Toronto 1861

We all make mistakes

2012-01-28T08:28:00.005-05:00

Some days I work on the census and its associated databases for far too long. Last evening proved to be one of those times.

I have been collecting portions of articles from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography to match against Toronto 1861 census entries. A few days of experimentation had led to a routine and I was just starting on the matches for the third of the seven wards.

It is quite easy to copy and paste portions of the DCB articles into a memo field in my own database--I doubt if my DCB table (or at least this field in the table) will ever see the light of day so I am not really worried about plagiarizing. But I did want to remove the asterisks that followed many names. The DCB uses these asterisks as hyperlinks to other articles. The hyperlinks themselves do not automatically copy into my database, so there is no point in keeping the asterisks that accompanied them. I decided to remove all of them in one "find and replace" operation--temporarily forgetting that an asterisk is a WILD CARD! I was left with 569 entries with blank memo fields--details that had taken two days to accumulate. Aaaarrghhhh!

Fortunately the 56 articles that had already been matched to people in the census had other fields filled in and were therefore identifiable. I am now proceeding to collect the data for these entries from the DCB again.

Why bother with the Dictionary of Canadian Biography? Each biographical article starts with a short paragraph giving the individual's dates and places of birth and death, the names of their parents, and, quite often, marital data as well. If the marital data is not in the opening paragraph, it is quite often found somewhere else in the article. Migration details (something I consider important facts in a person's life) are also there. Other significant relationships where business and family mix are also mentioned. The articles can sometimes hide extensive family trees--sufficient to convey how the Family Compact got its name.

Another tome, available on the web, which also yields the same kind of information is Biographical Sketches of the People of the County of York and the City of Toronto. This book came out circa 1895 and facts were obtained by circulating questionnaires to families in the community. It has its disadvantages: vital dates get omitted; people often go on at length about a single adventure and omit other details which might interest the 21st century genealogist; sometimes it is difficult to know whether the writer is describing his own life or that of his father. All the same Sketches can be useful for people who did not merit inclusion in the DCB.

You Lucky Ladies of 2012

2012-01-28T08:17:00.004-05:00

I just matched up the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry of Michael Willis, minister and prof of theology, to his entry in the 1861 census.

A sentence from the DCB: "The name of his wife is not known."

What did he call her in the 1861 census? "Mrs"

And that was life for a great many women of the middle of the nineteenth century.

Last week I came across Mr Cooney, a blacksmith, whose household list of inhabitants started with himself, proceeded to a female servant and her two children, and then to a married Bridget Cooney and two more children bearing the surname Cooney. Hmmm.

I hope they all knew their place.

Looking at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

2012-01-25T14:09:00.001-05:00

When I recorded the census form of

Rob't C Todd, 52, born England, artist and ornamental painter, married to M A, with four sons aged 11 down to 2.

I found he had not left the reverse of the form blank. He filled in the section

Annual Product of Business or Manufacture:

Quantities: various;

Kinds: various;

Value: from $300.00 to $400.00.

[Further details were not transcribed.]

And ended with the remark, “Toronto is to New and two Poor to suport an Ornamental artist." dated 14 Jan'y 1861.

I felt so sorry. Here was a man for whom the streets of Toronto were not paved with gold. Every time I came across the record I wondered what happened to him. Were things really so bad that he starved, or did he go back to England?

Today I have been checking the people of St Andrew’s Ward against the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and noting matching entries. Imagine my surprise when I found

TODD, ROBERT CLOW, artist and decorative painter; b. perhaps in 1809 at Berwick-upon-Tweed (Northumberland County, England); he was probably the son of John Todd and Alice (Alison) Clow; d. 7 May 1866 at Toronto, Canada West.

The DCB went on to say

Robert Clow Todd spent his youth as a painter of arms on carriages in Edinburgh and London before immigrating to Lower Canada about 1834. He lived in Quebec City and in suburban Montmorency before moving to Toronto in 1853 where he spent the rest of his life. Todd advertised himself during his stay at Quebec as a painter of signs, carriage insignia, and ornamental work, and in Toronto as a “Banner, Herald, Sign, and Ornamental Painter.” He may also have carved and gilded figures in wood. …

Todd is remembered mainly for his oil paintings dating from his Quebec years. These are principally portraits of horses commissioned by local sportsmen. Some picture horses and sleighs posed with their owners before the Montmorency Falls in winter. Typical is The ice cone, Montmorency Falls, now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. All these paintings are characterized by a vibrant linear quality and overtones reflecting an interest in genre. This same interest is found in works of such contemporaries as Cornelius Krieghoff and James Duncan. Other known Todd paintings give views of the Quebec lumber docks and Montmorency Falls in summer. One copy of an English print has been located. Allegedly he executed murals in at least one civic building in Toronto. …

How wonderful. He may not have lived another decade, but his work has been remembered. He wasn’t just another carriage painter.

Murdoch's Mysteries again

2012-01-11T10:48:00.001-05:00

The episode of Murdoch’s Mysteries that has intrigued me most was Episode 6 in Series 4, entitled “Dead End Street”. An autistic young woman who was incapable of speaking had created a model of the street on which she lived and in one house a man is pointing a gun. This leads Murdoch to wonder if a murder had occurred in the neighbourhood even though one had not been reported. What interested me was the location of the drama—one of the little residential streets at the east end of St Lawrence’s Ward. The backdrop used on the set included St Paul’s Catholic Church rising high above the houses in between. The story was based around a series of events that took place during an Orangeman’s Day Parade on the 12 July—a parade that proceeded along Queen Street and all the inhabitants of the street had gone up to the top of their road to see it pass.

The episode had two links to my census work. First, I had been working on that part of St Lawrence’s Ward in the week before seeing the TV show. The area was not densely poplulated in 1861, but maps of the time indicated that it was shortly to become so. The picture of the street as seen on television will always be the vision of that part of Toronto in the latter half of the nineteenth century for me, no matter how true an image it is. Secondly, I recalled transcribing a census form produced in St John’s Ward. The form asked for reports of deaths during 1860 and one poor widow with twin infant boys reported that her husband had died after playing the fife in the Orangeman’s Parade. I really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The census--all life is there.

R & R for the Old Census Scribe

2012-01-11T10:39:00.003-05:00

Shortly before 9 pm last evening I shut down the computer and resolved to spend the time until bedtime relaxing in front of the television. On offer last night was the general bill of fare: soaps, comedies, celebrity competitions, house renovations. BBC2 was offering a dramatization of Dicken’s Edwin Drood which I had thought of watching, but as I switched on I decided I wasn’t in the mood for it. But, on our cable channel that offers nothing but repeat crime series, Murdoch’s Mysteries was about to start.

Yes, Murdoch’s Mysteries is available here in the UK. I came across it first about five years ago and since then have watched a number of episodes, but I don’t put it in my diary for watching week after week. Toronto in the 1890s was probably quite different from Toronto circa 1861, but it is still a lot closer to the 1860s than Toronto as it is today. I view each episode with a fair bit of skepticism, always on the lookout for some point in the story line where the writers forget what year it was supposed to be. Surely Dr Ogden is a complete anachronism, but there has to be some love interest in the story. Besides they chose a name for the character that comes from nineteenth century Toronto—I hope the writers were paying tribute to Uzziel Ogden and not just picking a name from thin air.

Last night’s episode started with the discovery of a body of a man who had been murdered in 1862. “Aha!”, said I, “this one is going to be interesting”. Actually, it was very involved and concerned Canadian-American politics in both the 1860s and the 1890s. They even wrote Sir Wilfrid Laurier into the script.

Since I can’t keep my hands still while watching television I opened my new tablet computer to play a game or two. This is something I haven’t really got the knack of yet, so during the ads I downloaded Google Books. Four were being offered for free: Pride and Prejudice; Frankenstein; The Seventh Report from the Select Committee of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada on Grievances, published November 1831 by W L Mackenzie; and Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada by Anna Jameson. You would almost think these had been selected for me personally.

Some day I might read Pride and Prejudice. Up to now I have satisfied myself with seeing both the film and the television adaptation more than once. Frankenstein is not my cup of tea. The Seventh Report…. is something I really ought to look into beyond the table of contents and the index that I glanced at last night. Winter Studies… is a book I have never come across before. I certainly was aware of it, and understood it to be a good read, but this was my first opportunity to open its covers. I could hardly wait for Murdoch to solve his mystery before getting down to it.

Mrs Jameson travelled to Toronto from New York in December 1836—that meant up the Hudson River by a steamer armed with an ice cutter on its prow, across country from Albany to Niagara by stage coach, and across Lake Ontario on a ship that managed to sail between storms that would have made the voyage impossible. On arrival in Toronto she had to make her way on foot to her house on Adelaide Street West—one of the five brick houses on the corner of York Street that I mentioned in my blog just before Christmas.

She settled into the cold, cold like she had never come across in England, and into the life led by “Toronto society”, a life which she admitted she had previously avoided. I was very taken by a paragraph in which she described all the different types of sleighs in use. The diary has its peculiarities: in her day-to-day life she mentions no one around her, neither family or servants, although they must have existed.

Today I “googled” and “wiki-ed” Anna Jameson and found out a bit about her life from the outside, and about where those summer rambles would lead her once that cold winter was over. I am going to read more of it, and I’m not going to spoil the story for you if you want to do the same.

St Andrew's Ward and an Interesting Family

2011-12-31T14:56:00.008-05:00

After "getting things in order" as described in my last post, the next priority was to redraw my map for St Andrew's Ward. It now looks like the diagram above which, I assure you, in another bit of software, I can blow up to something that can be seen.

Yonge Street is at the rightmost edge, Strachan Avenue at the left. Divisions One (pink) and Three (turquoise) stretch from Queen West in the north to Adelaide on the south. The east-west boundary between them was York Street. District Two was the Adelaide-King West corridor from Yonge to Peter Street, beyond the old grounds of Upper Canada College. Divisions Four and Five stretched from Queen to King. Division Four started at Peter and ended at Portland Street, Division Five continued on from there to Strachan.

With all that done I could get back to inspecting the households and matching the inhabitants up to the city directories. Division Four started at the southwest corner of Queen and Peter, a tavern named "The Toronto Inn" run by Mrs C McDonagh. From there to Portland Street were two bakers (and another one on the southwest corner of Queen and Portland), a confectioner, one provision dealer, four grocers and a flour dealer handily situated to serve them all. The aroma early in the morning must have been quite something.

By Mitchell's Directory of 1864 a lot of the businesses had changed hands. The flour dealer had died and his business had been taken over by someone else. Police Station No 3 had appeared in the middle of the block between Peter and Brock. William Stewart, a painter living at 367 Queen, had become an artist.

The family that grabbed my attention was that of William Reeves, the baker on the southwest corner of Queen and Portland. He was 53 and his wife, Mary, was 45. Their household included nine children, two living-in bakers--one of whom was probably a nephew, and William's father, Richard, aged 83. Richard, surprisingly, was not a widower but married. Down the street about half a block was a clerk in his thirties named Henry Floyd with his wife Christina, three children--and his mother-in-law, Christiana Reeves, aged 74. Christiana was married--just like Richard. How interesting. The bakery must have been so bursting at the seams that Mother had had to move in with a married daughter. I wish I could prove the relationship between Richard and Christiana, but the 1851 Toronto census is missing and the couple were probably married in Ireland in the early years of the 19th century.

Simply out of curiosity, I would like to know when Richard and Christiana died. But until 1869 and civil registration, the only deaths to be found online are of people buried in the Necropolis. The Reeves family weren't there. Mitchell's Directory does state that William Reeve's bakery had turned into a grocery store run by Mary Reeves, "widow of Wm", by 1864. The Floyds were one of the families to move away from Queen Street--they were found near Hayter on Elizabeth Street by 1864. I wonder if Christiana was still with them?

Getting Things in Order

2011-12-27T14:19:00.006-05:00

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.

One Block in St Andrew's Ward

2011-12-18T15:08:00.007-05:00

On the map brick buildings are outlined in red, frame buildings in grey. The dotted lines are the fences and walls between properties as illustrated in the Atlas.
Brown’s Directory indicates that 156 Adelaide was vacant when data was collected later in the year 1861. 150 Adelaide, the eastern-most of the brick houses on the corner of Simcoe, is not mentioned in Brown, but is included in Mitchell. There is also a 148 Adelaide in Mitchell’s Directory (1863-64). This may be a house built after the census.
I am assuming that the largest brick house in the block belonged to Joseph Dixon, the land agent. His census form describes his house as 2-1/2 storeys and built of brick and stone. The next brick house belonged to Frederick Upton.
A number of families and single inhabitants were found at 116 rear and 118 rear Adelaide West. These would appear to have been separate buildings at the back of the two lots and not flats in the main buildings entered by a back door.
James Paterson’s grocery had a York Street address, but it would appear to be equally a property on Adelaide.

The enumerator filed the forms in consecutive order west to east. It was great to be able to compare the list below with the map above, and also with the completely different atmosphere of the area today as shown on Google maps!

Folios 599-627: Adelaide Street West, north side, between Simcoe and York
599. Cornelia Paterson, widow of Archibald, boarding house at 158 Adelaide West.
600. John Ginty, contractor, living with mother & a sister. 154 Adelaide West.
601a. John Bishop, butcher, found in Caverhill and Mitchell at two other addresses in different parts of the city; not found in Brown at all.
601b. Mrs Susan Thomas. Although she follows Bishop and his family on the census form, she appears to be chief tenant or owner. Did not divulge her late husband's name. Found by Brown and Mitchell at 152 Adelaide West.
602. Adam Limberd or Lineberd, labourer. Name misread by both Ancestry and me. Only found in Brown (who can't be depended on to get surnames right either). His lodger Michael Sheils was not to be found anywhere. 142 Adelaide West.
603. Thomas Bryan. Name originally misread. Not found in directories after re-inspection. Had employed children, but they were not in directories either.
604. Chas Cline, tailor, from Witerburg, Germany. Not in directories.
605. Joseph Dixon, house and land agent. 5 children. Found in all directories on first run at 138 Adelaide St West.
606. Mrs Eleanor Hutcheson. Found in all directories, spelling consistent, on first run at 136 Adelaide West. Caverhill had house number as 126—perhaps a typo.
607. Richard Couch. Four different occupations all in the building trade. Found in all directories on first run. 134 Adelaide West.
His father, John Couch, part of the household, mentioned in Caverhill & Brown, died in 1863 and was buried in the Necropolis.
608. Fred'k Upton, wharfinger, 6 children, present in Caverhill & Brown--and Necropolis Burials. Brown had his address as 126 Adelaide West.
609. John F Corner, moulder. Found in Brown & Mitchell only. Household includes older lady identified as mother in law. 122 Adelaide West.
610. Samuel Bowman. No occupation in census or in any of the three directories. Always lives at 120 Adelaide West. His lodger, James Loaney was living at 116 Adelaide West in Caverhill.
611. Eli Hussey. tavernkeeper & chairmaker (!). 118 Adelaide West. Moved to Elizabeth Street, St John's, before Mitchell's Directory was published. Family includes married daughter.
612. Henry Johnston. printer at 116 rear Adelaide West.
613. Dan'l Dunning, gardener (surname deciphered after 3 attempts). Makes a long comment on census form (transcribed). Brown finds him at 116 rear Adelaide West. Otherwise, not found.
614. Anne Laid or Lord, fruit dealer, 60, widow living alone. Not found in any directory.
615. James Passmore, porter, with two servants (maybe they just lodged there). Found by Brown & Mitchell at 116 rear Adelaide West.
616. Amy Odell, sewing, widow with grownup daughter. Possible late husband found in Caverhill. Living at 116 rear Adelaide West in Brown, not found in Mitchell. Not in Necropolis burials.
617. Mary McCarty. Very popular name—as a result difficult to match with directories. No one of that name found at 116 rear Adelaide West or anywhere nearby. May have had a daughter working as servant with James Passmore.
618. Robert McCawley, labourer with servant. Not found in any directory.
619. Mary Bauldry, housekeeper. Surname completely misread on first run. Found in Mitchell at 118 rear Adelaide West with a slightly different name to that given here.
620. Ann Morris, widow of George. Caverhill's Directory and Necropolis Burials checked unsuccessfully for an entry for her late husband. Found in Mitchell at 118 rear Adelaide West.
621. David Heslip, labourer. Only sighting in a directory (taking all possible spellings into consideration) was in Mitchell when he lived much further west.
622. James Hart, tailor. Found at 3 different addresses in directories. Brown gave address as 116 Adelaide West.
623. Thomas Hoolahan (sp), porter, wrote his own census form. Why did the three directories given his name as Wholahan, Wholehen, and Wholohan? Address in Brown & Mitchell was 116 Adelaide West (lived elsewhere according to Caverhill's Directory).
624. Uphemia Thompson, boarding house with 3 lodgers and 2 daughters in their twenties. Found only by Brown at 114 Adelaide West.
625. William Hodgins, shoemaker. Found only by Brown at 112 Adelaide West.
626. Elizabeth Miller, nurse, sole inhabitant of 110 Adelaide West (114 in Caverhill)
627. Fred Milligan, innkeeper, no boarders. 108 Adelaide West.
628. James Paterson, grocer, with address 128-130 York on the corner of Adelaide.

