Canadian periodicals of historical significance including: Maclean’s Magazine, The Financial Post, The Monetary Times of Canada, Massey’s Magazine, The Canadian Bookman, The Canadian Magazine, Saturday Night and The University Magazine. The time period covered is the 19th and 20th centuries.

Readers Guide Abstracts:Contains indexing and abstracting of many popular general-interest periodicals published in Canada and the United States from 1983 forward. The Retrospective option covers the period from 1890-1982.

World War I (1914-1918)

Canada and the First World War: Exhibition is designed to illustrate, through the National Archives of Canada’s collections, the many roles that Canadian men and women played during the World War I and includes war diaries, photographs, pamphlets, and posters.

Oral History of the First World War: Web exhibition based on the CBC‘s radio broadcast In Flanders Fields, a series of one-on-one interviews with veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which aired from November 11, 1964 to March 7, 1965.

Digital Library of Canada: History: See War and Military for other online exhibitions. 

World War II (1939-1945)

Faces of War: Online exhibition featuring photographs of men and women who served in the Canadian Forces during the Second World War.

Digital Library of Canada: History: Library and Archives Canada collection.See War and Military for other online exhibitions.

PostWar (1945+)

Readers Guide Abstracts: Contains indexing and abstracting of many popular general-interest periodicals published in Canada and the United States from 1983 forward. The Retrospective option covers the period from 1890-1982.

See Canadiana Research Guide for a more complete list of resources.

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