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Showing posts with the label canadian census records

Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show a side to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her - that one that the heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are...
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Was Your Ancestor Double Enumerated?

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Double enumerations are a rare but wonderful things to find when searching for your ancestor in a census. Often times this additional entry can tell us a lot about a person and their life at the time the census was taken. Determining if someone was actually double enumerated can be tricky but is definitely worthwhile.  What is a double enumerations? A double enumeration is a statistical error of sorts, on the enumerators part, where the same person is recorded two times in the same census. There are a few ways that this can happen, but the most frequent cause is that the person was living in two different places at the time. For example, a child in the household may have been living away at school but also have been recorded as living with the family back home.  How to tell if they are the same person? The more recent the census, the easier it is to tell if two entries are truly the same person. The reason for this is that more recent census returns offer more information abou...
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Get to Know bac-lac: Canadian Census Records (Part IV)

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In Part III of this series I talked about how occupational codes can tell us more information about someone's occupation. Specifically I used the example of how the term 'farmer' had been used as broad terms to describe anybody who lived off the land or cultivated something. The farm and goods census (1851 and 1861 only) served as a pre-cursor of sorts to occupational codes.  The farm and goods census record provided information such as: total lot size number of farm hands (male and female) how the acreage was divided between crops, pasture, residential, and bush land acres occupied by each crop and how many bushels were produced of each number of livestock income from the production of commercial goods (candles, shoes, leather, etc.) The above information was to be provided by the owner of the farm with production values given for the previous year of operation.  Before finding the person in the farm and goods census be sure to find them in the general population census. T...
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Get to Know bac-lac: Canadian Census Records (Part III)

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What is an Occupational Code? If you have been researching your family in Canadian census records for a while you have probably noticed the numbers that are written over the transcribed information. As much as I wish that they didn't obstruct my ability to read the original writing they do offer some valuable information. The meaning behind every numerical code written over the census is not known, however the ones next to/covering the employment column relate to the industry that someone was employed in. Occupational codes were introduced to make it easier for the government and social scientists to identify the number of people working in each industry for a given census year. In some of the older census records, generic terms such as 'labourer', 'farmer' or 'servant' were recorded when really this didn't provide a complete nor accurate description of what the person did for a living. The occupational codes broke down these broad job descriptions thus ...
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A Great Big List of (Mostly) Free Canadian Genealogy Websites

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One of the main reasons why I started this blog is because I noticed that there were few sites that focused on Canadian genealogy. Over the years I have amassed quite the list of resources. Some cover the entire country while others focus on specific areas that I'm researching. I have organized the list below by location and as always I have identified paid resources with ($).  Nationwide Canadian Genealogy Resources  I have provided more detail about the following resources on my Canadian Resources page.  Library and Archives Canada   Provincial Databases (some $) -  Familysearch Wiki - Canada Internet Archive Familysearch ProQuest  ($) Canadiana Military Resources I wrote a post on military resources and loyalists which can be found  here  and  here .  Database: WW1 Service Files Database WW2 War Dead Service Files The Commonwealth War Graves Commission Veterans Affairs Canada Wikipedia WW1 CEF Battalions Canadian Great War Project A S...
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Get to Know bac-lac: Canadian Census Records (Part II)

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In my previous post ( here ) I wrote about the Canadian census collection featured on Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac). Although understanding where to find census information and what parts of it are important can be a challenge, the most challenging part by far is performing a successful search that yields a manageable number of results. As much as I LOVE to conduct searches using a Degrees of Freedom analysis (which I wrote about here ), the limited number of search fields on bac-lac makes this a near impossible task. To further complicate things, bac-lac does not perform "fuzzy" searches meaning that it does not search phonetically or for names with similar spellings. This can be especially challenging for names that have many variations or that were abbreviated on the census return. For surnames that contain a prefix this adds another level of complexity as the prefix may be placed at the end of the surname. For example the surname "O'Reilly" may have ...
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Get to Know bac-lac: Canadian Census Records (Part I)

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People who know I love genealogy know that I am always talking about Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac). When I first was starting my genealogical research this website was my top resource. I still use it quite often when performing my Canadian research and each time it seems as though I discover a new set of collections.  Bac-lac is a website owned and curated by the Canadian government. They have a wide range of digitalized collections and an even wider range of ones that are cataloged or transcribed. Some of their most popular collections include census, immigration, and military records. They also have a page that offers genealogy help both in the form of basic tips and how to hire a professional (since I was a broke student when I started my research, I opted for the tips).  This post is going to focus on how to search census returns. I will write (and link) posts later on for the military and immigration records.  Census Records On the census records page, each c...
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Ford's Folly and the Slum of Little Hell

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Battersea: The Sinkhole of Surrey During the Victorian Era, Battersea had gained the reputation as being “the sinkhole of Surrey” due to its widespread poverty and slum-like conditions. Many of the poor in Battersea were subject to irregular income from the building trades. For a family to scrape by in the winter they would have to apply thrift spending during the summer. This was often complicated by the reliance on alcohol which was used as a means of escape from the depression of living in such widespread poverty. The irregular income caused many of Battersea’s poor to frequently be on the move. On average a family lived in one place for less than two years before moving no more than a few streets away. After hopping from neighbourhood to neighbourhood the family would eventually return to where they were once exiled from, moving in only a few doors away from their former address. Ford’s Folly and the slum of Little Hell In Keith Bailey’s report Orville Road, Battersea: a Victor...
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Born on St Patrick's Day: Happy 115th Mary

They say that its good luck to be Irish, and that the luckiest of all are those who are born on St Patrick's Day. No doubt this is what was said the day that my great grandmother was born. However, her life was not necessarily filled with the good luck that the superstition had predicted. As much as she had a hard life, her life was also an "ordinary" one of a young British immigrant to Canada. Despite that, the simple life she led in youth was filled with fun. She embrace the changing times, new found freedoms, and innovations. Its the heirlooms from that chapter of her life that fascinate me the most because they show a side to her that none of my relatives knew - a woman who was happy. So today, I am going to share the side of her - that one that the heirlooms tells. I have a small black autograph book that was hers.  At almost 100 years old, the book binding has all but disintegrated yet the leather cover is in near pristine condition and the partially bound pages are...
Read more

Courting Disaster: The 1915 Niagara Trolley Accident

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The worst electric rail crash in Ontario’s history and the  3 rd  worst in Canadian history (at the time)  occurred at Queenston Heights in Niagara Falls on July 7 1915 . In total the crash of car number 685 claimed the lives of 15 people and was responsible for injuring 130 people.  To put the scale of the accident into context, more lives were lost and more people were injured during the 1915 trolley accident than British soldiers during the battle of Queenston Heights.  The main occupants of the trolley were members of Toronto’s Wood Green Methodist and St John Presbyterian Sunday school groups. The two church groups had organized a day trip to Niagara Falls for the approximate 1,100 parishioners (majority of which were women and children). The accident occurred when the two groups were on their way home.  All day the weather had been ideal for taking portraits and going picnicking, however towards the evening hours (approximately 7:15 pm) it began to ra...
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