Censuses of Canada: Help

This page provides a list of services relating to the various censuses of Canada that are available. Some of these services are provided by this web site and others by other free web sites.

There are two motivations for maintaining this separate transcription:

1. This transcription is independent of other transcriptions and therefore will have different errors in transcription. Almost all other sites share a single transcription organized by the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) Family History Library (FHL) and financed in part by Ancestry.com. This includes the Library and Archives of Canada. The only other independent transcriptions I am aware of are OntarioGenWeb's Census Project and Automated Genealogy.
2. The family tree on this site identifies individual pages by the identification scheme used by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics for post-Confederation censuses, which was also retrofitted to the pre-Confederation censuses in the 1950s. This requires organizing the transcription based upon that identification scheme.

This service supports transcribing every column on the original forms. For each column the value entered by the transcriber is validated against the guidelines for the column and if not meeting those guidelines the entered value is highlighted in red. Many columns also have support for expanding abbreviations to speed up data entry. These abbreviations are explained in the popup help balloons for each column.

Columns which in the original represented a yes/no indicator about the individual are filled in with the gender of the individual. This permits coalescing columns which in the pre-Confederation censuses had separate columns for tracking by gender. This is extended to similar columns in post-Confederation censuses. For example in the Pre-Confederation censuses there were separate columns for school attendance by gender.

The pre-Confederation censuses did not include a column for associating members of a single household, only for describing residences. As a consequence the LDS transcription does not organize its response by household. This transcription emulates the post-Confederation family column.

In each form you can hide individual columns by clicking on the column header. There is also a Show Important button that hides fields that are not part of the identification of the individual.

While services that permit viewing census data are available to all visitors, there are additional services that permit you to contribute to the expansion of free census searches. Any registered user can contribute to any of the census searches that are implemented on this web-site .

There are individual database tables for each of the 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1906, 1911, 1916, and 1921 censuses of Canada, which record all or almost all of the values recorded in the individual enumeration forms of each of the censuses. For the post-confederation (1867) censuses that is schedule 1. There is also an option to perform a nominal search of All censuses of Canada at once.

To support the application there are three additional tables:

• The District table contains information about the districts into which each census was divided. For the pre-confederation (1867) censuses a District is the same as a County. Indeed the 1851 census was delayed until 1852 precisely because in 1851 the counties in Canada West (Ontario, formerly Upper Canada) were in the process of being organized as a result of the constitutional changes introduced as a result of the Durham Report. However for the post-confederation censuses the enumeration districts are based upon the electoral districts (called ridings in Canada).
• The Sub-District table contains information about each of the enumeration sub-districts into which the Districts were divided. Generally a Sub-District corresponds to a township, town, large village, or city ward. If the population of a Sub-District was such as to require being divided in order to keep the enumerator's workload down, then the Sub-District was divided into Divisions. Each division has a separate row in this table.
• The Page table contains information about each individual page in the individual enumeration schedule of every census. This table is therefore conceptually extremely large. However it is not populated for a given division until the first page in that division is transcribed. Each entry in the page table tracks information including how many individuals are recorded on the page, and the URL of the image of the original page, if that image is available on the web from a free source (usually the Library and Archives of Canada web site).