Record Atlas
Prince Edward Island · Canada · 4 volumes · 1721–1905

Prince Edward Island

Prince Edward Island in Canada, also written Prince Edward Island, Canada. 4 record volumes covering 1721–1905, and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-09-30 · first mapped 2026-09-23 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This is a province, not a town — the marker sits at its centre, not at a building. Records filed at this level are usually held for the whole province.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Prince Edward Island. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Search both names, not one

    This place has been written down as Prince Edward Island, Prince Edward Island, Canada. A catalogue indexed under the old name will not answer to the new one, and most people never find out they were searching the wrong word.

    Do this: search each name separately on every site below. Write the list down; you will need it every time.

  2. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1604–1713 France — Acadie genealogiequebec · lac · familysearch
    1713–1755 Britain — Nova Scotia; France keeps Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean genealogiequebec · lac · familysearch
    1755–1764 Britain — the Grand Dérangement genealogiequebec · lac · familysearch · nara
    1764–1867 Britain — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island lac · genealogiequebec · familysearch
    1867–2026 Canada — the Maritime provinces lac · familysearch · findagrave

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  3. The things that catch people out here

    1713–1755, Britain — Nova Scotia; France keeps Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean. THE TRAP, in two halves. Mainland Acadia became British in 1713 and its people did not move; Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island stayed French until 1758 and 1763. Same families, same generation, two sovereigns and two archives.

    1755–1764, Britain — the Grand Dérangement. THE TRAP for every Acadian line. The deportation scattered the population to the thirteen colonies, to England, to France, to Saint-Domingue and eventually to Louisiana. A family that vanishes from Nova Scotia in 1755 is not dead and is not in Nova Scotia — look in the Massachusetts town records, in the Poitou and Belle-Île registers in France, and in the Louisiana church registers from 1765.

  4. Start here — Images, free, but you must make an account first

  5. Find the parish, because that is where the book was

    Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the register. A village without its own church was written into a neighbour's book.

    • St. Malachy's Roman Catholic Church
    • South Shore United Church
    • St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church
    • Hunter River Presbyterian Church

  6. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

The archives named above: genealogiequebec · lac · familysearch · nara · findagrave. What each one holds and why.

Also written

Prince Edward Island, Canada

If the document in your hand says one of these, this is the place it means.

Whose archive this ground was

Prince Edward Island sits in Acadia — the Maritimes. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1604–1713 France — Acadie Généalogie Québec / the Drouin Collection · Library and Archives Canada · FamilySearch

Catholic parish registers from Port-Royal, thin and interrupted — the colony changed hands between France and England seven times before 1713.
1713–1755 Britain — Nova Scotia; France keeps Île Royale and Île Saint-Jean Généalogie Québec / the Drouin Collection · Library and Archives Canada · FamilySearch

THE TRAP, in two halves. Mainland Acadia became British in 1713 and its people did not move; Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island stayed French until 1758 and 1763. Same families, same generation, two sovereigns and two archives.
1755–1764 Britain — the Grand Dérangement Généalogie Québec / the Drouin Collection · Library and Archives Canada · FamilySearch · National Archives Catalog (NARA)

THE TRAP for every Acadian line. The deportation scattered the population to the thirteen colonies, to England, to France, to Saint-Domingue and eventually to Louisiana. A family that vanishes from Nova Scotia in 1755 is not dead and is not in Nova Scotia — look in the Massachusetts town records, in the Poitou and Belle-Île registers in France, and in the Louisiana church registers from 1765.
1764–1867 Britain — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island Library and Archives Canada · Généalogie Québec / the Drouin Collection · FamilySearch

Acadians permitted to return, to different land. The Loyalist influx after 1783 doubles the population again and brings a second body of American records with it.
1867–2026 Canada — the Maritime provinces Library and Archives Canada · FamilySearch · Find a Grave

Provincial civil registration from the 1860s onward, each province on its own timetable.

The volumes

Grouped by what it costs to look, most open first — which is the order worth trying them in.

Images, free, account needed — 4

The ground worth walking

Within 25 km — 1 place · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 13 catalogued volumes between them.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Neighbours with volumes catalogued

The nearest parishes

A church is a parish and a parish is where a register is kept — the register of a hamlet with no church of its own is kept at the church it walked to, so the distance is the useful part. Wikidata's coverage is very uneven: 34,612 churches in England against 105 in central Istria, so a short list here means thin data and not an empty landscape. Unchecked, and only inside a mapped record region.

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

National sources for Canada, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

The sources for Canada

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

  • BAnQ numérique — Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Images, free, no account Montréal, Canada
    Quebec's civil-registration registers — the parish registers that WERE the civil registration, kept in duplicate from 1621 and among the most complete continuous records anywhere in the Americas. Free.
  • Library and Archives Canada Images, free, no account Ottawa, Canada
    Canadian censuses, immigration and military service records, free.
  • Généalogie Québec / the Drouin Collection Images, behind a paywall Québec, Canada
    The Drouin microfilms indexed — Quebec and francophone North America, including the Acadian and New England parishes the deportations and the mill towns scattered people into.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Canada in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

  • Internet Archive Images, free, no account
    Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people.
  • Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
    The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
  • BillionGraves Images, free, no account
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not.
  • Find a Grave Images, free, no account
    Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
  • WikiTree Images, free, no account
    A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
  • Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
    Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free.
  • FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
    The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries.
  • Geni Images, free, account needed
    One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
  • JewishGen Images, free, account needed
    The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
    The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
  • MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Prince Edward Island. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Named for this place — 5

Catalogued under this place by name — the closest thing to a direct hit.

Elsewhere in the same country — 55

Narrower than the country but catalogued under some other district. Listed because a collection's title is not always where its records end, and never because it covers this ground.

…and 30 more.

See who held Prince Edward Island between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1604 and 2026.

See Prince Edward Island on the map →

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