Most people who qualify for Canadian citizenship by descent get stuck at the same place: proving the Canadian birth. They know a grandmother was born "somewhere in Quebec, around 1920", and the application needs a certified copy of her act of birth, with her parents' names on it, from the office that holds it today.
Until this month MaplePass told you where to look. Now it looks for you, and writes the request.
What changed
Two things, both inside the chat on the homepage and on every article page.
1. We search the free provincial indexes for your ancestor.
For Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and British Columbia, the chat looks the person up in the archive's own index and shows the candidates: birth date, parents where the index has them, the parish or town, and a link to the record page at the archive. You pick the right one.
2. We write the request.
With the right entry picked, MaplePass writes the letter to the archive, citing the registration so the archivist finds it first time. Where the record is held by a vital statistics office with an online form instead, it lists exactly what that form will ask for, in order, with the fee and the one choice that trips people up on that form.
You still place the order and pay the office. MaplePass never retrieves files on your behalf, and that is deliberate: the certified copy has to come to you.
How it looks
Say you tell the chat: "My grandfather Joseph Tremblay was born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, around 1921. Do I qualify?"
Open the card and you get the plan: the document to order (a copy of the act of birth, not the short certificate, because the copy names the parents), who holds it (the Directeur de l'état civil du Québec for births since 1900), the fee, and the order sheet with the fields the registry asks for. The ones you do not know yet are marked.
Tap "Look them up". For Quebec the search runs against Nos Origines, a volunteer-built index of Quebec families that goes back to the 1600s. A few seconds later:
Pick the right one and the order sheet fills itself: exact date, father, mother. Then the last step.
Which provinces, and why not all of them
| Province | What we search | Years covered by the index |
|---|---|---|
| Quebec | Nos Origines | 1600s to the 1940s, strongest before 1930 |
| Nova Scotia | Nova Scotia Archives | births 1864 to 1877 and 1908 to 1925 |
| New Brunswick | Provincial Archives of New Brunswick | births to about 1925 |
| British Columbia | BC Archives | births 1854 to 1903 |
| Ontario | prefilled FamilySearch link | no free provincial index exists |
| Everywhere else | prefilled links | the indexes do not answer automated searches, or are offline |
Birth records are private for roughly a century in every province, so an index can only ever cover the older generations. That is usually the one you need: a parent born after the 1920s is ordered from the vital statistics office with the details the family already knows, and the card handles that case too, as a form order rather than a search.
Who sees what
The plan, the lookup and the order sheet are free, with no account. The full request letter and the completed form values are part of the MaplePass package, which is the same package that builds your application, checks your uploads and prints the submission bundle. If you only need the record, the free part gets you to the archive's door with the right reference in hand.
Try it
Open the chat on any page of this site and tell it about your ancestor. A name, a province and a rough year are enough to start.