The Old Census Scribe returns

2011-12-18T14:23:00.005-05:00

With no blogs since May you must have thought I had given up the project altogether. Not so, I have just been so involved with it that I have not wanted to spend any time making a journal in blog-ese.

Since the last contribution I have done a re-check of each of the census forms for St George's and St Lawrence's Wards against the three contemporary city directories at one and the same time. Usually I expect to find most heads of households represented in at least Brown's Directory, published in census year, and hopefully in one or both of the other directories (1859 and 1863) as well. When I can't find a directory entry I assume that the family was a wandering one, or that I didn't transcribe it correctly. Many times now I have zoomed in on the suspect census form on Ancestry and discovered that the family surname was quite different from what I thought it was the first time around. These corrections have led to many more matches in the city directories.

St George's and St Lawrence's Wards have now been put to bed, and since early October I have been working on St Andrew's which is double the size of St George's. So far I have checked around 650 census forms out of a total of more than 1100. It is a slow process. My yawn factor sets in at about 25 a day. All sorts of supplementary projects have been started--some might amount to something; some have just been time-wasters.

Late this past week I found myself working on the north side of Adelaide Street West between Simcoe and York Streets. I came across a variety of situations: revised family surnames, deaths of breadwinners, a wide expanse of means of earning a living. I have decided to share my findings. Watch this space for the next episode.

Finches and Ferretts

2011-05-17T04:59:00.001-04:00

How do you turn a finch into a ferrett? Or, how do you turn a ferrett into a finch?

I have been matching people in St John’s Ward with Brown’s Directory, published in 1861-62-—about a year after the census. On the first run for each ward I work street by street in the Directory, finding the same people in the census. That is complete. The second run works from census to Directory, filtering out every one except heads of households who haven’t been found yet. The second run started with about 550 people. Some have been discarded. Perhaps they gave up on Toronto and moved elsewhere. Here, halfway through the F’s, 380 remain to be checked a second time.

And here I came across Mrs Charlotte Finch, a widow running a boarding house with four lodgers. She lived in a part of St John’s where the enumerator failed to fill in the name of the street on each census form. I went to Ancestry to re-check her name and found the form had been omitted. This usually means that the writing was more than their transcriber dared attempt. But the next form was there and the surname was clearly Bywater. The Bywaters had been matched to Brown and they lived on Park Lane north of Edward Street. During 1861 Park Lane became the eastern side of University Street which today we know as University Avenue.

In Brown’s Directory, on University Street, next door to the Bywaters was a boarding house run by Mrs C Ferrett. I have found many inaccuracies in this Directory over the past few months, but the mind boggles on this one. Just how do you turn a Finch into Ferrett?

It's Census Day in the UK

2011-03-27T14:20:00.003-04:00

Here in the United Kingdom, today is "census day". The 32-page booklet has been in the house for a couple of weeks. We have glanced at it, planning how we might answer the questions closer to the time. I noticed that we could answer it online, and that is what I decided to do. What to do with 32 pages of unused but printed paper in these days of recycling was an instruction omitted from the census form.

The standard form allowed for a household of six people--a perfect fit for our neighbours who have four children, but somewhat excessive for us--a married couple with one son, still single, at home. One of the questions was to relate each of the people in the house on census day to each of the others. Oh, how I wish the census designers of 1861 had thought up such a question. It would have solved so many presumptions I have made.

A couple of censuses ago the questions on birthplace and ethnical background were very few. Political Correctness was the way of the moment. Not any more. This year the choices of ethnicity cover a whole page for each member of the household. It was great to be different, to be able to tick "Other" and explain "Canadian" or "Canada" three times on my part of the form. And then put the icing on the cake by stating that I had lived in Britain since August 1965.

As per usual there were questions about the size of our home, whether it was a house or a flat, how many rooms it had, and how it was heated. We were also asked how many cars the household had. It wasn't until the three of us sat down to dinner this evening that we realized we had not been asked about computer usage. How many computers in the house? Do you have broadband? Do you have HD television (an abbreviation I always translate as heavy duty, but turns out to be high density)? Not one of these questions was included.

Ten years ago, at the last census, offering the facility to fill in the census over the internet would have been a fruitless thing to do. Now, it is simple and straightforward for many households all over the country. It will be interesting to see what percentage of the population answered our questionnaires that way.

Brown's Directory Now a Database

2011-02-14T04:51:00.001-05:00

It was January 11 when I wrote that I was attempting to make a database from an OCR scan of Brown’s Directory of Toronto dated 1861-62. On Friday (11 February), I had a listing of the complete street directory of approximately 8500 entries. OCR is workable on 19th century printing after all, but find-and-replace was far more useful than the automated spell checker that the software makers expect users to employ.

I have also experimented with using OCR on the “names directory” in Brown . Having got as far as the D’s, I have decided that it is not worth the effort. In the “street directory” people are arranged by their addresses and the street names only come up as headers; while, in the names directory, there is an address on every line. OCR can find no uniformity in these street names, so there is no time saved over copy-typing. It also appears that entries in the alphabetical list are one per house, no more than in the street directory. Mitchell’s Directory of three years later included most employed people whether they were head of household or not. There is not point on duplicating Brown’s Directory by transcibing a second lot of the same information.

The work of matching the census to my new directory database had now begun. The first ward I attacked was St Andrew’s which included many forms for commercial premises and where street names were omitted for the first division (Yonge Street west to York, Queen West to Adelaide). I had added as many clues from these forms as I could to my transcription including all notes stating “Personal details at place of residence”, signed by the proprietor and, maybe, giving his home address. Two of the first three forms with nameless proprietors have now been matched to actual people. For instance, Mr Leask’s handwriting was very hard to read and I had not been able to recognize the street he lived on, although the house number was 174. A quick inspection of my sorted digitized database found him at 174 Gerrard Street East, as well as the nature of his business downtown.

This kind of discovery challenged me to continue the census matching process. I have now finished the letter A for five wards. Two more city wards and the suburbs of Yorkville and East York to go. I hope temptations won’t lead me astray before the end of the alphabet. Certainly, if Brown’s Directory had come into my hands earlier, Caverhill and Mitchell would never have been done.

Working with OCR software

2011-02-01T15:07:00.002-05:00

I was trying so hard not to digitize Brown’s Toronto Directory. I thought it would take up too much time and I really was trying to complete the linking of the other two directories to the people who had the fortune or misfortune to be represented amongst the inhabitants of "Institutions" in the 1861 census. About a month ago I succumbed. Since then I have been ensconced in yet another data collection dealing with Toronto in 1861.

First, was the compiler, W R Brown, part of the Brown family of The Globe, or was he somebody else? Originally I assumed he was part of the newspaper family, but I am beginning to wonder if my assumption was correct. Living at Idlewold in Rosedale would have meant a long trip to the office everyday. Either his knowledge of downtown Toronto or a great mixup of entries just before typesetting led to a very noticeable error on Front Street West. The south side of the street suddenly jumped from Bay to Simcoe omitting Jacques & Hays’ cabinet works and Union Station. Numbered premises began again after Simcoe with even numbers which should have been on the north side. All the entries actually existed, but the order spoiled the meaning of the word “index”.

When I first discussed indexing city directories back in November I said that optical character recoginition (OCR) was not the way to go with 19th century printed pages. A couple of weeks ago I decided to see if another attempt with some software I bought years ago would be more successful.

The pages of the directory are filed individually in my computer and each page has two columns of entries. I open each directory page in my photo-finishing/drawing program, Paint.net, where I straighten the page and crop each of the columns to individual images or files. Then I take the separate columns to the OCR program and re-crop to get rid of extraneous lines and blobs of dirt on the image. The image is then “read” by the software. The result is not a pretty sight. To get one line completely correct on a page of 60 entries is unusual. The software is exceedingly poor at distinguishing numbers like “3” and “8” and “6” and “0”. The letters “v” and “y” are almost always misinterpreted. One gets used to these little vagaries.

A new discovery for me was that the OCR software permits find-and-replace corrections. I now start off work on each page by getting rid of unwanted double and triple spaces and remove all periods or full stops—things that aren’t wanted in my database style. Other start-up operations include altering the font to a uniform 20-point Times New Roman and typing a title right on the page—usually the book page number and the street it contains. Correcting a column takes about 20 minutes. Each column is saved to an individual spreadsheet file.

Once I have a collection of 10 to 20 completed spreadsheets I take a break from OCR work and combine the spreadsheets into one large one where I arrange the data into a series of columns which will ultimately be moved to a database.

The whole process probably takes as long as copy-typing the whole book, but because there is such a variety of tasks involved, the boredom factor is reduced. Into the bargain, my aging body is subject to a lot of aches and pains, particularly in the neck and shoulders. Continuous copy-typing would send me into complete lock-down. The other advantage, a personal one, is that, once I have gone through both the OCR and spreadsheet steps, I have a much better knowledge of the street I have been looking at and the people who lived there.

Another Directory Comes to Light

2011-01-11T06:35:00.003-05:00

Sometime in the autumn, Ancestry put a number of city directories for Canadian towns and cities online. Included amongst these is Brown's Toronto Directory for 1861-2. It proves to be a very worthwhile addition to the collection of listings of people in the Toronto area in the early 1860s period, and the closest one in time to the census.

The directories I have seen before were published by men who were not permanent Toronto residents, and they may have employed agents to do the job. (Mitchell's compiler got his own name in the directory.) It was a temptation to cut corners, or perhaps I should say numbers of pages, to reduce the cost of publication for one of a series of books covering different cities across the provinces. But George Brown was producing a directory for the city he lived in--he knew its component parts and they included suburbia. His street directory includes the streets of Yorkville and the area east of the Don River between the Lakefront and Todmorden.

We know of George Brown of The Globe, but The Globe was very much a family firm. In 1861, although over 40, George Brown was still living with his parents. His father, Peter, who had started the Toronto newspaper business with his son, was still working in the office. George's brother, Gordon, was actually editor of The Globe. W R Brown was the publisher of the Toronto Directory. Perhaps because he lived at Idlewold, a house on the Yorkville-Rosedale border, he thought it worthwhile to include the areas outside the formal city limits in his publication.

Because of its place in the alphabet, Bloor Street was the first of the Yorkville streets I have found. The south side of Bloor Street was in Toronto, the north side between the top of the Don River ravine and what we now call Avenue Road was in Yorkville. Further west, Bloor Street West continued into York Township Electoral District 3. Mitchell omitted the north side of Bloor Street from his street directory of 1864, but Brown includes it in 1862. Many of the people in the Yorkville section are well-known; those further west, lesser so. But, at least, they are there.

I am looking forward to discovering more gems from Brown's Toronto Directory. Already it has told me more than I knew before.

City Directories and the Census

2010-12-08T15:43:00.005-05:00

Part of my 1861 Toronto census project has involved matching people in the census to entries in city directories of the time, namely that of Caverhill in 1859-60 and of Mitchell in 1863-64. This has proved very interesting. There is evidence of a lot of movement around the city, as well as of people coming into the city and disappearing from it. From the census we learn a person’s age and his birthplace. From the directories we learn the kind of business he may be running or employed in. We may discover that a woman has been widowed during the five-year period. And I find hints that I may have misinterpreted a surname when transcribing the census. It has certainly been a worthwhile exercise.

In order to use the directories efficiently I have had to digitize them. Digitizing is a word we have heard in connection with computers over the past ten years, but do we know what it means? Taken simply, it is the process of copy-typing the directory entries onto a computer, and, at the same time, breaking down each line into its component parts of surname, given name, occupation and address. If you have transcribed a census or a list of burials in a Family Search project, you have digitized the manuscript information on the original forms.

Why should we have to do this for printed books? Can’t books be scanned and read by optical character recognition? Well, many more recently printed ones can, but 19th-century type does not lend itself to the procedure. The letters are just not sharp enough for a camera to identify each as one of the twenty-six used in our English alphabet. I have tried OCR programs on pages of old data and come very close to turning the air blue trying to make sense of the software’s interpretation. It might take a long time, but old fashioned copy-typing is the better plan of attack.

Since I was transcribing the directories myself I was able my own choices for headings. My initial reason for looking at the directories was that some enumerators had omitted addresses from the census forms. I wanted to know where these mystery areas actually were. For my purposes it was best to separate the directory addresses into streets and numbers and add in the city ward where the streets were located. From this I could make up a list of inhabitants, street by street, and house by house.

Both directories had a number of foibles. Caverhill’s inability to keep his records in strict alphabetical order was frustrating. I am suspicious that a pile of entries at the end of the alphabet went astray before the directory was printed. Initial letters W and Y are very poorly represented. He also had a bad habit of omitting the “East” or the “West” from streets that crossed Yonge. An address like 394 Queen could either be around Denison Avenue or between Sumach and River Streets, a very long way apart.

Mitchell’s Directory of 1864 had two parts and in one the households were arranged by streets. I started my database using this, but then found it only contained house owners or the heads of the tenant families. His alphabetical one contained not just heads but other people in the house: tenants, boarders, mothers-in-law, sons (and daughters) who were working or who were students in law or at university. Sometimes the addresses in the street directory differed from those in the alphabetical directory indicating that the family had moved house sometime during the compilation process. The alphabetical listing usually contained the later address. Mitchell had obtained staff lists provided by large employers. Unfortunately, many people’s addresses were missing. But the directory had an extra advantage: the entries for most widowed women contained the phrase “widow of John” or “widow of William”. How useful to the genealogist.

We ought not to complain about the imperfections in a mid 19th century city directory. Picture how it must have been developed—without electricity, typewriters, and all the other paraphernalia that we have depended on for the last hundred years. Until the directory was finally typeset, all the listings must have been done with pen and paper. It would have been easy to misread a colleague’s handwriting or even one’s own on a cloudy day in a dusty office. Omitting a letter or a cross on a “t” can make a lot of difference. Were entries made on foolscap pieces of paper or on slips that fitted in a shoebox? (Given the number of shoemakers in Toronto at the time, they must have had shoeboxes.) I hope it was the latter. Corrections are much easier to make that way. However, the typesetters might have insisted on the listings being on sheets of papers—and the rewriting would be another step in the procedure where errors could creep in.

Today I have three “digitized” databases illustrating Toronto’s population over a five-year period at the beginning of the 1860s. I hope it will prove to be a more useful series of documents than any one of the three taken individually.

Exploring Mitchell's Directory

2010-11-24T05:23:00.003-05:00

The end of a stage is in sight. This morning I have reached the letter "W" in matching the adult inhabitants of York Township to Mitchell's Directory of Toronto, published in 1864. Matching the inhabitants of Toronto itself to the city directory was completed some months ago.

Maybe it is getting to the end that sent me into hysterics about this entry found on page 180 of the directory:

Henry WHITE, explorer; 22 Nassau Street, St Patrick's

My first thought was, "Did he find it?" with the mind boggling about what there might be to look for on Nassau Street. But I've decided that "explorer" is a typo.

The census gives a much more sensible entry:

Henry WHITE, surveyor, 39, m, 5 children, Nassau Street, St Patrick's

It just shows that us census transcribers don't make all the mistakes.

Was Yonge Street Paved with Gold?

2010-11-05T05:56:00.001-04:00

I have just found another family who must have improved their lot by moving.

In the 1861 census Ambrose Kent was a bricklayer in his early forties with two sons at home--Ambrose, 17, and Benjamin, 15. A third young man living with the family, but probably not a son, was Joseph who was working as a bricklayer. No occupations were given for Ambrose jr and Benjamin. They lived in Division Five of the Township which stretches northwest from Dufferin and Eglinton to the Humber River in the vicinity of Weston.

