Birth, marriage, and death indices for Port Hope and Hope Township
taken from the local newspapers (1832-2009)

The lost issues The vital statistics in the available newspaper microfilms, housed at the Port Hope Library, pertaining to Port Hope/Hope Township families have been indexed. At Chief Librarian Patricia Enright's suggestion 20+ years ago, we began with the first existing microfilmed copy (1832) and finished when the Evening Guide ceased publication on 13 February 2009.
Note Issues prior to 1870 are limited in number.

Thanks are extended to those who gave of their time over the years to help us compile this database of over 35,000 entries: Barbara Trumper, Shirley Horner, Bill Hubbs, Allan Mackenzie, and Lori-Anne Simpson.

As transcriptions were done by as many as seven people at a time, the amount of material copied varies. Where there were weekly and daily issues we used the former, as the material in the dailies was generally repeated in the weeklies.

A special thanks to Walt Sammis of Florida, who, in 2011, discovered the "lost" 1928-1954 issues, stored in the basement of Cobourg's Northumberland Today building. One hundred three bound volumes (image right) were acquired and microfilmed through the efforts of Sun Media's Darlene Robertson, Port Hope Library's historian Lori Stephenson and the financial aid of Cameco Corporation.

Note A finder's index to the complete collection at the Library can be found here.

William Cooper's 1988 detailed history of the local papers can be found here.


1832-1899 (3,898 entries)

These entries generally contain a considerable amount of information, including cross-referencing with the local cemetery database, CemSearch, and Ancestry.


1900-1930: 8,592 birth (2331), marriage (1960), and death (4403) entries
Note There are only a few issues for 1927.


1931-1982: 18,151 birth (5696), marriage (4093), and death (8363) entries
The birth index, due to concerns about identity theft, has only the name and newspaper issue.
Note The existing sixteen issues for 1941 have been indexed, but not yet microfilmed. Missing are issues for Jul-Dec 1950 and May-August 1964. As many of the entries are for weekly issues, accurate dates were often difficult to ascertain (eg. "Married Tuesday last...").


1983-1999: 3,658 death entries
Note We are recording only death entries from this point for privacy issues, and only those that indicate local people. The listed descendants only include those with connections to the area at the time. While there may have been six offspring, only the "local" one(s) is/are shown.


2000-2009: 1895 entries, completed to 13 Feb 2009 when publication of the Guide ended



A number of original issues (1877-1927: 18 entries) are housed at the Port Hope Archives.

The following seven entries were transcribed in full from issues housed at the Port Hope Archives, which due to their fragility, are not accessible to the public.

Port Hope Watchman 11 July 1850 (3/1):

Port Hope Watchman 11 July 1851 (2/6):

Port Hope Times 06 Sep 1876 (5/4):



Peter and Barbara Bolton - Port Hope, Ontario
www.alivingpast.ca