While the process of genealogical research is the same for everyone, people researching Métis ancestors can face unique challenges. Some of these challenges face all people of Aboriginal heritage; others are specific to people of mixed Aboriginal and European heritage. It is important to keep your eyes open to these potential problems and be ready to get help from people with expert historical, cultural, linguistic, and geographic knowledge, when necessary.

Lack of "official records" in early time periods

First, if your Métis ancestors did not live in the western provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) between 1870 and 1885 you may find your research more difficult than other Canadians. This is because your ancestors have “fallen between the cracks” of official government record keeping. They generally did not participate fully in the institutions of “White” society, so they are not consistently recorded in land, court or civil registration records. Nor are they generally covered by Scrip records, as were the Métis of the West. And, as unregistered Aboriginals, they aren’t documented in the records of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Officially, therefore, they barely existed.

Lack of Aboriginal categories in older eastern records

When people of mixed heritage were mentioned in early records, the records might not say anything about their ethnic background (unless they had chosen to join an Aboriginal band).

Language issues

Differences in language between the registrar (enumerator, minister, or other official) and the person being recorded can result in many errors, from the misspellings of names, to the complete inability to communicate information. This problem exists for many Canadians because Canada was settled by immigrants who spoke many languages. However, the problem is even worse for Aboriginal people because the difference between European and Aboriginal languages is much greater than that between one European language and another. So, errors in recording names and other information will be greater and it will be more difficult to interpret written Aboriginal names.

Also, early record keepers, especially Christian missionaries, sometimes gave Christian names to Aboriginal people and only recorded the Christian, not the Aboriginal, names in their records. Other record creators, such as fur traders, often referred to individual Aboriginal people by nicknames. The individual concerned might not even be aware of this nickname. Matching these nicknamed individuals to actual members of your own ancestral family may well be impossible.

Finally, in the North, you might encounter records kept in syllabic script. Finding researchers who can read this script will be difficult.

Cultural issues

Cultural differences between Aboriginal people and those who created the documentary records about them can create problems for you. For example, kinship patterns and words used for relatives might be so different that non-Aboriginal record creators might have made mistakes in recording relationships. You must be very cautious in interpreting a record that identified specific Aboriginal people as, for example, “brothers” or “cousins,” because European observers may not have properly understood the relationships they saw or heard about if they were different from the traditional European pattern.
One example of this kind of problem is the confusion created when European record keepers tried to record the names of Aboriginal people who traditionally passed family names and group membership through women rather than men. Among the Six Nations, for example, many people were recorded with more than one family name, because European record keepers would sometimes record them under the family name of their fathers, instead of under the names of their mothers. The Six Nations were matrilineal societies, tracing their lineage through the mother, not patrilineal, as the tradition in Europe.

Naming traditions

Identifying individual Aboriginal people in early records can be especially difficult when people had more than one name. This was common among many First Nations people. Sometimes a person might have different names for different contexts. Other times, people changed their names during their lives. (Children got new names when they became adults, for example). Also, many Aboriginal people had European names as well as Aboriginal names. So, one person might be referred to in the records under several names.

Reliance on secondary information

Far more often than for non-Aboriginals, information in records about Aboriginal people was provided by people who did not have first-hand knowledge of the facts or events. We rarely find diaries, letters, deeds or other documents that were created by Aboriginal people in the nineteenth or earlier centuries. Most records are the reports of non-Aboriginal people created after the fact,

based on information from a variety of sources. This type of evidence is much less reliable than first-hand testimony.

Bias in record keeping

Because the vast majority of the available records were created by non-Aboriginals, often with a particular goal in mind (one not in favour of Aboriginals), the problem of bias can distort the accuracy of the records.
For example, where the goal of an Indian census might be to determine the number of individuals entitled to payments, it would benefit the government to err on the side of recording fewer rather than more people. This might result in some group members not appearing on the lists.
Other possible effects of bias might include not recognizing marriages and/or the resulting children as legitimate and thus not recording them at all. Another effect would be not trusting the accuracy or motives of the Aboriginal people and thus creating records based on information provided by respected non-Aboriginal observers.
Another major effect of cultural bias is that Aboriginal people aren’t treated as individuals, but only as vaguely described groups of people. This results in records that are virtually useless from a genealogical point of view. A less extreme situation results when census enumerators record only the name of the head of the household and list the remaining household members as “wife,” “boy” or “girl,” in the case of Aboriginal families. This was not common, but it was more common than with non-Aboriginal families.
A final form of subtle bias that works against all people who live in remote or lightly populated regions is the assignment of lower status clergymen and government officials to these areas. People preferred to work in well-populated regions, so the people sent to remote areas were younger, less experienced, or less successful clergy and officials. This can result in sloppier, less competent, less legible record-keeping than one might find in more centrally located areas.

Ancestors’ mistrust of record keepers

For a variety of reasons, many Aboriginal groups and individuals have historically distrusted government officials and other persons in authority. Because of this, they didn’t always cooperate with record-keeping. The result is that many records don’t include Aboriginal people or the information isn’t fully accurate.

Geographic remoteness and diffusion

When dealing with historical Aboriginal communities, particularly where people do a lot of hunting, trapping and trading (as many Métis people did), both the people and the records about them are likely to be scattered. For example, church records for many northern Ontario communities can be found in archives in Winnipeg, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal and London (England), depending on where the missionaries who created the records were based.

Gender bias

Historically, women generally aren’t as well recorded as men. While this creates problems for all researchers, it is a bigger problem for Métis because, in most cases, your Aboriginal roots are traceable to Aboriginal women rather than men. It can be extremely difficult to prove your Aboriginal heritage if the documentary trail leads back to a European man whose wife is never named or identified in the records. Even DNA analysis will not help, as genealogically relevant testing requires an unbroken series of only men or only women.

Adoption

Community identification and movement