Series GR-0112 - Crown land pre-emption records

Many of the volumes in GR-0112 were paginated prior to microfilming in the order the documents appeared in the original volumes. This was done in order to aid in the separation process prior to microfilming the collection. Generally speaking, the original order has been maintained; however, researchers will discover that many documents were microfilmed without regard to the page number sequence.

Documents were reordered for a variety of reasons. The main reason was to gather documents relating to individual pre-emptions together in one location. Other reasons would include human error or the reordering of documents within individual pre-emption documents. On several occasions this number appears on the back of the document. If there was no other information on the reverse of the page, it was not microfilmed and the pagination will not be immediately apparent without referring to the original document. On other occasions, the pagination repeats (e.g. 1-320, 312-321). In these cases, the documents were microfilmed in the order they appeared prior to microfilming.

Documents that were not numbered in the original pagination were inserted using alphabetized numbers (e.g.: 321, 321A, 321B, 322). On several occasions, these documents remain unnumbered. Documents that were found to be in multiple pieces were generally numbered this way as well (e.g. 322 [top], 322A [bottom]). In some cases, the backing sheet was paginated as well. In these cases, both numbers will appear on the same image. Either there was no information on the back of the record, or the document was glued down so heavily that the information on the back of the document could not be retrieved without damaging the entire document.

Regardless, the documents appear on the microfilm in the order they were arranged at the time of filming. The original volumes were rehoused in containers. Larger volumes were rehoused in two or three separate containers. The BC Archives maintains a list recording the location of these containers.

Several volumes were paginated after the volumes were placed in these new containers. Researchers will note that the page numbers recycle to 1 whenever a new container begins. In these cases, the pagination will generally reflect the order of the present documents, rather than the order they would have appeared in the original volume.

No guarantee can be made as to which system was used if only one container was used to house an individual volume, or multiple containers were numbered sequentially. Researchers will need to scan the entire volume to ensure that they have located all the documents related to the pre-emptions they are trying to locate. Every attempt has been made to microfilm the backs of all the documents that have information on them. The originals still exist if researchers believe that a particular page was missed in the microfilming process.