In Mitchell's Directory, compiled in 1863, Ambrose Kent was a grocer at 288 Yonge Street, i.e., in the middle of today's Eaton Centre. Ambrose jr and Benjamin were with him--Ambrose jr still didn't have an occupation, but Benjamin was now a watchmaker. John Kent (not found in the census) appeared next door at 286-1/2. There is a Joseph Kent on Walton Street (north of Gerrard but easy walking distance from Yonge and Queen). No other people of the surname Kent appear in the Directory.

There were two other Kent households in York Township, once again in Division Five. William, age 28, was another bricklayer, and F G Kent, described as a gentleman, age 47, with a wife nine years older than himself. Was this couple the source of capital for Ambrose's move?

Tollgate Keeper, a Stationary Occupation?

2010-10-24T06:07:00.003-04:00

Tollgate keepers were a necessary breed around 19th century York Township. Tollgates were not erected to prevent people travelling over private land or to improve the roads in general, but as a means of collecting money for the upkeep of difficult roads like steep hills and fords. Considering all the ravines within today's GTA, there were plenty of places where a toll was established.

I picture a tollkeeper to be a man in his fifties no longer capable of all-day outdoor work, but who could get about enough to get up from his comfortable chair by the fire, go outside, and demand the charge from the teamsters and drovers who moved goods passed his door. I shouldn't generalize on this point--I found one of my great grandfather's sisters working as a tollgate keeper somewhere between Aurora and Bradford in the 1881 census.

But I did expect that tollgate keepers to work in the same place. Even this is now disproved.
From the 1861 census of Yorkville:

William Hughton, tollkeeper, age 61, married, 2 children in household (probably grandchildren);

and from Mitchell's Directory compiled in 1863:

William Heighton, tollgate keeper, Kingston Road, Toronto Liberties

Did old Will find a better paying job or did the occupation run in the family? One thing is for certain: I have just found another surname to recheck!

York Township gets Sorted

2010-10-19T14:38:00.003-04:00

I've now finished inspecting York Township and arranging the entries into households.This was a far more difficult than in Toronto where one page equalled one house.

Problems were compounded in four out of the seven divisions because the origunal census pages were not arranged in the correct order before being microfilmed. What made me suspicious was finding so many groups of children at the top of a page who were not part of the family at the bottom of the preceding page. Eventually I spotted that the elder members of these families were to be found at the bottom of another page.

In Divisions One and Four the parents and older siblings were always located at the bottom of the page following the one that started with the children at the top. It was a while before I realized that, in these divisions, the pile of pages had been placed in reverse order to what they should have been prior to the rubber-stamped number being put on each page.

In Divisions Six and Seven the pages are in a more random order. The families follow one after the next for several pages and then, suddenly, up comes another group of youngsters with their parents not immediately accounted for. The mind boggles over what happened to those bundles of papers.

All families have now been given a Household Number in addition to the Census Reference Number given to each individual. The Census Reference locates a person on the microfilm, but their Household Number places them with their family.

The order of the pages wouldn’t matter two hoots to a statistician in Library and Archives Canada or in its predecessors. But we genealogists are interested in families, not just people. It is a help when families stick together.

Autumn Revival

2010-10-03T03:54:00.004-04:00

Like me, when you see a blog that hasn’t had any work done on it since February, you think that the author has grown tired of his or her topic and gone on to other things. Such is not the case with Toronto 1861.

When I shut down in February it was so I could put all my attention to the talk I was making at the Ontario Genealogical Society’s conference which was held in May in Toronto. And once that was over I came back full of desire to complete Phase Two of the project—to link as many inhabitants of 1861 Toronto as I could to the City Directories published by Caverhill in 1860 and by Mitchell in 1864.

Despite computer problems that have plagued me throughout the summer and are still not resolved, Phase Two is pretty much complete. The two city directories have now been compared with the census once. In fact, the whole of St Lawrence’s Ward and a part of St David’s have been subjected to a second check against Mitchell. I work through each directory, one letter of the alphabet at a time. Both the directories and the census are indexed using Soundex Code as well as surname and given name. The second check has yielded enough new matches to make me feel that repeating the operation is worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the images from the second microfilm of St James’s Ward which I copied while in Toronto disappeared without trace when I attempted to move them from a memory stick on to my main machine. Since that particular microfilm was not transcribed by Family Search, it is not a part of the 1861 census on the Ancestry website and I cannot compare my work with that very useful outside source. As a result my transcription of St James’s north of Gerrard East contains more omissions and is less accurate than it might be.

But, once this far through a phase, the temptation to look at other possible sub-projects becomes more and more irresistible. As a result I have got out my old York Township transcription and have re-jigged it into the style I used for Toronto.

Working with the first “ward” of York Township I found a whole lot of people whose names are in Mitchell’s Directory and some whose names are in Caverhill, so I am not finished linking the directories yet. In the past week I have been working with the agricultural census, trying to establish some formula to express “addresses” for the township or country inhabitants. After a lot of fiddling about I think I have established fairly specific addresses for the farming community, but it will be harder to be specific about those who made their living running a hotel or a blacksmith’s shop, or those commuting into town from their place in the country (and there were more or those than you might imagine!).

I wonder if it snowed on Sunday, January 13, 1861, and people were waiting till Monday before trying to get down to the city? Maybe going to the cottage for the weekend started earlier then we thought!

Watch this space. There will be more blogs to come.

It's Done!

2010-02-23T10:54:00.004-05:00

The complete census for Toronto in 1861 has now been transcribed. Work started in late 2005, so it's been a long slog to complete the records for 45,357 people. It hasn't been dull though. Some pages were written in the worst penmanship imaginable, others were absolutely clear. Some pages were sparse with information--not even the householder's occupation; others were filled with detail. I never knew what was going to be on the next page.

The institutions proved to be difficult, not only because it was hard to follow information on such large pages, but because the camera used for microfilming needed repair. Two out of every half dozen pages were seriously out of focus. These would be followed by four normal ones, then the images would go wonky again. It was a very short film and the last for Toronto, so I guess the decision was to get the city out of the way and then get the camera fixed. I wonder what part of Ontario they tackled next?

I am sorry to disappoint the extra curious by telling you that entries for the inmates of the jail did not include the reason why they were there. However, occupations were included and most of the women (who outnumbered the men) had the same occupation. The mayor must have started the year with a real morality campaign.

St Patrick's complete, but there's more

2010-02-17T03:53:00.003-05:00

The transcription of St Patrick's Ward was finished last week. In the seven wards there were 43,357 people living in 7,936 households. Women outnumbered men by 22099 to 20944, with 314 people whose sex could not be distinguished. Children made up a total of 37.3% of the population. Those with unknown sex were usually those with a name like J Smith in a household where all we were told was that it included 5 males and 3 females.

Now I am working on the institutions: residential colleges, orphans' homes, hospitals, the garrison (married quarters make it quite large), and the jail. The photography should be completed tomorrow. Each page has to be photographed in about 15 sections, insuring that all the sections overlap suffieciently so as not to miss anyone or their details. The position of the age, gender and marital status columns is too distant from the names to combine the two together in one picture. Transcribing is like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

Canada West--ever heard of it?

2010-02-02T04:14:00.005-05:00

Looking at the Ontario Genealogical Society website last night I was reminded of an item of history that I probably learned in Grade 10, many moons ago.

Upper Canada became Canada West on 13 February 1841.

Canada West became the province of Ontario on 1 July 1867.

But transcribing the 1861 census has shown me that even in its time, Canada West was not well recognized even by its inhabitants. Officially, everyone born locally and under 20 should have been born in Canada West, but in many districts, on census form after census form, Canada West was given as Upper Canada.

Many inhabitants who filled in the form for themselves give the birthplace as just Canada. More than one enumerator has methodically gone through a pile and corrected them. Some have put an obvious sharp-pointed "W" after Canada. No problem there. But others have prefaced "Canada" with a round-based wiggle. This wiggle can easily be read either as "U" or "N" or "W", depending on the whim or knowledge of the transcriber.

The transcription available on Ancestry was prepared by volunteers recruited through FamilySearch Indexing, an LDS project. It includes many entries giving birthplaces of children as "U C", "Upper Canada", "W C", "W Canada", "N Canada", or even "Western Canada" or "North Canada"! North Canada and Western Canada have never existed as a political entities--they are only geographical descriptions.

It is a pity that "copy what you see" is so stressed in instructions to transcribers. When it comes to birthplaces we should be giving as exact information as can be inferred from the details in front of us. Birthplaces are vital clues for following up the previous generation. Why should we send newbie family historians off to search the vital statistics of a place that never existed?

Some towns and cities, such as Halifax and London, exist in more than one country. If the country is obvious, why not add it to the entry?

Some places lend themselves to mis-spelling: it is Glasgow, not Glascow. And Glasgow is in Lanarkshire in Scotland. That's where you will find the parish registers.

Excuse the rant. I hope the people at Ancestry understand why I have made so many corrections to birthplaces.

Discoveries in St Patrick's

2010-02-02T02:37:00.000-05:00

St Patrick's District 3 had some interesting little morsels in it, as well as too many people (see previous blog).

First, there was John Leballeter, a 37-year old painter from Jersey in the Channel Islands, his wife and five children who were living on Lippincott Street. Well, they were until Sunday 13 January 1861, the day of census night. There was a note on the form that their house burnt down that day. There was nothing to say that they were in temporary accommodation elsewhere. I hope they got out safely.

Then, I met Thomas Carfrae--again. I have occasionally been doing a spot of transcripion on the Toronto Trust Burials Project which is digitizing the records of a number of Toronto cemeteries including Potter's Field and The Necropolis. When Potter's Field opened in 1829 or 1830 the first person to bury a relative was Thomas Carfrae. Between then and 1834 he buried several more, possibly two wives, several children and his mother. I began to wish he had spent more on food and less on burials. Recently I found myself looking at the early days of the Necropolis in 1854. Mrs Carfrae was arranging for the family to be moved from the Potter's Field to the new cemetery! My census find was a boilermaker in his early 40s, born in Scotland, with a wife and three children aged between 14 and 9, living on Spadina. Was he a son of the original Thomas Carfrae, I wonder.

Then there was the household of Patrick Cummins, "sergeant-major of police" living in the police house on Queen Street West. The position of each member of the family was listed in the Occupations column. There was a wife, two little daughters, another woman of 52 whose position I couldn't quite read, and his police sergeant, David Smith. On the right-hand page was a note to say that Patrick Cummins and David Smith were actually absent and on duty the night of the census, and Annastasia Summers wasn't in the house either. She was a prisoner in custody at the police station. Has anyone been looking for Annastasia Summers?

Counting St Patrick's People

2010-02-01T16:06:00.003-05:00

The first three districts of St Patrick’s Ward have now been transcribed and I’ve spent the day verifying my counts of both people and households and sorting out errors, not all of which have been mine I am glad to say.

The enumeration districts within the ward are strips which stretch all the way from Queen Street West to Bloor Street. District 1 (University Ave to Beverley Street) contained 1450 people in 261 households. District 2 (Beverley Street to Spadina Avenue) was much smaller—only 605 people in 111 households. District 3 (Spadina Avenue to Bathurst Street) appeared to contain 2118 people in 414 households, but that is the count according to the unsuspicious.

As I transcribed District 3 I noticed families that I thought I had seen before and when I finished I decided to check just how many duplications there were. By sorting the families alphabetically I was able to spot 19 families totalling 95 people who had been enumerated twice. The households were not absolutely identical. There were variations in spelling and in age, but Mr McDole and Mr McFowl had wives and children with identical names and ages, and what district is going to hold two 40-year-old Caleb Butts, each with six children.

How could these people have been transcribed twice? Obviously the enumerator was not being careful. For the most part the streets were named on the forms, but all the houses on one street did not appear one after the other. It was a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and back again. Also, the enumerator had re-written a great many forms—the writing was consistent from one form to the next for about the last hundred or so households. Either the enumerator was being paid by the head and intentionally expanded the population in order to gain more for his work, or he forgot to throw away the originals when he decided a number of census forms needed rewriting.

All of the duplications have been noted as part of my transcription. But I would have preferred District 3 with only 395 houses containing 2023 people in the first place.

Hidden Worthies in St Patrick's Ward

2010-01-25T14:22:00.005-05:00

The snow has cleared and I am gradually getting a better grip on the new computer. The transcribing progress on St Patrick's Ward has picked up. Not only have I been able to get to the FHC for the last three sessions, but Ancestry has finally made the ward available on their website. Some of the folios are so pale that it takes both their transcription and mine to make any sense out of what was originally written down.

I am now working on District 3, a huge area which starts at Spadina and progresses west. I haven't seen Hope Street (which turned into Manning Avenue), so either it is in District 4 or in the 150 folios of District 3 that I have yet to see. On the south-north axis, all the districts started at Queen Street West and stretched all the way up to Bloor, but there weren't many people living north of College Street.

While transcribing the other day I came across a civil engineer named William Armstrong. He had a wife and 7 children and 3 boarders. He lived on Queen Street and he had named his house Toronto Priory. I had come across the name of the house before in Caverhill's Directory, along with his business address at 46 King Street East. At that point bells began to ring. One of Mr Armstrong's boarders was D Beere, another civil engineer. Armstrong, Beere & Hime were the photographers who took the series of photographs from the roof of Rossin House (later the Prince George Hotel) in 1856.

The facts coming together from the census and both city directories (Mitchell placed Toronto Priory between Vanauley and Esther Streets) weren't enough for me. I had to find another reference to William Armstrong. Sadly, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography did not see fit to mention him, nor did Eric Arthur's book, Toronto, No Mean City. Time to do a search in Google where I found Greater Toronto Archives to have a special section on the firm at www.toronto.ca/archives/earliest_4_whowere.htm . I am still not clear about Armstrong and Beere's contributions to civil engineering, but their contribution to memorializing 19th century Toronto through photography was truly worthwhile.

A New Year with Changes

2010-01-13T05:31:00.002-05:00

I just caught a glance at my signature photo as I came to write this note.

The desk is the same, the sweater was the one I was wearing yesterday, but the lamp is gone and, the really big thing, the computer is different. For Christmas my son gave me a new huge machine which he put together himself. Two disk drives, two DVD drives, Windows 7, and masses of memory into which I can put the whole of the Toronto census and all the links to other information about the people I find there. The only thing it didn't come equipped with was more human brain empowerment to figure out how to move all my data and photographs from the old machine. Gradually I am figuring things out. Yesterday I managed to install the two extra buttons on my mouse, the ones titled "copy" and "paste" which are a vast improvement on ctrl+c and ctrl+v. The mouse is long out of date and finding the driver online took an age. Today the printer must get installed. . . .

You may have heard that the UK has been swaddled in snow. We didn't have a white Christmas (i.e., it didn't snow on Christmas Day), but we did have two big snowfalls in the week before and more since the New Year. It is snowing as I write and two lads off school because of it have just knocked on our door offering to clear our drive. They were armed with homemade snow shovels--not the garden spades that most of us use. The past week has also been very cold and only main roads are clear to drive on.

The transcribing of St Patrick's Ward has been limited by the weather. We have lost three sessions at LDS so far and the one tomorrow will probably be cancelled too. I hear a thaw is on the way for which I am thankful. With the cold weather outside and the powerful fans of the new computer blowing cold air through the keyhole of my desk, I have had to wrap my legs in a duvet.

The 1861 census was taken on the night of 13th January 1861, 149 years ago tonight. There were people living on the wharves at the bottom of St Lawrence Ward! I hope they managed to get a good fire going without burning their shanties down.

MC--HNY

2009-12-24T11:44:00.002-05:00

The pudding is made, the stuffing is ready to put in the turkey, the presents are all wrapped, and I haven't done any census transcription since Monday. It's time to say

MERRY CHRISTMAS

to everyone and a

HAPPY NEW YEAR

too.

I can't read that

2009-12-13T06:49:00.004-05:00

Invisible

Unreadable

As transcription goes on I have decided that the word "illegible" can often cover too wide a variety of problems. For this reason I find myself using one of four different words, each of which will describe the specific situation more distinctly.

Unreadable. This usually relates to the quality of the writing or the writing instrument or the paper which has made it impossible for the microfilming camera to pick up a smooth image. A copperplate nib might be responsible, so might ink thickened through lack of use, or paper exposed to damp before or after it has been written on.

Invisible. This infers that the writing is so pale that it is impossible to see anything at all. Occasionally one can pick up a given name or initial. This most often occurs in the Names and Occupation columns. Often the ages and sexes are visible, so that the transcriber can tell how many people will be missed and whether it was a straightforward family or a boarding house. These entries were probably made in pencil, although some are so bad that I wonder if a dirty nail was used instead. Did the enumerators of St John's and St Patrick's have an arrangement that they would rub out families' names if they were slipped 50 cents or a dollar? Many other families have had their entries crossed out and rewritten when there appears to be nothing wrong with the original.

