If you've spent any time digging into Revolutionary War-era ancestors, you've probably built up a comfortable assumption: everyone back then was a patriot. Rebellion in their blood, tricorn hats at the ready, cheering for independence. It's a tidy story, and it's also wrong for roughly one in five colonists.
Loyalists — sometimes called Tories, Royalists, or "King's Men" — were colonial Americans who remained faithful to the British Crown during the Revolution. They weren't villains twirling mustaches in the shadows. They were farmers, merchants, ministers, and mothers who had genuine, often agonizing reasons for staying loyal: religious conviction, economic ties to Britain, fear of chaos, or simply a belief that rebellion was the greater wrong. Some paid dearly for that choice. Many lost their homes, their land, and their standing in their communities. Tens of thousands fled north to Canada, across the Atlantic to Britain, or south to the Caribbean rather than live under the new republic.
If you've hit a brick wall with a colonial ancestor who seems to vanish from American records around 1775–1783, only to reappear somewhere unexpected — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, the Bahamas, England — you may be looking at a Loyalist. And I promise you, this is one of the most richly documented, wonderfully specific corners of genealogical research available to us. Loyalists left behind an extraordinary paper trail, largely because so many of them asked the British government to compensate them for what they'd lost. Let's dig in.
Why Loyalist Research Feels Different (In a Good Way)
Most colonial-era research involves piecing together scraps — a will here, a tax list there, a stray mention in a deed. Loyalist research is different because the British government, to its credit, tried to make its displaced supporters whole. Between 1783 and 1790, the Crown established the Loyalist Claims Commission, which invited Loyalists to file detailed claims for property and losses suffered because of their allegiance.
These claims are genealogical gold. A single claim might include:
- The claimant's place of origin and length of residence in the colonies
- A detailed inventory of land, livestock, buildings, and personal property lost
- Names of family members, including wives and children
- Testimony from character witnesses, often neighbors or fellow Loyalists, who could corroborate the claimant's story
- Military service records, if the claimant served in a Loyalist regiment
- Details of the claimant's flight — where they went, when, and how
In other words, instead of hunting for a single vital record, you may find a multi-page narrative of your ancestor's entire wartime experience, written in their own words or taken down from their own testimony. It's the kind of source that turns a name on a chart into an actual person.
Where to Start Looking
1. The Loyalist Claims themselves
The original claims are held in the British National Archives (Kew) under record series AO 12 and AO 13 (Audit Office records). Many have been microfilmed and are available through:
- Library and Archives Canada (LAC), which holds microfilm copies and has digitized a portion of the AO 13 series
- FamilySearch, which has partial digitization and indexing of Loyalist claims
- Ancestry, which includes some Loyalist claims databases, particularly for those who settled in Canada
Don't expect one-stop shopping. These records are scattered across institutions, and indexing is inconsistent, so plan to search under variant spellings and consider browsing digitized microfilm page by page if your ancestor's name doesn't surface in a keyword search.
2. Muster rolls and military records
Roughly 19,000 Loyalists served in provincial regiments raised specifically to fight for the Crown — units like the King's American Regiment, the Loyal American Regiment, Butler's Rangers, and the King's Royal Regiment of New York. If your ancestor served in one of these units, muster rolls, pay lists, and disbandment records can pin down not just a name but a specific company, commanding officer, and discharge location.
These records are held at:
- Library and Archives Canada (search their "Loyalists" research portal)
- The UK National Archives (War Office series, particularly WO 28)
- State archives in the original colonies, which sometimes retained confiscation or "test act" records naming suspected Loyalists
3. Confiscation and banishment records
Here's an underused resource: the states themselves. Revolutionary governments passed acts confiscating the property of Loyalists (sometimes called "Absentees" or "Persons Inimical to the United States") and banishing them under penalty of treason. State archives and historical societies — particularly in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Georgia, and South Carolina — hold confiscation lists, banishment acts, and court proceedings that name individuals by county. These are often published in state historical society journals and are searchable through sites like the HathiTrust Digital Library and Internet Archive.
