Now available, another year is added to Ancestry’s Ontario births collection, now running from 1832 to 1916.
The addition, the war year 1916, augments the collection by 72,767 for a total of 7,162,200 entries. Curiously, the update section of the Ontario births page, posted on 7 March 2022 claims 216,404 new records for the year 1916.
In a July 2020 blog post, I compared the official Ontario birth stats with those found from an Ancestry search. In 1913 they were running around a bit over 60,000, so 216,404 in 1916 cannot be right.
Perhaps even more curious is that the Archives of Ontario website lists 1917 birth registrations as available on microfilm reel MS 931, Reel 31. Why is Ancestry a year behind?
The “Report relating to the Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the Province of Ontario for the Year Ending 31st December, 1916 (Being the 47th Annual Report)” gives 65,264 births recorded for 1916. This number from the Office of the Registrar General would not have included the late registrations of births. So the 72,767 number returned when searching just on the year 1916 makes sense.
I think the inflated 216,404 number of new records from Ancestry is the total number of names indexed from the birth registrations. If you divide the number of new records stated by Ancestry by the number found from the 1916 search it works out to be approximately 2.97393. So I’m assuming each registration has generated an individual index record from the name indexed for the child, the name indexed for the mother, and not quite all having a name indexed for the father since there will be occasions where the father is not recorded.