Getting Things in Order

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas. As you can imagine checking the census took second place this past week. However, it was still an excuse for a sedentary break from preparing a slap-up meal with all the trimmings, following the suggestions of a myriad of television chefs for this and that.

Two days before Christmas I reached what I thought was the end of Electoral Division Three of St Andrew's Ward. The last five households did not have a folio number and were duplicated--one almost immediately, the other four at the end of the whole ward with a change of address to fit in with their so-called neighbours in Division Five. Today I decided to append special notes to these five houses and their duplicates and to declare once and for all that they all lived on Nelson Street West in Division Three. I noted that the duplicates placed at the end of Division Five were labelled Division Three as were the 30 or so preceding households! What on earth was going on?

The Library and Archives film numbers for St Andrew's Ward are C-1101 (part), C-1102 (all), and C-1103 (part). LDS film 0390240 covers the whole of the ward and nothing else. I transcribed from the LDS film so I don't know where the breaks occurred between the LAC films. But I think an accident occurred when the census pages were about to be rubber-stamped with the chronological "folio" numbers. As a result the last 31 houses of Division 3 are hiding at the end of Division Five.

Census references in my transcription include the Electoral Division number, the folio number and a line number within each household. These 31 houses with their 213 inhabitants will now be placed in Division Three, but will retain the higher folio numbers which they received before microfilming.

The five divisions are now of reasonable sizes: 250 to 260 houses in each of the first three divisions, around 200 in each of Four and Five which are situated further west.

When I originally drew up the boundaries between divisions on a map of the ward I thought Division 5 was a peculiar shape. Now I can sort it out.