I spent a few hours yesterday at the Ottawa Public Library with my records and a USB key.  If you go to the library, they have a subscription to ancestry.com which is a website that has images of many of the public records up to about 1918.  If you know the name of the person you’re trying to find, and some other pertinent details like a birth date or a place, it’s actually pretty easy to find records.  

This is a copy of the marriage record for Samuel ARBUCKLE and Margaret Jane MINIONS – this is not the register that they signed at their church.  The Reverend would have sent a copy of that record to the provincial government, where someone copied it into the big book of registrations.