St Lawrence’s Ward—Chapter Two

The population of St Lawrence’s Ward was officially 3780, but this may have been made assuming every property had at least one inhabitant. Reducing this number by census forms which just gave company names, by people who admitted they had filled in a census form elsewhere, or who neglected to give their age or their marital status or their sex or all three, brought the analysable population down to 3447. This was the lowest proportion in any of the five wards I have looked at to date.

There were 1845 males and 1602 females. The number of males in the ward outnumbered the females by 15 percent, an indication of the very commercial nature of the ward. When age is taken into the equation, the distribution of the sexes differs even more. Until age 20, there are approximately the same number of males and females, but between the ages of 20 and 40, there are 3 men for every 2 women. The population was much less made up of families than it was elsewhere.

The population breakdown between the divisions was as follows:

Division One
Yonge Street to Church Street, east on Colborne Street, north on Market Square, Bay Front to King Street East 767

Division Two
Church Street, east on Colborne Street, north on Market Square, to Caroline Street; Bay Front to King Street East 748

Division Three
Caroline Street to Cherry & Pine Streets; Bay Front to King Street East 1032

Division Four
Cherry & Pine Streets to the Don River; Don River to King Street East, with continuation along south side of Kingston Road in the Liberties 900

The involved boundary between Divisions One and Two must have been made to give a fair division of a fairly dense population between two enumerators. This was industrial dockland. There were even people living on the wharves--which must have been very unpleasant. The census date was 13th January.

St Lawrence is one of the wards that Ancestry hasn’t published yet. This may be due to the transcribing difficulty I mentioned in my earlier chapter on the ward. One of the enumerators wrote over the pencilled offerings of the householders with a very broad pen nib, editing bits he thought unnecessary as he went. This may have caused extra difficulties in cleaning the film and in reading the data.