Unrecognizable. This usually refers to birthplaces, particularly where the householder has written a specific place in Ireland, England or Scotland which I just can't make out. If he has messed up the initial letter there is no point in staring at a gazetteer to solve the problem.

Queried. I use this when I have made an attempt at reading a name but am not sure I am right. The word is scattered liberally over my transcription. Anyone is welcome to have another go.

Planning Ahead

2009-12-10T15:17:00.008-05:00

This afternoon, after raising my count of households photographed in St Patrick's to 130, I decided to inspect the two films borrowed from the LDS to see just what was covered by both of them.

The first film continues through St Patrick's for 979 folios or households. The last district is number four which has barely started at the end of the first film and continues on into the second film for a total of 164 folios. The whole ward comprises 1101 households.

The rest of the relatively small second film contains the various institutions in and around Toronto which had their own populations. These are not listed in households but on pages of 50 inhabitants, rather like the rural township census forms.

I have always been curious as to the actual institutions which formed this group. Here they are, together with the number of pages it took to list their "inmates". The inmates included everyone on the premises, even those in charge of the institution.

Trinity College, Queen Street West, St Patrick's Ward
Toronto University buildings, Queen's Park, St Patrick's Ward
Knox College, Grosvenor Street, St John's Ward
St Michael's College, St Joseph's Street, St John's Ward
House of Providence, Power Street, St David's Ward
House of Industry, Edward Street, St John's Ward
Orphan's Home, St Patrick's Ward
Boys' Home, King Street East, St James's Ward (The Girls' Home was listed in with St James's Ward itself.)
St Mary's Convent, St Joseph's Street, St John's Ward
The Peninsula or The Island, St George's Ward
Provincial Lunatic Asylum, part one, St Andrew's Ward
Provincial Lunatic Asylum, part two, St Andrew's Ward
Toronto General Hospital, St David's Ward
Toronto Jail
Toronto Garrison, St George's Ward
Old Fort York, St George's Ward

So, "The Pensinsula" was an "institution". Who would have thought it? It is a part of Toronto rather dear to my heart as I would have been included on its 1941 census, had that census happened. In 1861 the inhabitants included David Ward and his large family, members of the Hanlan family, and a few others.

A learning institution I was expecting to find but didn't was Upper Canada College. Some pupils were boarding with masters on the grounds in St George's Ward proper, but there were no dormitories such as those ususally described in 19th century private schools. I can only presume that the term had not started on January 14th and most pupils were still at home.

I was surprised that it took 10 pages to cover the Toronto Garrison. Admittedly this included all the families in married quarters, but that was still a lot of British soldiers stationed 3000 miles from home in what was to all extents peacetime (save for internal problems across the American border, of course).

I should finish St Patrick's District One next week, and there is still one more session available in the library before Christmas. I think I will work on some of the institutions that day rather than leave them all to the end.

St Patrick's Ward gets started

2009-12-10T03:37:00.003-05:00

St Patrick's Ward started out just where I expected--at the northwest corner of Queen Street West and University with an enumeration district of 261 houses. The enumerator made his way along the north side of Queen for about three blocks and then proceeded to work on the side streets. At least, this is what appeared from what I saw on Tuesday and checked later with the streets directory section of Mitchell's City Directory of 1864.

I usually try to photograph 75 folios or households a day, but on Tuesday I had forgotten one of my preparational steps. Thus, my camera told me its memory card was full as I reached house 57. Today I have made sure my camera is empty to start with, but I must look out my second 2GB memory card.

The families were quite a mixture, with occupations stretching from labourer up to "gentlemen" and merchants, with a fair sprinkling of men and widowed women who did not see fit to tell the census authorities what, if anything, they did to keep the wolf from the door. There were at least two people who lived alone, and some very large families (one of seventeen members including a few servants). Three households were impossible to read--a high score for one day's work. The unusual thing was the number of deaths in 1860 recorded. The enumerator must have been especially vigilant on this score. I have found census districts which did not include any at all and I am sure Toronto was not that healthy at the time.

The proofreading of St John's District 3 was completed before starting on St Patrick's and with luck I can finish the small District 6 north of College over the weekend. District 6 was so different from the rest of the ward. Suburbia I guess you would call it. Yonge Street was commercial and included Thomas Christie's first biscuit factory and a large builder's with a lot of men recorded there. The surnames in the builder's yard were familiar. The employer may simply have listed all his workmen or the employees may have stayed there over a Sunday night prior to going to a nearby job on the Monday morning. University College was completing construction at the time and there were at least four painters in that list. Back of Yonge Street were clerks, bookkeepers, merchants and barristers and the one titled person I have found in the whole of Toronto: Lady Macauley. Her late husband had been a judge and had died in 1859. Knox College was in the middle of this ward and St Michael's on the edge of it. Most of their "inmates" will probably be found in the Institutions file I have yet to get to on the second film of St Patrick's Ward.

St Patrick's Ward Transcription starts Tuesday

2009-12-04T05:39:00.005-05:00

The other day I received word that our local Family History Centre is back open for business following a three-month break while the Latter Day Saints chapel had a renovation. Come Tuesday I can go back to the process of adding new people to the 1861 census database.

St Patrick's is the last ward to do. I know it includes the area north of Queen Street West and west of what is now University Avenue. The northern boundary is present-day Bloor Street West and it will stretch west to . . . . well, that is something I shall have to find out. From the looks of the map of the ward in 1861, there was a sizeable population in the rectangle bounded by Queen, College, University and Bathurst. There were also people living west of that along the Queen Street corridor, but not that many further north.

Population density in St Patrick's is going to be governed by the availability of transporation. People would either have to work close to home, perhaps running their own businesses, or be able to travel daily into the more built-up parts of the city. In 1861 in Toronto public transportation was just beginning to come into existence. Travelling to the centre by carriage was for the much better off, travelling in on horseback would involve more problems than just those we have today parking a car.

I look forward to charging up my camera on Monday night ready for my first three-hour stint on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, I have been proofreading St John's Ward. Districts One and Two are complete and back into the big database. Now I am tackling District Three--308 households containing 1500 people--in the area from Queen north to Agnes Street (now Dundas) and from Yonge over to Terauley (now Bay Street). More than half of this is now covered by the Eaton Centre. The enumerator started with Agnes, then did the north and south streets and finally tackled the east-west ones starting at Queen and progressing northward. I just finished Albert Street. Now there is Trinity Square, Louisa and Alice--92 houses. With a bit of luck I shall get that done and, perhaps, District 6 north of College before I start on St Patrick's.

Population--Variations in Density

2009-11-24T07:23:00.002-05:00

This morning I decided I had looked at clumps of trees for just too long. It was time to back off and view the whole wood.

When you transcribe a census of a town or city ward by ward it is hard to know just how many people you’ve included. There may be households that get copied twice accidentally, there may be houses omitted. There may be people who write their name over two lines in barely readable handwriting. It takes a proofread to realize there is only one person there. Equivalently it is possible to leave out one child in a large family or miss a boarder in a rooming house. Now, with a great deal of tidying up done, I have discovered that there were 37,586 people in Toronto (excluding St Patrick’s Ward), and they were organized into 6,718 households. A further 125 buildings contributed census forms but were vacant on census night. The average number of people per inhabited household was 5.59.

The various wards varied in population from largest to smallest as follows:
St James’s (Yonge east to Jarvis, King Street north to Bloor)
8,466 people; 1403 households; household density 6.03.
St John’s (Yonge west to University Ave, Queen north to Bloor)
8,101 people; 1599 households; household density 5.07.
St David’s (Jarvis Street east to the Don River, King Street north to Bloor)
8,019 people; 1452 households; household density 5.52.
St Andrew’s (Yonge Street west to Garrison Creek, King Street north to Queen)
6,281 people; 1144 households; household density 5.49.
St Lawrence’s (Yonge Street east to the Don River, the bay front north to King Street, with a few families out on the Kingston Road)
3,839 people; 698 households; household density 5.50.
St George’s (Yonge west to Garrison Creek, the bay front north to King Street)
2,880 people; 422 households; household density 6.82.

The ward with the highest household density was St George’s and the lowest was St John’s. This was surprising. I haven't done a careful survey on this point, but would assume there were more people classified as servants in St George's. Certainly there were a lot of families comfortably enough off to afford them. St George's also included three or four large hotels. On the other hand, St John's was populated by families of craftsmen in a variety of trades from stonecutter to shoemaker. There were servants--quite often girls of 14 or 15--but they were more likely to be found in smaller families. Larger families must have depended upon their offspring to get tasks done that would otherwise by carried out by hired help.

The housecleaning and renovation of the database as a whole is now complete. I can now start looking at individual houses and improve the presentation of the data to be found in each. St John's is getting a proofread, two districts done and now into the third of the seven.

Renovating the Census and What it Can Lead To

2009-11-08T13:54:00.004-05:00

I have been expanding my housecleaning work to other wards. So far St Andrew's and St John's are being inspected and given the equivalent of a good lick of paint. Like any renovation process, you suddenly see something that needs doing in one room and then the action has to be repeated everywhere else as well. It's a long careful process to get a better and more uniform database up and running.

The last stage in making any renovation is to see if it works. This led me, this afternoon, to the census entry for Jas B AIKENHEAD, clerk, aged 44, in St David's Ward. A long time ago I matched him with an entry in Mitchell's Directory of 1863: Aikenhead, James, salesman, 2 King Street East, h 157 Jarvis. His employment address of 2 King Street East tied with that of W Hewitt, 111 Yonge Street, general hardware merchant. Mr Hewitt was one of the principal advertisers in Mitchell's Directory. At the bottom of every right-hand page in the Directory he listed one of the products he sold. It is great fun to go through the directory just reading the great variety of hardware items available to the people of Toronto and the rural areas round about that could be obtained at W Hewitt's at the corner of Yonge and King.

The name AIKENHEAD allied itself to hardware in my head, just as it probably does to anyone else who grew up in Toronto during the 20th century. The occupations of clerk and salesman were very lowly. Was he the one who started up the ladder on the way to commercial success in the hardware business?

Time to put the query "Aikenhead hardware" to Google. The best answer on the first page was a book in Google.docs titled I know that name!: the people behind Canada's best-known brand names by Mark Kearney and Randy Ray. It confirmed my guess. Jas B Aikenhead was the founder of Aikenhead's Hardware, and his son Thomas (age 2 in 1861) followed in his father's footsteps and became managing director of the firm in 1902, just before his father's death.

These are "notes" that I can now put with the census. Notes that are just as worthwhile as the actual transcription, even if you aren't related to the Aikenhead family in any way. Discoveries like this is what really makes transcribing and inspecting the census FUN.

Housecleaning the database and other things

2009-11-03T07:58:00.002-05:00

It's November. Sometime this month our local Family History Centre ought to open up again after the down-time caused by renovations in the LDS chapel building. I have just been on the phone to a chapel member and she says there is a fair amount of work to do yet. It may be a while before I can get down to transcribing St Patrick's Ward.

I have given my database of St David's Ward a housecleaning. Now, for the first time, I can produce a form giving all the data I have for a household--not just the original census schedule, but links to city directory entries, and all my miscellaneous notes that go with the people and the household or building in which they lived. I can indicate that a particular census page was extremely difficult to read, or that the details on the form may be incorrect thanks to an error on the part of the person who originally filled it in (for instance, getting the sexes of two children the wrong way round). Better still, I can add facts about the individuals, such as if they found their way into the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, even though they were just children in 1861. Eventually I can add many marriage dates and future spouses. A census is a snapshot in a life, why not expand it into a photograph album if the evidence can be found?

The next task is to repeat what I've done for St David's to the other five completed wards. I hope I can remember all of the steps.

Ancestry have just delivered their acknowledgement-and-thank-you emails for my corrections made during October. There were more than 1600 messages in a mailbox that usually gets about ten in every delivery. Can one find a census entry using a corrected entry? The answer is yes, but the individual will always be filed under the spelling that their original transcriber used.

Proofreading Comes to an Unexpected Halt

2009-10-25T05:05:00.005-04:00

I am rather pleased to see that it is less than a month since I last wrote to this blog. Proofreading the census entries has proved to be more immediately challenging than writing about them. Since the end of September I completed checking St Lawrence's Ward and went on to St James's, the last of the three wards situated east of Yonge Street.

Yesterday I started work on District 4 and less than forty houses in I had to stop. Ancestry had come to the end of its provision. There are 1413 folios or households in St James’s Ward, but there are only 828 folios in Ancestry’s website. If you are looking for one of the 600 familes that lived north of Gerrard Street East between Yonge and Jarvis, Ancestry doesn’t have them.

It would appear that they are not on FamilySearchIndexing either. I just did a search of a few heads of households on the index there to find "no matches". I am beginning to wonder if one microfilm missed the FSI volunteer indexing program which happened back at the beginning of the year. If so, it is Family History Library Film US/CAN Census Area 390245—the description in the LDS Library Catalogue exactly fits the point where the index ceases to exist.

Oh well. I guess I had better start on the database revision operation for the three complete districts of St James's. But it is a pity that the whole of Toronto east of Yonge can’t be proofread.

Ancestry Difficulties

2009-09-28T11:05:00.002-04:00

In yesterday’s blog I was discussing census images for which FamilySearch Indexing did not provide a transcription and which, therefore, are omitted from Ancestry’s database.

Along with the image of each folio on the 1861 census, Ancestry provides a "Report Problem" option. Opening it leads to three choices: "Missing Image", “Wrong Image” or "Unreadable Image". It does not include anything like "Image not Transcribed". If I tick "Missing Image" or "Unreadable Image" I immediately receive an automated e-mail thanking me and advising that if I wish to take the matter further I should telephone or write snail-mail.

Ancestry provides its services to us through the internet. Surely they ought to assume that their customers would want to use the same means to contact them. Phoning or writing costs money, particularly for those of us outside North America. As far as phoning is concerned, there is also the matter of time zones. The “matching working hours” window between Utah and the UK is very small.

Contacting "Contact Us" results in an e-mail saying they have put the question raised on their file of problems to check. Admittedly they get around to these problems eventually, but answers tend to be phrased as if every correspondent is looking for his/her own family and correcting a small mistake in one record. They do not seem to identify the general researcher looking at a community and who may be trying to point out to them something they may not have considered before.

One afternoon, a couple of weeks after I finished proofreading St David's, I received a collection of more than 500 e-mails from Ancestry thanking me for individual corrections and comments I had made. I didn't read too many, particularly after I found several suggesting I should take out a subscription. Can one read their Canadian census results without a subscription?

Excuse the rant. These molehills in Ancestry's provision can easily grow into mountains.

St Lawrence's--Proofreading Stage

2009-09-27T11:51:00.005-04:00

No, it wasn't a two-week break. I got down to work proofreading St Lawrence's Ward on the Monday and am now part way through the last of the four districts.

I think I have said before that I did the original transcription of "Larry" in a hurry prior to a trip to Canada. Does it show! The full correction is going to take quite a few days. Yesterday I discovered an error in reading the folio numbers that followed on for more than 100 households. Folio numbers are the vital reference to original sources and I use them as identification codes in my database. All these people will have to have their codes altered to link them to the city directories correctly.

The quality of some of the folios are so bad that FamilySearchIndexing didn't even attempt to transcibe them. This makes it difficult because in these cases there is no facility in Ancestry to "fill in the blanks". On most folios it is possible to read the ages and determine the number of people in the household. Had the indexer entered the ages it would have allowed others to have a go at the names.

Just for fun I decided to see if I could find one of these omitted households in the 1871 census. In Ancestry the left hand side of Folio 649 was no more that a smear, but there were ages given for ten people. It looked like the first nine were a family and the tenth a servant. On the reverse the signature was definitely that of David Gorman. This must have been one of those folios that should not have been bleached when the census films were renovated in the past year, because I had made some guesses as to names in my database. I couldn't have done so working with what Ancestry provides now.

David Gorman was aged 60 in 1861 so looking him up in the 1871 census was a bit of a long shot, but one might as well try. There he was aged 72 and still in St Lawrence with his wife, Margaret, and five of his children--the ones whose names were pretty well illegible.

I tried a couple of other folios of the same quality. One was successful, but the other must have belonged to a family who decided Toronto was not the place to seek their fortune after all.

