Founded and incorporated in 1994, the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa (BIFHSGO) is a not-for-profit genealogical organization.

 

Our mandate is to encourage and facilitate family history research, and its dissemination, by people with ancestry in the British Isles ( England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands). As of 2012, we have more than 625 members, approximately 30% of whom are outside the National Capital Region.

Within BIFHSGO, there are several special interest groups:

 

BIFHSGO is a member of The Council of Heritage Organizations in Ottawa / le Conseil des organismes du patrimoine d'Ottawa (CHOO/COPO), an umbrella organization providing networking for the entire local heritage community in the City of Ottawa.  The Society is also an associate member of the Council of Irish Genealogical Organizations (CIGO), and affiliated with both the Federation of Family History Societies in the UK and the National Genealogical Society in the USA.

We work in close cooperation with Library and Archives Canada on researching Canada's Home Children, particularly the indexing of Home Children's names found in ships' passenger lists and in the records of the Middlemore Homes. BIFHSGO's role in Canada's Home Children story is to establish databases of information about Home Children who came to Canada and to ensure that the information compiled is freely available to all. Our publication, British Home Children: Their Stories, is available from GlobalGenealogy.com.