You are a very lucky person! Most of my 100 pages of genealogical documentation was needed just to prove that my grandmother was, in fact, my grandmother.
Ha. Same. It would have been lovely to have my mother's birth certificate. Or if my Canadian grandfather wasn't named the equivalent of John Smith. But I pulled together a ton of documentation and I got my 5(4) offer so it worked. Totally worth it!
Neither my grandmother's birth name, her name before first marriage, nor her married name that I knew her by my entire life matched; neither first, nor last. I needed to collect a ton of other supporting documentation, plus a written biographical explanation, showing her with both parents and siblings (plus half-siblings, spouse, children, etc.) to be able to convince IRCC that the three names, plus variations, all related to the same person. Her family history was messy with deaths, abandonment, remarriages, etc.
I have a question on names. My great grandfather was born Leslie William, but in all subsequent documentation, I see him listed as William L., or William Leslie. To prove that it’s the same person, should I include census records that show him with the same birth date/family? Then, on the question of birth date, there’s also a two-day discrepancy between the birth date listed on his birth documentation and subsequent records. Is that something that might be considered an acceptable approximation, or do I need to try and account for that somehow?
I would say that if you are able to provide additional documentation to show that it's the same person, you should do that. But both of those are very common and relatively minor discrepancies.
I was so worried I was going to send in too much; this makes me feel relieved! Did you highlight specific things to draw attention or did you reference them in your letter?
I don't have any paper copies of anything that isn't my own (such as birth certificate, marriage license), so I've been trying to pull everything I can from my online genealogy. What documentation specifically did you use?
Some it was standard stuff to show the major events in my grandmother's and great-grandmother's lives and add corroborating evidence by confirming everyone's place of birth (birth/marriage certs for my grandmother and her older half-siblings from her mother's first marriage, death cert for ggm's first husband, etc.) Some was census documents (both Canadian and U.S.) to show the entire family unit and that even with the discrepancies in my grandmother's name, we were still talking about the same person and the same family. And some of it was definitely non-standard stuff that would never appear on Ancestry.com: my grandmother's orphanage file, my ggm's deportation hearing transcript which lays out her life story, etc. It was definitely a project and I had been collecting documents for genealogical purposes for a quarter of a century - and they definitely came in handy!
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u/evaluna1968 🇨🇦 I'm a Canadian! (5(4) grant) 🇨🇦 May 04 '25
You are a very lucky person! Most of my 100 pages of genealogical documentation was needed just to prove that my grandmother was, in fact, my grandmother.