How to "take a break" in style

2009-09-13T03:37:00.003-04:00

Last night I was checking people with 'C' surnames against Caverhill while listening to The Last Night of the Proms on radio. Once the program reached the intermission I felt eyes needed to experience this as well as the ears. It was time to leave the computer screen for the television one.

I was first introduced to the Last Night of the Proms 44 years ago when I had only been in the UK for a couple of weeks. Two of us were driving from Glasgow to London by way of the slow scenic route. Saturday night still found us on the Scottish side of the border staying with some people introduced to us by Canadian friends. As dinner ended our hosts recalled that it was the Last Night of the Proms, something that appeared to be a "must watch" to them, but meant nothing much to a couple of girls in their mid-twenties visiting from a foreign land. So the black-and-white television was switched on and we settled down to an evening in which conversation was not going to be the vital part.

As all of us who can remember back that far can recall that, as the 1950s moved into the 1960s, popular music changed. I was not a fan of rock'n'roll. In fact, to replace that empty space that had been filled by romantic ballads and easy jazz, I was discovering classical music of the era from Bach to Mozart. But concerts have never been my style. I can't keep my hands still in my lap. However, that evening I was doing my best to be a proper guest and not fidget excessively.

My yawn factor was suddenly reduced as the quieter parts of Sea Shanties moved into The Hornpipe and the camera moved to the standing audience doing their best to clap in time as the music got faster and faster. Then there was Jerusalem, which I had learned at school, sung with warmth and respect by singers on both sides of the podium. I was beginning to realize why my hosts had looked forward to this evening in front of the television.

"It will be Britannia next." And it was. I forget who the soloist was that year. I don't even know if it was a man or a woman. All I can remember was the audience participation--people of my own age waving flags and swaying from side to side in unison. Really letting their hair down and having fun. It was something I had never known at a symphony concert.

Then Sir Malcolm Sargent made his traditional Last Night speech, thanking all and sundry from Sir Henry Wood (the founder of the Proms whose bust sits on a plinth at the back of the platform) to the hoi polloi like us. On completion he turned to the orchestra, raised his baton, and the familiar tune of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1 came forth. The orchestra played the melody once through, and then, together, the whole audience began to sing "Land of Hope and Glory". Again the streamers and the flags came out. At that moment I decided this was where I wanted to be. These people were the kind of people I wanted to be part of.

The Last Night of the Proms has changed a bit over time, but it keeps many of the traditional features and people love it for doing so. The soloist for Britiannia sometimes comes on in costume. I recall a well-built soprano who came on in an all-covering cape which turned out to have a Union Jack lining. But last night Sarah Connolly, who had sung her earlier solo in a trouser suit, came on dressed as Horatio Nelson, and with a flourish presented her tricorn to the conductor who then proceeded to lead the orchestra with one hand while keeping the hat under his other arm.

A few years ago someone got the brilliant idea of producing matching "proms in the parks" in different parts of the country so that the live audience was not limited to those who can get to the Royal Albert Hall in London. Giant television screens allow the various concerts to be swapped around from venue to venue and fireworks displays add to the excitement. This year Handel's Fireworks Music took the place of the Sea Shanties. It was just as fitting. The weather was dry and warm enough for the park audiences to enjoy their night out.

The program from inside the Albert Hall has also changed. Thirty or more years of colour television has seen to that. I am sure there are more streamers and the flags are much larger. There are now a number of colour spotlights moving their beams around the hall. In fact, we did not see as much of the promenaders last night, and--shock, horror--many of them appeared to be in evening dress instead of the usual t-shirt, jeans and silly hat.

It was a wonderful way to take a break from Toronto 1861. If you want to see what this year's Last Night was about, follow http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/events/Proms/b00mvfl6. The podcast will only be available for the next week (until September 19 2009). Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Keeping Busy in an Interim Period

2009-09-01T08:14:00.005-04:00

When I completed St Andrew's Ward at the beginning of August, I thought I would be taking a three to four week transcription break before continuing on with St Patrick's, the final area to be done.

However, our Family History Centre and local LDS church unexpectedly decided to have the builders in and the centre is now closed for ten weeks or so. With no transcription to do I am keeping myself busy with other tasks in connection with the project: proofreading, comparing census data with city directories, reading histories of the period, and drawing maps.

Proofreading is being done with the assistance of Ancestry's provision of the original microfilms online. They now also bring up the transcription provided to them by the LDS FamilySearch Indexing project and allow any viewer to suggest alterations. As a result I am proofreading my transcription and theirs at the same time. They both contain errors. Hopefully, at the end of the day, the names in both will be the same.

Proofreading is a fairly slow activity and has a fairly early "yawn" threshold. However, I have almost completed St David's Ward which I transcribed four years ago. It is a lot easier to read a computer monitor than it was to figure out the same information on a microfilm screen. There is more magnification available and computer monitors tend to be cleaner.

Comparing the data from the census with city directories is something I have done quite a bit of ever since I started transcribing. It's nice to know exactly where a family lived and every once in a while the directory's entry sorts out legibility difficulties provided by the census. Of course, sometimes the directory gets something wrong, too. Let's face it, on cloudy days they would have been proofread by gaslight. And all the indexing was done by hand and eye and brain while we present a great list to our computer's software and, presto, it's done.

Last week I discovered that Amazon UK carries some books on Toronto history. As a result I now have copies of Eric Arthur's Toronto, No Mean City and two of Mike Filey's Sketches of the Way We Were. It's amazing how much I have learned about 19th century Toronto since I opened these books on Saturday.

Drawing maps is strictly a computer activity. I am no artist, but with a mouse I can draw a straight line. A drawing program called paint.net lets me trace from a map found online or scanned from a book. The original is the background layer. Then I add a pale solid colour as a translucent layer, then another layer on which I outline the streets and a third where I write the street names. When I'm finished I hide the original and I have a fairly easy-to-read street map. The streets on my map follow an even stricter grid pattern that Toronto planners provided us with in the first place. My father was a draughtsman who retired at about the same time as computers came on the scene. He would have been green with envy.

There's plenty to do, even without actually transcribing.

You Have to Start Somewhere

2009-08-24T05:45:00.004-04:00

An entry from Elm Street East (now Gerrard Street), in St David's Ward (folio 1426)

Henry Pellatt, bank clerk, born Glascow, age 31, married, 3 children born in Kingston, 2 servants, house made of rough cast, two storeys high.

Not exactly a castle.

Response to Comments (cont'd)

2009-08-22T02:18:00.002-04:00

Meanwhile, all you eagle-eyed blog readers can try your hand at Mr Beatty's occupation which absolutely flummoxes me.

Response to Comments

2009-08-22T02:15:00.005-04:00

There have been two responses to yesterday's post, both of which said the same thing, so I thought I had better share the original with everyone.

This is to let you know that I thought I had become used to the curly topped "d" at the end of a word, but another can always come along to fool me. I shall change my transcription to the less interesting possibility.

Stand by for another blog. I haven't figured out how to place pictures where I want them yet. And this is centred because Google seems to want it this way.

Naming Difficulties

2009-08-21T02:30:00.002-04:00

Anyone who has ever looked through a census will know that it is not always a boring list of people written in amazingly difficult to read handwriting. Every once in a while, particularly where people are filling in their own census schedules, you find a family that shows its personality.

Such was the case with the Grants in St Andrew’s District Four. It was one of those frustrating families where the parent given the responsibility for filling in the details saw fit to provide posterity with only the initials of his or her brood of four children, except for the last little girl, aged 3 weeks on 14 January 1862. No initials for her, just the comment “Not Christmas!”.

I sensed a family feud. I guess the Grants had used up all the names in the standard Scottish family naming pattern and it was time to look beyond monickers carried by grandparents and parents. One parent, doubtless backed up by the more romantic of the other children, was going for a really interesting name for the new arrival. The other, more staid and more aware of the difficulty of bearing an unusual name, was electing for something more down to earth.

I wonder what “Not Christmas!” ended up as. I hope she lived to enjoy it.

St Andrew’s Ward—An Overview

2009-08-20T15:12:00.002-04:00

Now that St Andrew’s Ward is completely transcribed, it is time for some statistics. The whole ward comprised 6,268 people and there were 1160 schedules filled in. On average, then, each household contained 5 or 6 people.

The ward covered all the area between King and Queen Streets, starting at Yonge Street and moving out as far to Strachan Avenue which was the western edge of the city. It is a very long narrow rectangle and very hard to put on one map without losing focus on the streets in the centre. For the census it was divided into five districts:
District One included 1393 people on 250 schedules and covered the area south from Queen West to Adelaide and from Yonge west to the east side of York Street. It was very much a commercial district with people living over shops as well as in hotels and boarding houses.
District Two had a population of 1493 in 253 households and comprised the area between the south side of Adelaide and the north side of King, starting at Yonge and going west to John Street. It included Upper Canada College and the houses of masters who lived in the grounds. Only a few pupils living with the masters are included. Either the rest are covered in the film titled "Institutions" or they had not returned from their Christmas holiday by census night.
District Three had 1113 people in 224 households. It was a westward extension of District One starting on the west side of York Street and ending on the east side of Peter. There were some big houses in this district, including that of Chief Justice John Beverly Robinson.
District Four continued west again, this time covering the area from the west side of Peter Street to the west side of Portland Street. It included St Andrew’s Market. There were 1119 people and 206 households.
District Five was the largest district geographically. It continued west from District Two and John Street to Portland Street, once again only the block between Adelaide and King. West of Portland it expanded to the complete width of the ward from King Street up to Queen, stretching beyond Garrison Creek to Strachan Avenue. Its population was 1150 in 227 households.

I have now finished adding all the relational fields—spouses, children, parents and “living with”. Tomorrow I will make the spreadsheet into a database where I can better compare it with other material, particularly the city directories.

Mrs Green, who are you?

2009-08-14T09:43:00.003-04:00

I have been proofreading St David’s Ward, using the originals provided by Ancestry. District 3, with its 458 schedules, must be one of the longest of the lot. This morning I called for the next Ancestry image only to find that it came complete with their own transcription and the facility to advise alterations. As a result I have been checking two transcriptions at once—mine and theirs--and finding all types of errors in both of them!

One type of error is worth mentioning. Because the census was being filled in by the householders, the members of the family are described much more in the manner of the era than they would be if the information was being copied down by an enumerator constrained by rules from above. In the 1860s this meant that wives were very often referred to as Mrs J Smith or Mrs R Brown. To admit that your wife was Mary Smith or Ann Brown was just not done. This seems to be more true of couples in their twenties than in older families

The LDS FamilySearch Indexing project (who prepared the transcription for Ancestry) was not prepared for this habit. Their rules instructed indexers to leave a blank in the given name field instead of writing “Mrs”. This made sense when I did a bit of transcribing for them, but now that I see the results in Ancestry, I am less happy. I expect a blank given name field to infer something unreadable or omitted. Instead, it turns out to be a schedule on which the lady of the house was referred to as “Mrs”. The atmosphere of the era would be far more evident if “Mrs” were present when it was used, just as it would be if they had chosen to include occupations.

The situation also gives rise to another mistake. Take a family headed by William Black followed by Mrs W Black. Nickels to doughnuts her name was not Winnifred or Wilhelmina, but some transcribers have removed the “Mrs” and made the assumption that her name began with W. Given the sparseness of other records of the time, this type of error will find its way into many a family tree.

It just proves that even English-speaking transcribers can’t get it right 100% of the time.

August Actions--Tidying Up

2009-08-11T06:30:00.005-04:00

With the transcription of St Andrew's complete, I am adding its frills and furbellows: additional fields naming spouses, children, parents and the one for which I can't think of a better title than "Living With". This field lists the head of the household for all servants, boarders, relatives with a different surname, and all the older children who might leave the nest come another year or decade.

Putting in these extras can be very boring and I keep trying to think up some semi-automated way to fill in the columns in my spreadsheet. With between 200 and 250 households in each of the five districts completing will take a while. This morning I hit upon a two-stage way of filling in the Living With column which is fairly successful. District One is now finished.

I have also started to proofread St David's Ward, the first one I attacked. I was surprised to find my files were dated 2005. Was it really four years ago? From the looks of my corrections I was pretty green then. In 2005 I was doing the whole transcription at the Family History Centre and, if I was to make any progress at all, I had to limit my time on each schedule. I did well if I could cover 20 schedules in a session. The proofreading is being done against Ancestry's originals (not their index) and I can manage 50 households a session and, perhaps, two sessions a day.

There is plenty of other work to do with the census. Finding 19th-century Torontonians in the Dictionary of Candian Biography is one of them. Hiding in the census, there must be other young men who went on to success besides John Ross Robertson, and the DCB could guide me to them if it had a Toronto index. I wonder if anyone has ever made one, of if I shall have to do it myself?

St Andrew's Complete--with a Surprise

2009-08-06T03:19:00.008-04:00

As forecast, I did complete the last session of picture taking of St Andrew's Ward schedules on Tuesday, but I only finished transcribing from the photographs ten minutes ago. Yippee! Only one more ward to go and the collection will be complete.

This last lot of schedules was pretty messy--there were 3 houses where all we will ever know about the inhabitants were the size of the family and their sexes. However, the third last schedule was that of a merchant, John Robertson. His eldest son was a student, aged 20, named John R.

Bells rang in my head. John R Robertson, like in John Ross Robertson, a 19th century newspaper journalist who wrote like a 20th century one, and the original publisher of Toronto's Evening Telegram? I went over to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography to check. Yes!

As I've mentioned before, one of the things that has kept me going on this transcription is the discovery of people who reach the history books. Usually they are people well known by the time of the census, like Bishop John Strachan and Rev Egerton Ryerson, William Lyon MacKenzie and George Brown, Theodore Heintzmann and James Christie, Sandford Fleming and William Gooderham, but here was someone yet to make his mark, a student son of a dry goods merchant living on John Street.

It's made my day. Even more than finishing St Andrew's as the last worthwhile accomplishment of my seventh decade (which ends before midnight).

St Andrew’s Ward: The Finishing Post in Sight

2009-08-02T14:19:00.002-04:00

It looks like I shall finish St Andrew's Ward on Tuesday--one session ahead of schedule. I am being extra careful with these last 120 folios or so, because they are not in Ancestry. Why? There was a break between one film and another around the 1100 folios mark and someone decided that was where to stop.

This last bit is, admittedly, not very interesting. As in all the other wards, there is an urban section and a rural section. When you get out to Garrison Street and find a widow whose occupation is "cows", you know you are in the country. Just in case you are interested, the value of a cow was $12. Horses were worth $20 and pigs $2.

After the transcription, the analysis. It takes time and cramped fingers to list spouses, children and who boarders live with. Nevertheless, it's a worthwhile exercise.

St Patrick's--the last ward to do--is on order. Transcription of it will start sometime in September.

Worthwhile Suggestions

2009-07-16T04:48:00.003-04:00

Surround and conquer.
Go backward to come forward.
The timeline is your best friend.
In searching, don't filter too quickly,
refine.
If you can't find the truth in the story,
check out the storyteller.

The above suggestions to genealogists come from John Reid's blog of today (or was it yesterday). John lives in Eastern Daylight time, I live in British Summer Time. No matter.

But they don't half fit the last ten households I have just transcribed. One with initials for given names who said the family consisted of 4 females and 3 males but admitted 2 boys went to school; two with lists of very legible given names where the sexes didn't fit; one where the head of the household wrote his entire schedule in invisible ink but signed his name on the back; and, lastly, the young couple of 23 and 22 where he listed his wife as exactly that--"wife".

I hope we shall be able to find the "storytellers" in other documents to discover the rest of their stories.

Transcription of St Andrew's has now reached Division 4 of 5. Provided swine flu doesn't catch up with me I will make my deadline.

A good day

2009-07-01T13:59:00.002-04:00

I passed Folio 400 in St Andrew's yesterday. That makes the ward one-third done. Completion should be in early August. After that, only one ward to go! St Patrick's and St Andrew's each contained between 1100 and 1200 houses.

Yesterday's section was a breeze. Not one "invisible" schedule and just the odd word or age which proved to be unreadable. Tomorrow's session should be very interesting. It includes Upper Canada College in its original home on the south side of Queen Street. Glancing forward yesterday, I noticed the homes of various masters and teachers. I await to see if the pupils are listed--the school itself may not be in its proper place geographically, but stored in the file titled “Institutions and Goals” (not my spelling mistake, by the way) on the St Patrick's film.

Happy Canada Day, by the way!

