Billings Family Project

The Billings Project was originally started to assist the City of Ottawa Archives, where Ottawa Branch has it library. We have volunteers at the Archives every day and they get requests from people who are researching the Billings family, usually wanting to know if they are connected to the Ottawa line. The Archives had a printed photocopy of a descendants chart from the Billings Estate Museum that was not complete. I was asked to compile a more substantive research aid. My original plan was to make it available on a CD to the Archives staff but I later decided that a website might be more useful. A long article hd been published in the NEHGR on Roger Billings in 1935 and it documented many of the descendants of Roger Billings of Milton MA, including Dr Elkanah Billings, his children and some of his grandchildren. As the City Archives referred more Billings queries to me, I thought that it would make sense to expand the project to include all the descendants of Roger Billings.

 

This project has not yet been completed but it is now time to make the information available on line. It has been compiled from a variety of sources but not all has been verified. Most of these sources are derivative and researchers should check the originals whenever possible. The City of Ottawa Archives holds the Billings Family fonds containing over 7 metres of records that date from 1796 to 1988. MG2 contains the notes of Charles Murray Billings who considered himself the family genealogist about a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, he never published his work; he also never took a course in organizing his genealogy files. But there is a wealth of information there that I am slowly working through.