To begin my search, I started by looking for my grandfather’s (Gene Pepin) birth certificate. A Google search eventually indicated it was accessible for free from a public library (libraries are the best!) on FamilySearch.org. It turns out that FamilySearch.org is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons), who aim to create the largest global collection of genealogy records.

Once I found his birth certificate, I knew his parents’ names: George James Pepin and Edith Mable Willing. So, I typed George Pepin into FamilySearch.org (FS) which indicated that George was born in Chicago. The exciting part came next: his family tree populated on the website and it showed that George’s father, Jules Pepin, was born in Canada!

Proof of Canadian citizenship requires submitting birth records for everyone in the ancestry line back to and including the Canadian ancestor. At this point, I had mine and my dad’s, and now my grandfather’s birth certificate. I needed to find my great grandfather’s (George) and his father’s (Jules).

I decided to start with Jules, my grandfather’s grandfather, because if I couldn’t prove he was born in Canada, the rest of the application was pointless. The 1871 Canadian Census record, linked to Jules on FS, indicated he was 4 years old at the time. Aha, so now we had a birth year – Jules was likely born in 1866/67! The census record also showed the family was living in the district of Hochelaga, neighborhood of Longue-Pointe. A Google map search revealed this area is essentially in the city of Montréal!

In Québéc, the province in which Montréal is located, vital records (i.e., births, marriages, deaths) were administered by the church until 1926. According to the Reddit group, this meant I would need to find a baptismal record. Finding a baptismal record requires finding the church the family attended.

The 1871 census showed the family was Catholic, so the next step was to find Catholic churches in the area. This proved difficult, because Google maps only shows current churches. I needed to find Catholic churches that were in existence in 1866-67.

There’s lots of vital records available via FS that are text searchable but that are not necessarily linked with a specific person. So, we spent quite a bit of time typing variations of the name Jules Pepin (e.g., J Peppin, Julius, etc.) into different search databases on the website to see what we could locate. Eventually, we found a marriage card for Jules’ parents. Helpfully, Jules’s dad’s name was also Jules Pepin, so his records were included with the search variations.

The marriage card showed Jules’ parents, Jules Pepin and Emilie Bernard, were married on January 9th in 1866. It also included the note Pointe-aux-Trembles. What did this mean? Was this the name of the church? The place?

Now we knew that the marriage took place at the beginning of the year in 1866 and Jules was born in 1866/1867 (via the 1871 CAN Census record). This meant Jules must have been the first born, which makes sense given the shared name with his father. So, we thought that maybe his baptism would have taken place at the same church as the marriage.

Chris found this amazing webpage that includes a map of Catholic churches around the globe, and importantly, dates when each church was founded. Overwhelmingly, there were a lot of Catholic churches in Montréal.

Thankfully, the website also included some searchable tables to narrow things down a bit. Interestingly, Pointe-aux-Trembles comes up as a city in Québéc and importantly, only five churches are listed. By zooming in on the map, we could see only 3 churches in the area. The first one we clicked on was established in 1959, so that was eliminated. The next one we clicked on, Église du Saint-Enfant-Jésus de la Pointe-aux-Trembles was established in 1678 which was promising! We also liked that the name of the chuch was the same as the neighborhood and matched the marriage card.

We went back to the FS website and found the digitized collection of records from this church. Unfortunately, this proved a difficult task as the records are in French and in cursive and often of poor digital quality. We came up empty handed.

Our next move was to locate Catholic churches in the area where the family was living according to the 1871 census. Only one church was listed in the city of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, and it was founded in 1948, so that wasn’t the right one. We went back to the map and found the neighborhood of Longue-Pointe with a few churches. The two churches closest to the midpoint of the neighborhood were established well after the baptism we were looking for. We broadened our search and still most of the churches were too recent to be the one we were looking for, with the exception of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi.

We found the digitized records for this church on FS and, again, started flipping through the baptism records and trying to make sense of the French cursive and record logic.

And then, the moment we had been hoping for happened. We found the page with the baptism record of Jules Pepin, on the bottom right side of this page!

The left column shows that he was the 46th baptism in this church in 1866 and his full name is listed as François-Jules Pepin.

Chris kindly agreed to attempt a translation of the full text (corrections welcome!):

On the second of December eighteen hundred sixty-six, the undersigned priest of this parish baptized Francois Jules, born the day before, of the lawful marriage of François Jules Pepin, day laborer, and Emilie Brouillet dit Bernard of this parish. The godfather was Jean Olivier Pepin and the godmother Julie Chatelaine who were unable to sign. The father has signed.

I want to sincerely thank the good people of the Reddit group, who taught us everything we did. Without being able to lurk on this group, we would have been incredibly lost in trying to figure out how to triangulate the data.

The next order of business was to locate the birth record for George, Jules’s son and my grandfather’s dad. Story to be continued…

It’s been a bit disorienting to go from a text about a Reddit thread, to hopefulness about my citizenship status, to official documentation as a Canadian citizen in a matter of months.

I was able to demonstrate my Canadian ancestry through my paternal grandfather, Gene Pepin. While neither of my grandfather’s parents were born in Canada, his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were both born in Canada. That makes his parents first generation Canadians.

What made this possible?

Canada updated its citizenship law in 2009 to clarify how citizenship by descent worked. The change was meant to ensure that people born outside Canada to Canadian parents could still be recognized as citizens. That revision included a critical limitation: it restricted citizenship by descent to only the first generation born abroad. This restriction remained in place until Canada’s Supreme Court struck it down, leading to its removal through Bill C‑3 in December 2025.