I hear you haven’t had the best weather for it, not like here. We are into the second week of the Wimbledon tennis and there has only been one 20-minute session of rain. With our longer days it is very hot.

St Andrew’s Ward: It's All There

2009-06-24T11:39:00.002-04:00

Division One of St Andrew's is now complete (all 250 households with 1400 inhabitants) and I am working on Division Two. Division One’s enumerator did not note the streets and sides, so I wasn’t completely sure where I was although it was pretty clear that Yonge Street and Queen West were involved. I think at one point a resident gave his address as on Temperance Street, and another on Bay. Division Two has addresses. Again, it started on Yonge, but before the 50th household the addresses were on King Street West. I will probably find that the dividing line between the two was between Adelaide and Richmond, and the westernmost limit for both was York Street.

The census allows for remarks on the reverse of the form. These are not often filled in, but are always worth a read—if they are legible. The first one I found in St Andrew’s was made by Robert C Todd who described himself as an artist. I quote his comment as found: Toronto is to New and two Poor te suport an Ornamental artist. The “annual product of business or manufacture” was $300.00 to $400.00. Raw material used (paints oils & brushes) cost about $100.00.
Artists do complain, don’t they?

The second remark worth mentioning was made by J W Smith, a dry goods merchant: Since the completion of the Railways, the business of the City has fallen off and is now done in the Country villages. Unless the Government encourages to the fullest extent, Manufacturers of various kinds, there is but little hope that Toronto will ever regain its former prosperity.
Mr Smith’s business capital was $7600, he employed 5 clerks to whom he paid a total of $120 per month, and he had reached the grand old age of 24!

Had I read something about a recession in Canada in 1860? Perhaps I had.

The third comment was not made by a householder but by the enumerator on a particularly messy census form that I wasn’t making much sense of. Names did not attach to ages or any other details. When I read the remarks I burst out laughing: A notorious whore house keeper that owns the property she lives in. Destroying the people all round both morally and phisically, a curse to the neighbourhood and wich no law, as yet, has been able to reach!!!
signed Wm Hopkins, enumerator.

There had to be one somewhere. And there it was in the division in which the enumerator had taken a form to list the all the churches and the Temperance Hall.

Good Old Toronto. It was ever thus.

Fire and Flood

2009-06-18T15:16:00.002-04:00

What caused the water damage to the census forms? Flood? Or fire? Were they stored in the old Parliamentary Library in Ottawa before the advent of Canada’s National Archives which eventually became Library and Archives Canada (LAC)? I recalled from school history classes and from visits to Ottawa that the Library was saved when the Central Block of the Parliament Buildings burnt down in ---- . Suddenly I knew it was time to consult Wikipedia.

Okay, the fire took place in 1916 and at that time the library, completed in 1876, was saved because it was only accessible by a single corridor from the main building and that was blocked off by an iron door bolted in time by the chief librarian himself. Wikipedia doesn’t say whether firemen’s hoses might have done any damage to the roof.

Before the fire, however, was the flood. In 1888 a tornado removed the original slated roof, hence the building has had a copper roof ever since. There certainly could have been water damage at that time.

There was a fire in the Parliamentary Library in 1952, but I should think by that time that archives like past censuses would have been removed to the building on Wellington Street or wherever its predecessors were. It would not surprise me though if the 1952 fire set minds thinking as to how to preserve large amounts data on paper in some other way. The timeframe between then and the 1955 filming is not that great.

Protective wrapping such as we know it just wasn't available. The invention of plastic sheeting did not take place before World War 2. Tarpaulin wrapping would have been very costly. Were the censuses in cabinets? Who knows.

I also thought about the large part of the 1851 census (including all of Toronto) which is “lost”. What happened to it? Did it ever get to Ottawa? How was it transported to Ottawa? By cart or carriage, or by boat down Lake Ontario and up the Trent Canal? Did it get blown away in the tornado of 1888? Or lost track of in a move from one archive warehouse to another? The brain is wandering around. Must get back to sorting out where these people lived in 1861.

Out of the Chaos

2009-06-18T04:27:00.002-04:00

The census form which suffered the greatest damage that I told you about in my last post turned out to hold the records for three very interesting people. The head of the household was John Cameron, who called himself a banker. Directories of the time called him a banking agent. He was probably a brother of Angus Cameron, president of the Bank of Toronto.

Below his family was Rev John Barclay, D.D., pastor of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, then located at the corner of Church and Adelaide East. Dr Barclay was 48 and a bachelor.

The third was probably someone who was in Toronto for only a short time. He was described on the census form as A G Davis, electrician—an American of 27 with his main residence in Montreal. An electrician in 1861? Edison was yet to discover the light bulb. The answer was in Column 47, a column usually left blank, but in this case it expanded on the occupation to “sup’t, Grand Trunk Telegraph Lines”.

Telegraph as a means of communication was probably younger in 1861 than the internet is today. Mr Davis was in charge of stringing the wire on all those poles that accompany North American railway lines, the equivalent of our high speed carbon-fibre cables which bring you this message.

Suddenly, Chaos!

2009-06-18T04:03:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday down at the FHC I was happily snapping away at my second session on St Andrew’s Ward when I came upon a census form that was filled with absolutely unreadable black blobs. The form filler was one of those who answered every question for everyone in the house, putting a broad dash when the question was not applicable. He had 15 people to deal with, making for an awful lot of black marks. All very well, but the form had then been subjected to water damage. The ink from all those dashes had bled. The print from the instructions on the back of the form had come through as well. Into the bargain the ink had seaped through to the sheets below. Evidence of the accident was still showing 40 forms later.

What was I going to do? I hated the thought of being unable to give any details at all about the people on the form with the most damage and the following two which weren't much better. That was 31 people I was going to leave off the transcription.

My curiosity led me to see what Ancestry had provided for this house in its originals. Much to my surprise I found a readable schedule. Most of the writing was quite clear with a bit of haze around the lettering. Unfortunately, the ages were for the most part still unreadable. This is where the most of the puddle must have accumulated.

Ancestry and/or the LDS must have some fantastic film-cleaning software at their disposal. Their images are based on the same 1955 filming of the census that I am using on microfilm. I don’t want to use the Ancestry images as a crutch, but there are times—and this was one of them—where the temptation was just too great.

Just an Update

2009-06-13T15:06:00.000-04:00

You will be interested to know that another researcher has found the missing parts of St Andrew’s, St John’s and St Lawrence's on Ancestry’s York County file. St Patrick’s is yet to be found. LDS FamilySearch Indexing mentions it in sources, so it has been transcribed.

St Lawrence’s Ward—Chapter Two

2009-06-11T03:37:00.004-04:00

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.

Progress and Competition

2009-06-11T02:20:00.003-04:00

Once again I have been caught by the temptation of making progress with working on the data, rather than talking about it to the readers of this blog. But when Ancestry’s index and film images came online on Tuesday night, I was curious to have a look. I was surprised to find that I could browse the census pages at will.

The first thing I noticed was that Ancestry had 8390 images of census returns to offer for Toronto in 1861. They had filmed both sides of each folio or household census returns and called each one an image. This meant there were, at the most, only 4195 households in Toronto covered by the census. With two wards still to be done I was sure I had covered more households than that.

Yesterday morning I checked through Ancestry’s images, noting the ward, division and folio number for every 500th image. They started with St Andrew’s—which I haven’t seen yet—and went through the other wards in alphabetical order until they reached St John’s. St Lawrence’s and St Patrick’s should have followed on, but they didn’t.

The ward divisions in St Andrew’s jumped from One to Five very quickly, so I did a more inclusive check. Only a few pages of the divisions in between are available. I am curious to know what I shall find on the film on order through LDS.

The images that Ancestry have provided are much cleaner that those I have been looking at. They are using the same 1955 National Archives filming that is available through Ontario Archives, various libraries in Canada, and the LDS, but someone has waved the magic wand of technology over them, vacuuming away the pock marks and, therefore, clarifying the writing. I am dying to know what Ancestry’s transcribers managed to find on the pages I simply could not read.

It has to be admitted that it is much easier reading an old census off a still computer screen than off the screen of a microfilm reader which seems to be equipped with an over-sensitive handle anxious to move you on to the next image before you have even focussed on the one you want to see. This is one reason why I started taking my camera to the library.

Is my transcription still going to be useful? Maybe not so much as it would have been without Ancestry’s provision. However, one of my aims has been to build links to other data covering the same people in the same timeframe. Another is to analyse the population statistically, something that will satisfy my own curiosity if not anyone else’s. Yes, I’m going on.

St Johns—Chapter Three

2009-05-25T05:01:00.004-04:00

I thought the history of some of the streets in St John's as outlined in Chapter Two needed a bit more expansion, so here goes.

Elizabeth Street is the only long north-south street within St John’s Ward which has retained its original name and length.

Terauley Street, between Yonge and Elizabeth, is now part of Bay Street. Bay Street originally ended at Queen.

Sayer Street, which in 1861 ran from Osgoode Street (north of Osgoode Hall Law School) up to College Street, is now a shorter Chestnut Street. The southern part was lost when the new City Hall was built in the 1960s.

Centre Street, west of Sayer Street, is now only two blocks long. Its remaining sections have long been covered by office buildings and hospitals.

St Vincent Street, which runs up the middle of Division Six, was also joined to Bay Street in the early 20th century.

Most of the east-west streets have retained their 1860 names with just a couple of exceptions.

Agnes Street became Dundas when the decision was made to link all the short streets named Dundas into one long one.

Wellesley Street must have come into existence about 1860. I have two maps which appear to be of the same series, one with Wellesley on it and one without.

The building of the hospitals on the east side of University Avenue in the early part of the 20th century meant the demise of a number of streets in St John’s. The construction of the Eaton Centre 70 or 80 years later led to the same fate for most of Albert, Louisa, James and Alice and for the residential part of Trinity Square.

St John’s Ward—Chapter Two

2009-05-25T04:48:00.004-04:00

St John’s extended from Yonge Street west to what is now called University Avenue (then Park Lane), and from Queen St West north to Bloor Street West. The population in total was 8102 and covered 1604 schedules or census entry forms. It was divided into seven divisions, each of which had an enumerator, if not a team of enumerators.

Only one enumerator’s name is retained on the microfilm for each division and there are no descriptions outlining the division borders. Did he work alone or as the head of a team? There is no evidence on the film one way or the other.

The “doorstep” part of his job might have been outlined as dropping off the census schedules and collecting them again a few days later, but the enumerator would also have had to come to the aid of those who could not write, and to the assistance of the government in persuading everyone to fill in the form, including those who did not understand why a census should impinge on their privacy.

Once the schedules were collected they had to be numbered and each one had to have the division and ward written along the top and the street written along the side. That must have been boring. Enumerators sometimes lost track in numbering and two of the divisions lacked their street descriptions. It took careful comparison of a list of the streets gleaned from all the schedules with a map of the time to work out just where those two divisions were.

Division One started in the southwest corner. The first street was Park Lane. Before Mitchell’s Directory of 1864 was compiled it had been renamed University Street, the eastern side of today’s University Avenue. There were no private addresses on Queen Street West, so the division must have been the two-block wide area that extends north from Osgoode Hall. The most northern street mentioned on the schedules was Edward Street.

Division Two lacked street descriptions, except for one or two places where an inhabitant had actually written down his address. From these and since there was no reference to Elizabeth Street in Division One, I came to the conclusion that this area must have had Elizabeth Street as its backbone.

Division Three continued from Terauley (present-day Bay Street) to Yonge, starting at Queen and going north to Agnes (Dundas)—the area covered by the Eaton Centre today.

I thought I was halfway through as I reached the end of Division Three, but it wasn’t followed by Four, but by Division 3-1/2 with about 200 schedules in it! It turned out to go straight across the ward from Yonge to Park Lane covering the area north of Agnes up to Elm Street. It must have been set up at the last minute, perhaps because the enumerators rebelled at the size of their territory. Perhaps the original plan was for the first three divisons to have their northern boundaries at Elm Street.

Division Four was the second unnamed section which had to be identified by a process of elimination.

Division Five was located north of Gerrard and south of College and included Yonge and Terauley addresses, but nothing further west. After identifying this area it was quite easy to establish that Division Four was west of it, streching from Terauley to Park Lane and Elm to College.

Division Six was the area north of College Street (then known as College Avenue) containing only 85 houses. I found a map with the western boundary north of College denoted as Surrey Place, a street stretching from College to Bloor. I don’t think this street was ever laid out to its full length. Today it is two blocks long and is just west of Women’s College Hospital. Wellesley Street west of Yonge was only a lane. North of Wellesley, St Michael’s College was still a seminary with no entries in the Ward enumeration. It will probably be found within the file “institutions”. Victoria College had not yet arrived in Toronto from "the old Ontario Strand".

St John’s Ward--Chapter One

2009-05-24T04:25:00.003-04:00

The first ward I tackled west of Yonge Street was St John’s Ward. St John’s was a large ward of working people, many of whom were either self-employed or worked on short-time contracts. There were workshops rather than large factories, and grocery and provision stores rather than wholesale grocers and provision merchants. Although the commonest occupation was still “labourer”, these were almost outnumbered by carpenters and cabinetmakers. Somewhere north of Osgoode Hall on the west of the ward was at least one stone and marble cutting yard. Hotels and taverns were very few, even on Yonge Street. There was no identifiable market.

The ward was quite densely populated as far north as College Street. From there to Bloor there were only 85 houses with schedules in the census. Yonge Street was well built up, but population was more sparse to the west. St Michael’s seminary covered a substantial area in what was then Clover Hill, and is now north of Wellesley and west of Bay.

There were less Irish people in St John’s compared to the numbers I found east of Yonge. What it did have was a large new immigrant community. Quite a number of families had answered the question of ethnicity with a “C” for coloured. International events had made their way into Toronto. The Civil War had begun in the United States, and a goodly number of slaves who escaped through the underground railway during the 1850s established themselves in St John’s Ward. Virginia and Maryland were very common birthplaces. There were at least two churches that catered to the black community.

I will be jumping around the wards in these descriptive posts. The wards have all been analysed, comparing the ages, birthplaces and religious persuasions of the inhabitants. I am working on an occupations comparison, but coding it is slow. The transcription of St George's Ward is complete and I am waiting for the St Andrew's films to arrive.

St Lawrence’s Ward—Chapter One

2009-04-20T11:02:00.002-04:00

St Lawrence’s was one of the wards I transcribed before I got the idea of photographing the schedules. It is the ward where I would most like to go back, film the returns and re-assess many of them. Although short, it was not an easy ward to tackle, and an upcoming trip to Toronto meant I was in a hurry and probably did not give the transciption the time it deserved.

The ward included the eastern waterfront and stretched from Yonge Street to the Don River, going north as far as King Street. It contained St Lawrence Market and many businesses catering for market activity: hotels, restaurants, stables, etc. The courthouse and the Corporation of Toronto offices were also here. It was the location of many lawyers’ chambers. King Street was also the commercial hub of the city and contained many dry goods stores and boot and shoemakers. Surprisingly, there were also a number of photographers’ studios.

To the east of the market Palace Street was a mixture of small shops and dwellings with a cluster of hotels and boarding houses. East again and we find Gooderham’s Distillery, a railway area centering around Don Station, and the Toronto Rolling Mills where steel plate was made. Along the shore of the Bay were a number of commercial wharves. Although the census was taken in January, some people were living right on the wharves. It must have been very cold, uncomfortable and unhealthy.

Because of the nature of the ward, the census included numerous schedules giving the title of the business or the owner’s name, very few personal details, and the words “Personal Census Taken at Residence”. Some of these would, in addition, list young men living at their employer’s place of business. I wasn’t prepared for this presentation and taking notes around it took more time than I would have expected. Recently, in doing St George’s, a ward with many similarities to St Lawrence’s, I have adopted the initials PCAR into my initial transcription of the business owner’s line.

One of the enumerators must have suggested that everyone fill in their forms in pencil. He then wrote over the pencil with a very broad penknib, editing bits he though unnecessary as he went. So much for householders’ individual responses in that area!

Street names were seldom omitted in St Lawrence’s Ward. With the great variety of types of premises, it was just as well.

A Momento of St George's Ward

2009-04-19T03:30:00.005-04:00

Last week I was able to take this photograph during my progress along Front St West.

We know John Toronto better by the name Bishop Strachan. At the time of the census he was 83. He had been a bulwark of religious and political life in Toronto since his arrival there in 1812. Many of his contemporaries respected him, many disliked him, but he was one of the most prominent men of his time in Toronto.

