The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada has marked the country's national historic sites, persons and events with bronze plaques since 1919, and Parks Canada publishes the plaque texts in its Directory of Federal Heritage Designations. Two hundred and fifty-four of those sites, as of October 2026, have permanent pages at TreeAlive, each carrying the plaque text in English and in French as the Directory publishes it, and in a third language where the plaque was cast in one. The Directory records no coordinates, so every page stands on a location worked out from the Directory's own street address or local area, checked two independent ways, and says the location is approximate. Sites the Directory does not place, and the persons and events it records with no address at all, are not shown.
254 marker pages, on more than 83,000 historical map sheets. Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, Parks Canada, credited on every page.
Every dot is a live page. Click one to preview it or add it to a road trip; many dots hold several markers each; click a busy spot to zoom in. Prefer a list? Browse all 254 markers by county.
TreeAlive maps family trees. When a visitor's ancestors lived in Canada, the plaques standing near those places surface automatically alongside their family's journey:
Fort Anne · near where a family lived in Annapolis Royal in the 1700s · what this plaque records spans 1629 to 1917, overlapping the family’s years here
When a plaque stands near a place in your own tree, you have a personal reason to go see it. Open the live demo tree, choose the Crossings tab, and turn on Historical Markers to see the experience working (the demo family’s markers are in Pennsylvania; a family with Canadian roots sees Canada’s).
Browsing all 254 markers by province.