Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Veenkoloniale Genealogieën

Notes:
Ottawa is the capital of Canada and the country's fourth largest municipality, as well as the second largest city in the province of Ontario. It was created in 2001 when the City of Ottawa was amalgamated with the surrounding municipalities that with it comprised the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. It is located in the Ottawa Valley on the eastern edge of the province of Ontario, 400 kilometres (250 mi) north-east of Toronto and 190 kilometres (120 mi) west of Montreal. Ottawa lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec.

There is no federal capital district in Canada. Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the federally-designated National Capital Region, which includes the neighbouring Quebec municipality of Gatineau. As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities.

In 2005, the city was estimated to have 859,704 residents, while the metropolitan area, which includes the city of Gatineau, Quebec, was estimated to have a population of 1,148,785.. Ottawa has a significant Francophone population, and under city government policy, all municipal services are available in both English and French. The current mayor of Ottawa is Larry O'Brien, who succeeded Bob Chiarelli on December 1, 2006. Ottawa has the highest per capita concentration of residents with PhDs in Canada.

History

The Ottawa region was long home to First Nations peoples who were part of the Algonquin. The Algonquin called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wrighht who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible, and the area was soon booming based almost exclusively upon the timber trade. Favoured by many European nations for its extremely straight and strong trunk, the White Pine was found throughout the valley.

In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of labourers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map.

The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed and constructed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (with the 1812 conflict with the U.S.A. being in recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid ouut a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons, most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river.

The west side of the canal became known as "Annalisetown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Nathantown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832, and typhus in 1847.

Ottawa became the centre for lumber milling and square-cut timber industry in Canada and, in fact, for North America as a whole. From there, it quickly expanded further up (or westward along) the Ottawa River, and logs were boomed by raftsmen great distances down the river to the mills. Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855.

On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpiin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West.

In fact, the Queen's advisers had her pick Ottawa for three important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (Quebec/Ontario border today), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable the major cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transporortation via the Ottawa River to Canada East, and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (~500 km/310 mi) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals.

The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about 1 km south of Parliament Hill on Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centrepiece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city.

On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents. At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, since the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a nighht in a neighbour's apartment, listening to his own home being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy network operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans.

In 2001, the old city of Ottawa (estimated 2005 population 350,000) was amalgamated with the suburbs of Nepean (135,000), Kanata (56,000), Gloucester (120,000), Rockcliffe Park (2,100), Vanier (17,000) and Cumberland (55,000), and the rural townships of West Carleton (18,000), Osgoode (13,000), Rideau (18,000) and Goulbourn (24,000), along with the systems and infrastructure of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, to become one municipality. Ottawa-Carleton used to be just Carleton County before 1969 and consisted of what is now the City of Ottawa except for Cumberland.

Demographics

In 2001 the population of the city of Ottawa was 774,072 (310,132 households, and 210,875 families of which 72.8% were married couples living together, 11.1% were common-law couples, and 13.2% had a female householder with no husband present), w while the greater area had 1,063,664 inhabitants, an increase of 6.5 percent from the previous census in 1996. The population of the pre-amalgamated city was 337,031 at the 2001 census, and had fallen to 328,105 at the 2006 Census. The census of May 2006 estimates 1,148,800 people living in the greater Ottawa (Ottawa-Gatineau) area. In 2001 females made up 51.23 percent of the population. Youths under 14 years of age number 19.30 percent of the total population, while those of retirement age (65 years and older) make up 10.81 percent resulting in an average age of 36.6 years of age.

Foreign born residents in Ottawa made up 18.46 percent of the population in which many come from China, Lebanon, northeast Africa, Iran, and Balkan Europe. Members of visible minority groups (non-white/European) constituted 14.14 percent, whille those of Aboriginal origin numbered 1.28 percent of the total population. The largest visible minority groups consisted of Black Canadians: 3.32%, Chinese Canadian: 2.59%, Arab: 2.19%, and Asian: 2.02%, as well as smaller mixed race, and other East Asian groups. Because Ottawa is the core of an urban area extending into French-speaking Quebec, the city is very bilingual. Those who speak English as a first language constitute 50.45 percent, those who speak both English and French, 1.07 percent, while those who speak French as a first language number 32.15 percent. Other languages include Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, and many others.

As expressed in 2001 census, the most popular religion is Christianity as 79.34 percent of the population described themselves belonging to various Christian denominations, the most popular being Roman Catholicism: 54.16%, Protestantism: 21.85%5%, Christian Orthodox: 1.68%, while the remaining 1.64% consists of independent Christian churches like Jehovah's Witness, LDS etc. Non-Christian religions are also very well established in Ottawa, the largest being Islam: 3.97%, Judaism: 1.09%, and Buddhism: 0.95%. Those professing no religion number 13.29 percent.

Birth

Matches 1 to 1 of 1

	Last Name, Given Name(s)	Birth	Person ID	Tree
1	Trudeau, Michel	02 Oct 1975	I680020	savenije

Death

Matches 1 to 3 of 3

	Last Name, Given Name(s)	Death	Person ID	Tree
1	Hoitzing, Grietje	Sep 1996	I352739	savenije
2	Wubs, Heije	27 Mar 2001	I352740	savenije
3	Zay, Gabriela Eleanor	01 Nov 1963	I302312	savenije

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