Ontario, Canada Research Guide to Districts, Counties and Regional Municipalities

This article is a precis of "The Districts and Counties of Southern Ontario, 1777-1979, Two Centuries of Evolution" by Eric Jonasson in Families, vol 20 (1981), no 2, pp 91-102, the quarterly publication of the Ontario Genealogical Society, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Until 1788 the southern part of the geographical area now called the Province of Ontario was included within the Province of Quebec, known at that time as “Canada”. The entire section of Quebec whose rivers flowed into Hudson’s Bay or Hudson Strait was known as Rupert’s Land and was governed separately from Britain.

Quebec or Canada was divided into “districts” for local administrative and judicial purposes. In 1788 Canada was separated into two portions, the old Province of Quebec or Lower Canada located to the east of the Ottawa River, and the new Province of Upper Canada to the west of that river. At that point the population of Upper Canada was very small but beginning to grow with the influx of Loyalist settlers coming in from the United States.

The system of districts was carried over into the newly formed Upper Canada. The province was immediately divided into four districts: Hesse, Nassau, Mecklenburg and Lunenburg. In 1792 these names were changed to Western, Home, Midland and Eastern respectively. Also, in 1792, the boundaries of the original 19 counties were drawn up. But it was the districts which were responsible for the management of local affairs. Each had a District Court of General Quarter Sessions of the Peace. This was a court with a variety of powers covering all aspects of municipal and judicial administration. For the genealogical community these powers usually cover three areas of interest: land transfers (by both grant and sale) and taxes, registration of marriages, and minor criminal proceedings.

The growth of the province, both in population and in the land that was populated, obliged the number of Districts to increase. By the time they were abolished in 1849 there were twenty individual districts, each with a number of counties under their jurisdiction.

The counties, originally established in 1792, acted as little more than electoral divisions. After 1841, when the government of Upper Canada was reorganized and the province became known as Canada West, some of the administrative responsibilities of the districts were transferred to local municipal councils, but they still retained complete control of judicial matters. In 1849, the districts were abolished and their remaining responsibilities were reorganized using the county or union of counties as the jurisdictional unit.

By this time, most of the counties in southern Ontario had been created and their present boundaries delineated, particularly those in the western and extreme eastern sections of the province. Over the following three decades, the boundaries of some of the counties were redefined or were extended as settlement moved into previously unorganized territory.

Several new municipal units were also created during this time, namely Dufferin, Muskoka, Parry Sound, Nipissing and Haliburton, most of which were created from unorganized territory. Dufferin is the exception to this broad statement, having been organized out of portions of three existing counties (Grey, Simcoe and Wellington).

Following the abolition of the districts, many of the counties were united for municipal and judicial purposes. Most of these unions were dissolved by 1860. Some remained united beyond this date and a few were never dissolved until the reorganizations of the latter half of the 20th century.

Since 1950, the Ontario government has instituted a system of regional/district/metropolitan municipalities to replace the county system. Designed to consolidate municipal functions more centrally, these new municipalities possess wider powers and responsibilities than the counties they replaced.

The first of these reorganizations was that of Toronto in 1953 when the surrounding suburbs and a portion of the County of York were united to form the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. Further reorganizations occurred after 1968. By 1981 ten regional and district municipalities have been created to replace fourteen counties or portions of counties. More occurred after the publication of the article on which this summary is based.