Until December of 2025, my legal Canadian ancestry ended with my great grandfather. Removing the first generation rule made my grandfather Canadian, which made my father Canadian, and which ultimately makes me Canadian!

To prove it, I spent a couple of intense weeks tracking down records: a 1866 Catholic baptism in Montréal (more on that in the next post) and my great‑grandfather’s 1896 Chicago baptism record. I even had a second qualifying line through my grandfather’s maternal side, though that one has been trickier to document.

Back when the 2009 law was first introduced, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney released a public awareness commercial to explain who might “wake up Canadian.”

I had no idea in 2009 that I too was a “lost Canadian.” But I woke up one morning this week to an email with instructions on how to download my Canadian citizenship certificate. No more work-permit renewals and no more stress about being too old to be eligible for Permanent Residency. I have been found.

P.S. Happy Opening Day! Go Jays!

In the past, the expectation was that the university helped employees move from temporary work permit status after 1 year to Permanent Residency (PR) status. PR in Canada is very similar to a US Green Card. PR holders have the right to live and work anywhere in Canada long term (assuming eligibility requirements are met). It also offers a pathway to eventual citizenship, generally after 5 years of living in Canada.

A popular pathway to PR for people like me is through Canada’s Express Entry points based system. Points are given based on education, language ability (we had to take a surprisingly challenging English test!), work experience, Canadian work and schooling experience, and age. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) holds regular draws, and if your score meets the cutoff, you receive an Invitation to Apply (ITA) for permanent residency. You can find your own score through an online calculator.

Applying for PR used to be fairly straight forward and an easy path for university faculty members. However, Canada recently altered the point system for what it takes to be eligible in such as a way that being over the age of 30 makes it now nearly impossible to receive an invitation to apply for PR. I’ve been living and working in Toronto for 2 1/2 years and I am still awaiting an ITA. This has been somewhat unsettling, as it creates uncertainty about my legal status. More annoying, it also slows down my eventual application for CAN citizenship and delays other rights offered to permanent residents and citizens.

Enter the citizenship‑by‑descent rule change. If I can prove I’ve been a Canadian citizen this entire time (and I think I can!), I can bypass the PR process and the time requirements (~5 years) before applying for citizenship. I submitted an application for “proof of Canadian citizenship,” the official way of saying, “Hey, I’m pretty sure I’m Canadian…mind confirming that for me, eh?” If that application is approved, everything changes. I wouldn’t need to keep waiting in the Express Entry pool. I wouldn’t need to reapply for work permits. I wouldn’t even need to apply for PR at all. I could simply apply for a Canadian passport and become a dual citizen.

What makes all of this even more meaningful is that moving to Canada wasn’t an out-of-nowhere decision for me. It was something I’d talked about for years, often more seriously than the half‑jokingly way many people say “maybe I’ll just move to Canada” when the news cycle gets too bleak. I’d seriously considered the move twice before it finally became a reality.

It’s important that I note here that I’m already in an incredibly privileged situation. I have the support of university‑hired immigration lawyers. I have a stable job at a well‑resourced institution. I’m not lying awake at night wondering if my work permit will be denied or if I’ll suddenly be forced to leave. I’m not facing the same barriers or precarity that so many other migrants experience, including many of my students.

Even with all that privilege, there’s still been a low‑grade weight of background anxiety. Reapplying for a work permit isn’t just paperwork; it’s another trip to the border and a reminder that my life here is technically conditional. Even renewing something as basic as my health card is a bureaucratic time drain.

I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy trying to make the university aware of the changes to the permanent residency system and to push for alternative pathways for faculty that don’t shut out people over 30. Each passing month without PR is a delay in the rights that come with belonging here: the right to vote, the right to buy a home without extra fees, the right to feel settled instead of provisional.

This all lands even harder because of what’s happening back in the U.S. right now. The political climate is increasingly hostile to higher education and to sociologists in particular. Universities are under attack, research funding is being dismantled, and even some sociology textbooks are being policed. Watching this unfold from across the border has made the prospect of Canadian citizenship feel like a potential lifeline. It represents stability, safety, and the ability to keep doing the work I believe in.

And the impact doesn’t stop with me. If this works out, it also means that my family members who share the same ancestry can apply for citizenship too. They could choose to move here if they ever wanted to. The idea that this door might open not just for me, but for (some of) the people I love, makes the discovery feel even bigger.

For all these reasons, when I learned I might qualify as Canadian by descent, it was game changing (pun intended). Like the possibility of a walk‑off win.

Basically, for many decades “Canadian citizenship by descent” has meant that only the first generation born outside Canada could automatically inherit citizenship from a Canadian parent. This first‑generation limit meant that grandchildren and later generations were excluded from citizenship by descent.

This was changed on December 15, 2025. Bill C‑3 removed the first‑generation limit in most situations, making millions of people with Canadian ancestry eligible to reclaim their status.

As Chris and I dug into it, we realized that both our families likely qualified. As we put together an application (a story for another time), I began collecting a significant archive of documents regarding my family’s Canadian history. As of today, I have submitted my application (fingers crossed!).

What began as bureaucratic paperwork slowly became a genuinely fun puzzle. I got hooked on the search itself and I have a new interest in learning about my family’s Canadian lineage.

So…I’ve decided to start this blog, dedicated primarily to tracing my family’s Canadian history. I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned so far, along with new findings as I keep researching. While the blog is meant first and foremost for family and friends, it may also serve as a companion space for a broader academic project I’m developing.