The 1931 Canadian census was released on June 1 2023. At the time of its release, Library and Archives Canada (BAC-LAC) had digitalized the collection but had not transcribed, consolidated, and made it searchable by name. This means that the only way to find an ancestor was by searching using districts and subdistricts. Within the past week, Ancestry has applied their AI transcription technology and managed to make some of the census searchable by name, however this is not without its own imperfections.
When trying to find your ancestor in the 1931 census, its best to start with Ancestry to see if their page has been accurately transcribed by the AI technology. If your unable to find who your looking for, all is not lost. By the applying the following strategy (and a little patience), it is possible to find them!
I used a combination of historical maps, city directories, and modern maps to find the street that I am looking for. I developed this strategy when the census was first released because I was too excited (impatient?) to wait for a transcription to released. To best illustrated its application I will walk you through a case study.
I had been researching my 2x great grandparents for quite some time and therefore knew (based on city directories) that I needed to find Busy Street. I started by referencing the 1931 census and noticed that Busy Street was located in Ward 1. This meant that I could quickly screen subdivisions based on the image in the set, as opposed to having to skim through several pages.
The city directory also provided me with the names of the three major streets that surrounded Busy street. This information will prove useful when referencing the names in the census return against a map.
Once I had found an entry for Ward 1, I would skim it for street names and reference it against a historical map of Toronto. I particularly liked this one because it could be overlayed on the modern Google map. The process of cross referencing the census against the map resulted in the following type of table/notes:
For the above map, I have highlighted Busy street in green, and the streets mentioned in the subdistricts in blue. It should be noted that the visible street names are those from the modern map, and that the street names from the historical map are only visible when zoomed in on smaller sections.
Based on the above, I knew that I was quite far north of Busy street. After mapping out another few districts on either side of this range I determined that subdistricts were moving in two separate snaking pattern that met near Gerrard street. This meant that I needed to continue applying this method to the descending subdistrict numbers. I eventually found Busy street in subdistrict 20.
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