For an online biography, see The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (http://www.biographi.ca/index-e.html?PHPSESSID=b983dmdth512rlcaa2gc073bb4)

St David’s Ward—Chapter Three

2009-04-07T17:18:00.004-04:00

Having strayed more into the realms of geography for the past two blogs, I am now going to try and get back to a topic more closely related to genealogy. Where did the people of St David’s Ward come from?

When transcribing, most of the birthplaces were entered as found, though I tended to use a uniform abbreviation for Upper Canada or Canada West. If someone was specific down to the town or county of Ireland or England, I put it in—so long as I could read it. For the purposes of this analysis, however, I separated the birthplaces into 23 categories spreading out from Toronto, first to the rest of the North American continent, then to the British Isles, and then to the remainder of the world.

Within the province of Canada West there were four categories: Toronto, elsewhere in York County, Canada West outside York County, and simply, Canada West. The volume of “Canada West” and “Upper Canada” responses lead me to assume that this category was the one that enumerators were expected to advise to householders, and the one they would use if they had to fill in the forms themselves.

The birthplace claimed by the greatest number of people was Ireland with 31.9 percent of the total. The next place was Canada West with 26.9 percent. When Toronto and the two intervening categories were added to it, the proportion bumped up to 35 percent, quite a bit more than Ireland. Needless to say, the locally born were the younger section of the population and St David’s had 40 percent under age 16. When the ages of the population are presented against their birthplaces, the Irish markedly outweigh the locally born from age 16 upward. The census took place less than 15 years after the potato famine. It shows.

There is no distinction made between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic either in the census or in my analysis. The border that exists today was not put in place until the 1920s.

The third most commonly given birthplace was England with 13.6 percent of the total. “Canada” came in next at 6.8 percent. In fourth position was Scotland with 5 percent and the United States was fifth with 2.3 percent.

We must remember that at the time Canada only comprised what we know as Ontario and Quebec. The maritime provinces were still separate entities. It is possible that some enumerators suggested Canada instead of Canada West. In Divisions 5 and 6 there were many more people born in “Canada” than in “Canada West”, although the number born in Canada East (or Lower Canada) did not drop significantly in those two divisions.

Although the first Toronto General Hospital was built on Gerrard St East between Sackville and Sumach and opened in 1856, there is nothing to indicate its presence in the census. The staff and patients are probably to be found in a separate section titled “Institutions” which I have yet to see. The inmates of the Don Jail are probably there as well.

If you want to see what St David’s Ward looked like, I suggest you spend a while browsing through the old photographs in the Toronto Public Libraries collection online. The link is http://historicity.torontopubliclibrary.ca/ where it is best to put “Cabbagetown, pictures” or “Regent Park, pictures” into the keywords box. If you live in Toronto there is another collection, analysed street by street, at City of Toronto Archives just north of the Dupont subway station at 255 Spadina Road.

Off Topic

2009-04-06T06:40:00.003-04:00

Today is April 6th and it would be appropriate for me to celebrate the birthday of my great-grandfather's eldest brother, Newyear.

Newyear? Yes, Newyear. I didn't know anything about him until I had been investigating my family history for ten years or so. He was born somewhere in the United States in 1832. By 1839 the family was living in Kingston, Ontario, and a year or two later moved to a farm in what is now Scugog Township, Durham Region. He married in the 1850s and established his own farm in Bruce County. He had several daughters and one son.

Why Newyear? Well, April 6th is the first day of the year in the old Julian calendar that was used until the 1750s in England. It is still the first day of the financial year in England. Newyear's parents were both English, one or both of them must have recognized the significance of the day. I would like to think that the historian was my ggg grandmother, Martha.

Martha is a mystery to me. She and her husband George both gave England as their birthplace on Canadian censuses. Like her husband she must have emigrated to the States. Somewhere they met and started their family. But that's all I know. Even her maiden name is a mystery. She died as "relict of George". Frustrating.

St David’s Ward—Chapter Two

2009-04-05T02:19:00.003-04:00

My last blog was a brief description of the ward from a geographical point of view. In this one I want to tell you some things about the people who lived there.
The total population, according to the census, was 7846—of which 3804 were male and 4042 were female. Both sexes were pretty evenly matched in numbers throughout the age range but, between the ages of 16 and 35 there were definitely more females. In the days before many girls had an occupation, they stayed home, while their brothers were in a better position to wander and establish themselves elsewhere. Children under 15 accounted for just over 40 percent of the population. Only 250 people (3 percent of the total) were over 60 and another 5.3 percent were in their 50s. Those who did not give their age or whose ages, for some reason or other, were unreadable amounted to 122 or 1.6 percent. That left 1816 males and 2142 females between the ages of 16 and 50 (47.7 and 53.0 percent respectively).
The population breakdown between the divisions was as follows:
Division One (King St East to Duchess Street, Nelson Street to Caroline Street) 953 people
Division Two (King St East to Queen, Caroline Street to Parliament Street) 1434
Division Three (Duchess & Queen St East to Caroline St, Jarvis St to Parliament St) 2423
Division Four (King St East to Beech St , Parliament St to the Don River) 1881
Division Five (Carlton St to Bloor St East, Jarvis St to Parliament St) 413
Division Six (Beech St north to Bloor St, Parliament St to the Don River) 778
Three of the four streets bounding Division One have had their names changed since the 1860s. Duchess Street is now the eastern part of Richmond St East, Nelson Street is Jarvis Street below Queen, and Caroline Street is now the southern part of Sherbourne Street. In terms of physical area, it was the smallest of the divisions, but probably the most densely populated. On King Street there were many families living “over the shop”.
Division Two extended east from Division One and also added another block north so that it reached Queen. It was still quite densely populated and contained many small shops.
Division Three was much larger in area than Divisions One and Two. Jarvis Street was the home of many merchants and barristers. George Street, which parallels Jarvis, was more likely to contain the homes of workers.
Division Four extended east from Division Two and the two divisions were quite similar, although the density of population continued to ease the more one moved from the centre of the city. On the streets adjacent to the Don River were a number of butchers. This was probably an area where cattle could be kept for a short time immediately before being herded down to St Lawrence Market.
Divisions Five and Six could be considered the “suburbia” of the time. Only a few years before the area was called “The Liberties” and was not exactly part of the city. People were just moving into this area. Division Five was a continuation of Division Three with many merchants, bankers, and a small academic community stretching out from the Normal School and the Medical College situated east of Jarvis. Division Six included not only St James’s Cemetery, but Lamb’s Blacking Factory—the glueworks which formed the location of one of the episodes of Murdoch’s Mysteries.

St David’s Ward—Chapter One

2009-04-04T14:42:00.003-04:00

St David’s was the first city ward I attempted to transcribe. Although I had done a lot of transcribing before, including both the 1851 and 1861 censuses for York Township, tackling a census form which individual families had filled in was definitely a new process. Reading writing styles which changed from page to page was one challenge, understanding how different people interpreted the instructions was another.

St David’s stretched from Jarvis Street east to the River Don and from King Street East to Bloor, or “the Second Concession”. The southern part of the ward was densely populated but the number of houses in the quarter east of Ontario Street and north of Queen was definitely less. North of Gerrard Street there were even less people. It is hard to imagine this area as thinly populated as it was in the early 1860s. Today we know much of it as Regents Park, where two or three large schemes of urban renewal have taken place during the 20th century to improve the quality of residential accommodation left from earlier times.

The street names were not methodically added to the forms by the enumerators, and this has made it difficult to establish the boundaries of the six divisions into which the ward had been divided. It has also been very difficult to identify families in the Caverhill (1859) and Mitchell (1863) Directories because so many people moved so much during those 4 or 5 years.

Most people had many fewer possessions than we do. It was simpler to rent a house than buy one; leases may have been unknown and a mortgage was probably out of the question for most families. Moving house was probably a much simpler proposition for them than it is for us.

Recently I decided for the nth time to see if I could figure out where all the streets were where the enumerator had not put them on the individual schedules. I had tried to do this before, but usually hit upon an operation that took so long that I never found the answer. This time I took my Access database and made a query asking for a list of the number of households on each street within each Division. I transferred the list to a spreadsheet and sorted the list by division and then by street. What do you know--most of the households without an address were in Division 3, something I hadn’t realized before.

I made a copy of a map that I had scanned from Toronto in the 1850s and, using a free image-enhancing software package called Paint.net, I outlined the five divisions for which I had streets. Presto! Division 3 was the empty space. And what an important one. The western boundary was Jarvis Street, the eastern one Parliament, the south Queen East and the north, Gerrard—the territory many families were moving into as they found their circumstances becoming more comfortable.

This is only the beginning of the story of St David's Ward. Chapters Two and Three are on their way.

A Walk along King Street

2009-03-27T15:02:00.003-04:00

I now have two days' worth of St George's Ward under my belt. I was expecting dullness but, as ever, it isn't. With 100 of 489 schedules complete, this is what I have discovered.

The first three schedules were for Rossin House, a very large hotel for the time--five stories high, located on the southeast corner of King St West and York Streets. It burned down two or three years later. At the time of the census, there were just about exactly 100 residents including the Rossin family (two German brothers with wives and children), people newly arrived in Toronto including a university professor, salesmen and commercial travellers from elsewhere, and a big staff whose families were probably located elsewhere in the city.
The enumerator progressed from Rossin House eastward along King Street and then down to Melinda and Wellington West.

Many buildings were businesses with no one on the premises overnight. Some are listed as "vacant", others give the name of the proprietor and the phrase "Personal Census at Residence" which I have shortened to PCAR. I wish I had used the same term when doing St Lawrence's Ward. Amongst the PCARs was The Globe printing works with the schedule signed by George Brown himself. Capital invested in the business was $250,000--more than the $200,000 claimed by the furniture makers Jacques and Hay.

The largest family was that of Charles Rogers, a carver from Glasgow, Scotland. There were 11 children ranging in age from 24 to 2. He and his wife were in their 40s. In fact, his wife's age was written as a very small "40". That would have made her 16 when the first one was born--was she being truthful? The children were evenly spread every two to three years, so they were probably all of the same union. I couldn't help but compare the family with that of my Scottish great-great grandparents who were less than a decade older, and had a total of 13 children. They had already lost four by 1861 and were to lose another 3 in the next twelve years. I hope all the Rogers children made it to adulthood; their descendants could have splendid family reunions.

St George's--Here I Come

2009-03-24T07:17:00.001-04:00

I thought a blog was going to be in order when I finished transcribing St John's two weeks ago, but I wanted to get on with the finishing touches, so I put off the "literary" exercise. This morning I completed comparing the three eastern wards with the contents of two city directories of the same time period, and again thought it was time I wrote a blog.

Then, half an hour ago, while I was taking a break and doing the ironing, the organizer of our local FHC phoned to say that the film of St George's Ward is in, so it's back to work again as soon as my camera battery charges up.

St John's Ward had a population of over 8000. I thought it would be more, but that was the number at the bottom of the spreadsheet. It covers 3 microfilms and by some error I managed to transcribe the first and the last, and then had to order the second separately. So, originally I assumed there were 6 divisions, but it has turned out to have 7. There must have been an error in estimating the size of the first four because Division 3-1/2 has been invented. Now why could the census organizers not have called it 7? Because it is not north of Division 6? But it is not really adjacent to Division 3 either. Go figure.

St George's is the ward along the Bay and north to King Street, west of Yonge Street. It is the smallest of the wards in terms of population. There will probably be a lot of businesses with and without people staying in them over a Sunday night. Ooh, wouldn't we have hated to do that in January in 1861! Not like staying in The Harbourfront Condo!

The unknown ones

2009-03-12T08:36:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately not everyone recorded in Toronto’s census of 1861 will be present in my transcription. I have named them my Invisible People.

Every once in a while I come across a census form which might as well be a blank. Usually this is because of the technology of camera and film in the 1950s when the microfilms were prepared.

We have become very used to the principles of digital cameras. We can point and shoot and then immediately inspect the photograph. We have forgotten the routine of only 10 or 15 years ago when we snapped 12, 24 or 36 pictures and then took the reel to the drugstore and waited an hour or a day or a week for film to be transformed into photographs. We collected them and immediately began to wish we hadn’t taken some of them. We hadn’t noticed the movement or the potential over- or under-exposure.

The same thing happened at Library and Archives Canada when they decided to condense an archive by putting the 19th century censuses on microfilm. The old census pages were clamped on a flat surface and the pictures taken from a camera perched overhead, probably fixed in a small gantry. In each of Toronto’s wards over 2000 photographs (two for each form) were required. Some people wrote in pencil, some wrote with thick pen nibs, some changed their minds and scratched out their original answers, some had their answers changed for them by enumerators. If a householder decided to give their family’s names as surname and initial, the enumerator went back and asked for clarification. The given names ended up in the margin where they often ended up under the clamp holding the fraying paper edges in place.

A basic exposure setting was needed. It could not be easily altered to cope with the differences in the individual pages. The film crew could only foresee a few of these problems as they took the pictures. And, after the images making up the film were processed, it really wasn’t worth going back for an extra shot here and an extra shot there. It would have taken the patience of Job to match up the poor quality images with the originals and retake them and then interleave them into the right places. Ever wondered why it costs Hollywood more than a million dollars to make a movie? Careful editing was definitely not a job to consider doing in a minor government department!

Hence the quality of the images on the microfilm I have looked at. The choice of focus must have leaned toward darker images. Did they have an exposure meter? Would it have worked given with so few shades of grey? I am not a professional photographer and I don’t know the answer to these questions. All I know is that when a census schedule written in pencil was overwritten in places by an enumerator, the corrections appear on the film but the original names do not. And the names, over to the left hand side of the form, are less likely to show up than the ages and genders closer to the centre.

If anyone reading this participated in the census microfilming way back in the 1950s I would love to know how close my theorizing comes to the actual process.

Transcribing: the First Rule

2009-03-07T13:40:00.003-05:00

The more I transcribe, the more I think about the basic rule of transcribing: write down what you see. But then are so many cases where I want to accept that rule with a fair pinch of salt.
I wonder if I should really differentiate between the various ways of describing a religious denomination or the various abbreviations for a birthplace. In 1861 Ontario was officially Canada West. It had had that name since 1848. But almost every well-established household with children aged under twelve reports them as having been born in Upper Canada (or U Canada, or U Can or U C)--the name of the province prior to 1848.

Should I just scribble down UC in every case, or is it absolutely necessary to answer following the householder’s whim? Should I differetiate between Upper Canada and Canada West? Should I decide that the responses should be converted into a series of multiple choices? These are questions that go through the head and keep the boredom away. Certainly, if a householder specifies a town in Britain or Canada or a specific state of Germany or the United States, that is put down in the transcription. I know it may be gold dust to a future family historian.

There is another way in which I have probably personalized my transcription. You may notice it in the paragraph above. I don’t use periods in abbreviations. My first job in the UK was with a book publisher, and my colleagues soon told me that adding periods (“full stops” over here) was very old hat and American and “didn’t follow British Standards”. Britain may not have a constitution but it does have rules for how to print abbreviations. Forty years after leaving that job I have never gone back to using full stops except at the end of a sentence. It doesn’t half save typing time!

I just came across a schedule where I can’t be sure of the names, so I thought I would copy the ages and the sexes first to give me some clues. It turns out to be one of those families where males are listed first, so the ages go 37, 2, 36, 19 (perhaps 13), and 11. But the marital status column reads m, m, s, s, s. What should the honest transcriber do here? What this one does is provide a column for Notes. My Notes column is very full.

Filling in the Form

2009-02-22T14:06:00.002-05:00

Our ancestors understood what a census was much more than they understood how to fill in a census form.

When it came to the statistical columns they were prone to give totals rather than a tick for each individual member. Most of them gave the names of the household, usually—but not always--starting with the family arranged in descending order of age from the head. The family was followed by other household members: possibly aged parents, the wife’s sister, lodgers, live-in employees and/or servants. Relationships were not requested, but can often be assumed. For each “inmate”, as the census form described them, the occupation, birthplace, religion and age was listed. Quite often the only occupation given was that of the head of the household; servants, particularly young ones, were seldom indicated as such.

The fun begins with the columns headed Male and Female. Suddenly the head of the house tires of all this writing and tells us there were, say, 5 males and 4 females. Not very helpful when he had used initials in place of names when listing the family in the first place. Who is to know whether the family included John and Mary, or Matthew and Jane? Sometimes the male and female columns for school attendance can narrow down the problem, but that depended on the age of the family.