4. Loyalist settlement records in Canada
If your ancestor made it to what's now Canada, you're in luck — Canadian record-keeping around Loyalist settlement is superb. Look for:
- Land petitions in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, where arriving Loyalists petitioned for land grants and had to prove their loyalty and losses
- United Empire Loyalist (UEL) lists, compiled in the 1780s to determine who qualified for the special land grants and hereditary designation "U.E." (short for "Unity of the Empire")
- Parish and township records in Loyalist settlement areas like the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the Niagara Peninsula, and the Saint John River Valley of New Brunswick
The United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada (UELAC) maintains a public list of proven Loyalist ancestors and offers a formal certificate program if you can document descent — similar in spirit to joining the DAR, but for the other side of the war. If you can trace your line to a documented Loyalist, this is a wonderful, well-organized society to explore, and their volunteer genealogists are famously generous with research guidance.
A Word on Records in England, the Bahamas, and Beyond
Not every Loyalist went to Canada. Depending on regional ties and personal circumstances, some returned to Britain, others resettled in Bermuda or the Bahamas, and a notable number of formerly enslaved people who had been promised freedom for supporting the Crown ended up in Nova Scotia and eventually Sierra Leone — a chapter of Loyalist history that deserves its own deep dive, and one increasingly well-documented thanks to the Book of Negroes, a British military ledger recording the names, former enslavers, and destinations of Black Loyalists evacuated from New York in 1783. If you're researching African American ancestry with ties to the Revolutionary era, this record is essential and searchable through Library and Archives Canada and the Nova Scotia Archives.
For those who resettled in England, look to parish records in port cities like London, Bristol, and Bath, where Loyalist communities often clustered, sometimes receiving government pensions that generated their own paper trail in Treasury records.
Reading Between the Lines: Clues That Suggest a Loyalist Ancestor
Sometimes you won't know to look for Loyalist ties until you notice a pattern. Keep an eye out for:
- An ancestor who disappears from colonial tax or land records between 1775 and 1783, with no death record to explain it
- A family that reappears in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, or Quebec in the mid-1780s with no obvious immigration record from Europe
- Land in the original colonies that was suddenly sold, seized, or reassigned during the war years
- A surname carrying the notation "U.E." in Canadian records — this is essentially a badge announcing Loyalist ancestry
- Family lore about an ancestor who was "run out" of town, or who "went north" during the Revolution
- Membership in an Anglican congregation in a colony where Anglicans were a minority — not a guarantee of Loyalism, but a common correlation, especially in New England
A Research Approach That Works
Given how scattered these records are, I'd suggest this order of operations:
- Start with what you know. Nail down your ancestor's last confirmed location and date in the American colonies, and their first confirmed location and date afterward, wherever that turned out to be.
- Search the UELAC's proven Loyalist list even if you don't plan to join — it's a great way to see if someone has already done foundational research on your surname.
- Check Library and Archives Canada's Loyalist collections, including land petitions and the AO 13 claims, using every spelling variant you can think of.
- Look for military service if your ancestor was of fighting age, since muster rolls often include richer personal detail than civilian claims.
- Circle back to the state of origin for confiscation acts, banishment lists, and any court records related to loyalty oaths — many colonies required residents to sign oaths of allegiance to the new United States, and refusal was itself a documented event.
A Gentle Reminder
It's worth sitting with the fact that Loyalist ancestors made a choice that history's winners later cast as the wrong one. That doesn't mean it was made lightly, or without genuine principle behind it. Many Loyalists believed just as fervently in their cause as any patriot did in theirs — they simply landed on the other side of an enormously consequential argument. Finding one in your tree isn't a genealogical scandal; it's an invitation to understand the Revolution as the genuinely divided, uncertain event it actually was, rather than the foregone conclusion we tend to picture in hindsight.
If you do uncover a Loyalist ancestor, you're inheriting a story with an unusually rich documentary record — claims, muster rolls, land petitions, and settlement lists that can take you from a single confiscated farm in colonial New York all the way to a specific land grant on the Bay of Fundy. Few branches of early American genealogy offer that kind of continuity across such upheaval. Enjoy the hunt.
