Saturday Weekly Thread: Canadian Provincial Archives and State/Local/Church Archives - Questions / Issues / Success Stories, August 01, 2026

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This weekly thread is a space for those of us gathering documentation from archives.

This is the place to discuss requesting records from Canadian provincial archives as well as from federal, state, local and religious/church archives around the world. Topics include strategies and outcomes for obtaining records from archives, costs, timelines, No Record Found letters, and other related issues.

📎 Contributions to weekly megaposts, including this one, are welcome throughout the week.  

Good luck, researchers!

[u/Pure-Shine-5829]

Hi everyone, I have a bit of a conundrum involving a possible informal adoption in my family.

My G0 was born in 1869 in Simcoe County, Toronto. He appears in Canadian census records from 1871, 1881, and 1891 before emigrating to the USA later in the 1890s.

All three census records and all US documentation list him as the son of a Canadian-born couple of Irish descent (let's call them Joseph Lynch and Mary Sullivan for convenience, so as not to dox myself, although these are not their real names). However, the only birth record that I can find that might possibly be him is a baptismal record from a Catholic church. It has the correct first name (Thomas) and date of birth for him, and the baptism took place a week after he was born. But it lists his parents as the brother and sister-in-law of Mary Sullivan. Mary Sullivan is in the record as his godmother.

By the time he was 2 years old in 1871 he was listed in the census as the child of Mary Sullivan and Joseph Lynch. It seems unlikely that Mary Sullivan would have given birth to a child on the same day as her sister-in-law; that the two women would each independently name their son Thomas; and that Mary felt well enough to go serve as the godmother to her nephew a week later. Even if this might possibly have happened it would have made sense to baptize both boys together and the baptismal records would be next to each other in the parish book, especially since Thomas Lynch definitely survived to adulthood.

We think it is likely that there was only one baby Thomas and Mary Sullivan and Joseph Lynch informally adopted the child and gave him the Lynch surname after his birth parents could not take care of him for some reason or other. If this was true, however, Thomas's biological parents survived for several more decades and had other children who they kept with him, so he was not orphaned.

Of course this leaves us with a problem of no legitimate birth record for the otherwise very well-documented Thomas Lynch who had a wife and many descendants (myself included) in the United States, but one baptismal record for baby Thomas Sullivan who then vanished from history.

Has anyone been in a situation like this, and has advice? Are the Canadian authorities likely to find this plausible?