The column titled Married or Single also caused problems. Answers were quite often omitted, perhaps because the title was set sideways on on the form, and not easily readable by those with little education. It was also confusing to them whether they should answer with ‘m’ or ‘s’ or with a tick for married. Two further columns for Widowers and Widows were more likely to be filled in where necessary, particularly if it was the head of the household so described.

The next set of columns dealt with Family Members and Non Family Members. This was a difficult concept for many. Many a lodger or servant was included as a family member. In St Lawrence’s Ward no one was considered non-family, in St John’s they were much more selective. Another peculiarity to be blamed on the individual enumerator?

Back to Work

2009-02-05T04:29:00.005-05:00

Just in case you are all thinking that I have lost interest in the blog, that’s not the case. The fact is that the film I was waiting for arrived at the FHC in mid January and I can once again spend the better part of two days a week taking pictures from the microfilm screen. Well, that was so until this week—we’ve been snowed in!

It’s not just a centimetre of the white stuff, but two falls of about 3 inches each. The first snow was Sunday night, after weather warnings throughout the weekend. Transportation came to a standstill, even in London. Schools were closed and many remained shut on Tuesday, much to the objection of hardier mortals. Such are the difficulties of occasional snow.

I live in a village in, maybe I should say on, the Chiltern Hills northwest of London and the Family History Centre is 8 miles away at the bottom of a very steep incline. The organizer lives close to the top of another hill. I usually give her a lift as otherwise she has to take a trip into town by bus, then change buses for a further ride in another direction. Monday evening I rang to tell her my taxi service wasn’t running on Tuesday. She wasn’t disappointed. No matter how much I want to add to my “picture collection”, I wasn’t going to risk the dangers of icy 10% slopes.

This morning we have awakened to another fall of snow. The family cars have turned into large whte blobs. It is awfully quiet on our side street. This time the snow is wet, clinging to every branch—high quality snowballing snow. Again, I have said “No way” to the car journey.

The weather has not kept me away from the computer and data organizing. The transcription is up-to-date. Three of the six divisions of St John’s Ward are complete and two more part done. That may sound odd, but, by mistake, I ordered the first and third reels first and am now working on the middle and largest one.

I have also been progressing on the operation of comparing the three already transcribed wards with the city directories of the time. Yesterday I completed the initial “T” in both directories. Another week and I will have finished a project that last summer I thought would take years. I am also working on some maps which I hope to be sharing with you shortly. It all depends on whether Google can help me out.

Care to Join Me in Transcribing?

2009-01-24T05:56:00.007-05:00

Last evening Rootsweb’s ONTARIO and UPPER CANADA mailing lists both carried a message from Bill Martin to say that the FamilySearch website has just added the Ontario 1861 census to its indexing projects. I have been following the public announcements made in the past few months by the LAC, Ancestry and LDS FamilySearch, so I knew this was going to happen. I’ve got competition!

When the 1916 Census of the prairie provinces was available in November I transcribed half a dozen pages, so I resurrected my username and password and found the new project. It took a bit of trying—not all the introductory webpages have been updated to include it.

The LDS doesn’t allow its volunteers to choose where in the province they want to index. You get what you get. I found myself in Brantford. It was a beautifully clean background and the enumerator’s handwriting was extremely easy to read. Compared to the microfilm of the same census which I’ve been using, this page was a dream. Have they found some new photographic technology? Or have they just put out the best pages first?

My major complaint is that fifty lines on a page with no horizontal lines to follow make it very difficult to keep on the right track. There is no “blue blob”, reminiscent of the old sing-along bouncing ball, to guide one through this index the way there has been in others. But, maybe in their rush to put this index online, they forgot to add the gadget.

I wish that they had reduced the column width on the reply sheet for columns requesting one or two digit or letter answers. At the moment the person’s name and the person’s age do not appear on the screen at the same time.

I also wonder about their choice of columns. They have omitted the second column on the census, the Occupation. Not only is it a very useful item about an individual, but I have always found it to be a handy way to indicate the start of a household. It helped to draw that imaginary line across the page to keep one on track. It may still be there on the original, but it is not there on one’s transcription, so you don’t have a matching guide. “Relationship” was not a question on the 1861 census.

The last three columns requested are entitiled Marital Status, Widower and Widow. I have never been able to figure out why the last two of these three were included in the original census, but why bother with them on a transcription? If we have the wit to write down “m” if the Male column has a tick in it, and “f” if the Female Column has a tick in it, why can’t we use just one column to answer Marital Status with “m”, “s” or “w”? In devoting so much space to Marital Status they are forced to omit the following question on family membership.

There is great stress on the transcriber’s rule of “write down only what you see” . Guidance states that you mustn’t put anything but names in the Given Names column. In the page I did last night that meant that five ladies referred to as “Mrs” had to have the title replaced by a blank space and two named Widow so-and-so in the same household ended up with the same fate. “Mrs” was so commonly used for a married woman in the 1860s that I think some of them must have had trouble remembering what their actual given name was.

What bothers me most on that page is the family JOMES. Will they be lost to their descendants forever because the enumerator turned an “a” into an “o”, or because he turned an “n” into an "m"?

If you are interested in joining the project yourself, here's the link: http://www.familysearchindexing.org/en/home/home.jsf .

What was an urban Canadian census of 1861 like?

2009-01-18T11:48:00.003-05:00

In 1861 the Canadian government decided that people who lived in “large” cities like Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Quebec and Montreal could fill in their own census forms. As a result, the arrangement of data varies from that used in smaller towns and rural areas. On microfilm, one form or “schedule” or “folio” covers one household and includes four pages to be filled in, mostly with the same type of information as used in the 50-people-per-page forms used elsewhere, but questions on agricultural output were replaced with questions on industrial enterprises and a description and value of the dwelling.

The designers of the census did not realize the limits of literacy within the urban population, much less the patience of the enumerators who had to transmit the information back to headquarters. Do-it-yourself census forms were not attempted again until some time well into the 20th century.

The urban form was designed with the numbers 1 to 20 down the left margin, but no horizontal lines to guide the writing across the page. This sometimes lead to ages, sexes and marital status inadvertently being omitted for one or more individuals.

Quite often the householders thought that only their surname was necessary, until the enumerator came along and told them they must put their given names in, too. As a result many forms are found with given names in the margin, often in a different hand.

The enumerators were expected to give each form a number. Unfortunately some omitted numbers or duplicated them. Headquarters must have failed to explain to them how two or more apartments or flats in one dwelling should be interpreted. Each form was supposed to have the name and side of the street written in the margin, but some enumerators omitted this instruction intermittently or altogether, and others placed it in the margin beyond the area photographed in the microfilm.

The difficulty in reading individual census forms varied widely. Some people of limited education tried very hard to do what was required of them, others depended on the enumerator writing what they reported. Detail on these latter forms was minimal.

Many with occupations that you would expect would be held by more knowledgeable members of the population misinterpreted the forms—they gave ages for each of the children and then summarized the size of the family as “3 males and 4 females” rather than giving the sex of each child.

The head of household might also decided to maintain his family’s privacy by using initials instead of full given names for each member. This left the statisticians at headquarters and the today’s transcriber with the potential for very inaccurate data.

Other problems were caused by poor penmanship, writing in pencil, writing sideways, covering vital information (like ages) with a blot, or entering a birthplace and/or a religious persuasion solely for the head of the household.

I understand that the 1911 UK Census, just available online, also allowed householders to fill in their own forms. I haven't seen it yet, but it will be interesting to assess how satisfactory the process was 50 years later.

Toronto 1860-1960, a very brief description

2009-01-10T09:50:00.003-05:00

Over its history, like all big cities, Toronto has grown in geographical area as well as in population. In 1861 its northern boundary was Bloor Street. From east to west it stretched from the Don River to “the Garrison” on the eastern side of the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds of today. It was divided into seven wards, all named after saints. As the city grew between 1861 and 1891 more saints’ names were added. Around 1890 it was decided to redesign the wards and number them numerically. The nine wards established then remained until the establishment of the Greater Toronto Authority in the 1990s.
The large townships of Etobicoke and Scarborough did not have any governmental link with Toronto until the 1950s when Metropolitan Toronto was established.
York Township in 1860 included all the land in between Etobicoke and Scarborough which was north of Bloor Street and south of Steeles Avenue. York Township was eventually separated into the townships of East York, North York, and West York, and parts of these townships were incorporated into the City of Toronto or Metropolitan Toronto at various times between 1860 and 1960.
The seven Toronto wards of 1861, with their boundaries, were as follows:
St George’s: the land west of Yonge Street stretching to the Garrison, and from the Bay shore north to King Street West.
St Lawrence’s: the land east of Yonge Street stretching to the Don River, and from the Bay shore north to King Street East.
St Andrew’s: the land west of Yonge Street stretching to a line north of the Garrison, and from King Street West to Queen Street West.
St James’s: the land east of Yonge street to Nelson and Jarvis Streets, with its southern boundary King St East and its northern boundary Bloor Street East (still known as the Second Concession Road through the 1850s).
St David’s: the ward east of St James’s and north of St Lawrence’s with its eastern and northern boundaries the Don River and Bloor St East, respecively.
St John’s: the land west of Yonge Street to what is now University Avenue, and north from Queen Street West to Bloor Street West. In 1861 the name of St John’s western boundary was just on the point of changing, and in the census it is found by its former name: Park Lane.
St Patrick’s: the land within the city north of Queen Street West and west of University or, as it was then known, College Avenue. College Avenue and Park Lane were parallel and very close together. There were no houses in between. Today they are the west and east sides of the boulevard which is University Avenue. The western boundary of St Patrick’s was Dufferin Street, but the greater part of the population lived east of Hope Street (Manning Avenue).

Toronto’s Early History

2009-01-08T10:03:00.005-05:00

Toronto was established as The Town of York in 1793 by Lt Gov John Graves Simcoe. His engineers and surveyors planned out the central section in the grid pattern that still exists today. With its natural harbour and a rural community beyond requiring imported goods to establish farms, it grew steadily. In 1834 it was established as a city and renamed Toronto. At that point it had a population of about 9000.
By the 1850s, the population had expanded to more than 30,000. The railway was completed from Montreal to Niagara within that decade. The railway infrastructure to the north and the west continued for the next two decades. Toronto was also the seat of government for Canada West, the western province of the United Province of Canada, established in 1841. In 1867, with Confereration, Canada West became Ontario.
Up until 1861, we must depend on history books and privately published local directories for any details of Toronto’s citizens. These are occasionally supplemented by church records and gravestones which have survived, but in the case of ordinary citizens we can only obtain information through assessment rolls (reference 1) and marriage records (reference 2).
The original population of Toronto was comprised of people newly arrived either from Great Britain or loyalists previously resident in the United States. Parts of continental Europe were also represented. In the 1850s the population expanded with a great influx of Irish people who could no longer sustain themselves in their own country after the potato famine of the mid-1840s. In 1861 27 per cent of the population claimed their birthplace to be Ireland.
The census of January 1861 was the first official government census of the city of Toronto which still exists today. The Canadian census of 1851 included Toronto, but somewhere along the line, the data was lost, as it was for many other places that were covered by that census.
This is a list of books from my own bookshelf. Included are some histories of Toronto of this period and lists of individuals, usually only heads of households, living in Toronto in various years.

Toronto in the 1850s: A transcription of the 1853 tax assessment rolls and guide to family history research by Paul J McGrath and Jane E MacNamara, published by the Ontario Genealogy Society, Toronto Branch, 2005
The Marriage Registers of Upper Canada/Canada West, Home District, Volume 11, Parts 1 to 4 compiled by Dan Walker, Ruth Burkholder & Fawne Stratford-Devai published by Global Heritage Press, 1963
Inhabitants of Toronto, Ontario 1850 compiled by Norman Crowder from the Toronto portion of Rowsell’s City of Toronto and County of York directory for 1850-51, published by Henry Rowsell in 1850; and published by the Ontario Genealogy Society, Toronto Branch, 1993. A second volume is entitled Inhabitants of York County, Ontario 1850.
Researching Yonge Street edited by Sheila Jean Brown, published by the Ontario Genealogy Society, Toronto Branch, 1996
A Mill Should be Built Thereon, an early history of Todmorden Mills by Eleanor Darke and published by Natural History/Natural Heritage Inc, 1995

About Me

2009-01-05T05:03:00.001-05:00

I was born in Toronto and grew up there, attending schools and the local University of Toronto. But in my mid-twenties I left for England, married, settled down, raised a family, and eventually retired. I discovered family history around 1980 and have traced most of my own lines back to at least 1800. One line was living in the vicinity of Toronto even at that early date and another arrived around 1840. These two lines moved into Toronto itself in the 1890s and merged (married) in 1901. The other side of the family arrived from Scotland in late 1903.
My parents lived in Toronto all their lives and had a broad knowledge of the city—living, as one or the other of them did at different times, on the Island, in the “pan-handle” north of Lawrence but still in the city, near Broadview and Danforth, out near the Beaches, on Borden Street, ending up in a condo on the banks of the Humber, their one home outside Toronto proper. Even in her last years after she stopped driving at age 88, Mom could navigate anyone around any part of the city.
I joined a local family history society here in the UK in the early 80s and around the same time we bought our first computer. The two came together when the society decided to transcribe the local census. When the LDS decided to transcrbe the British census of 1881, I did quite a bit of work in my local county of Buckinghamshire and also in Scotland. My three times great grandfather had been census registrar in Rothesay on Bute in 1881. I had the privilege of transcribing out what he had put in.
Once on the internet with what we call a broadband connection and what North Americans call high-speed internet, I started investigating the online resources for Ontario, particularly the area around Toronto. I discovered Ontario GenWeb’s census project and its transcriptions of the 1851 and 1861 censuses of Markham, Vaughan and King townships. It wasn’t just viewing my great-great grandfather’s family in Markham Township that made it interesting, it was looking at all the families. I started to match those which I could find in both 1851 and 1861 censuses. I also found lists of marriages and tied those in too.
I knew we had a local Latter Day Saints Church with a Family History Centre where I could borrow microfilms and inspect them. It appeared that no one had ever attempted to transcribe the York Township census for 1851. Why not try it? So I did. In this case my original transcription was made on pre-designed forms and handwritten in pencil, leaning on a clipboard. The population in that year was just over 10,000.
The process turned out to be not the least bit boring. It was really great fun, especially when I was able to figure out where I was in relation to streets of today. There weren’t any clues to this other than there were two divisions—east and west of Yonge Street. All I could depend on was surnames that linked with later street names, a comment about the building of the original Woodbine racetrack, and railway construction sites. The eastern division stretched from Yonge to Victoria Park and mostly from Steeles Ave down to Bloor St, but east of the Don River, this extended to the lake front. The western division stretched from Yonge to the Humber River and from Steeles to Bloor St West. The accompanying agricultural census listed locations by landowners, and many were not residents.
The following year I transcribed the 1861 York Township census. The population had expanded to 11,500. Locating people was easier this time. There were now seven divisions—three pretty rural ones on each side of Yonge Street and Yorkville, a much more urban village on the edge of Toronto immediately north of Bloor Street. The 1861 agricultural census was more useful, and I did thank the enumerator of Divison Three who made it his business to trace the home address of every servant working in households in his patch.
Where are these transcriptions? Tucked away in my computer, waiting on someone to come along and offer to proofread. Now that the 1851 census is online, it has been transcribed again and is to be found on two different websites, but we must now wait for Ancestry to work through its recent acquisitions from Library and Archives Canada before the 1861 comes online.

Transcribing the 1861 Census of Toronto

2009-01-04T09:15:00.002-05:00

This is not a New Year’s Resolution, but a New Year Decision: it’s time to build a blog!

Since 2005 I have been transcribing the 1861 census of Toronto. So far I have completed the three wards on the east side of Yonge Street (about 25,000 people) and I am currently working on the ward with the largest population west of Yonge Street—St John’s Ward.

When I started I worked with a hand-held computer (or personal digital assistant) which held a copy of Excel. I borrow the microfilms through the Church of the Latter Day Saints and view them at my local Family History Centre. After a day’s transcribing I would come home and upload my files to my desktop computer and add a few additional columns of data which are useful at later stages of the analysis. It was a slow job—on a good day I would complete 25 folios or households. Nevertheless, two wards were completed that way.

In summer 2007 I decided to see whether my digital camera could take pictures off the microfilm reader screen. Once I got a tripod the results were good enough that I switched over to taking pictures at the FHC and transcribing the details from my photos to my spreadsheet at home. I continued to write down the data for each head of household on my PDA while at the Centre. This was in case anything went wrong with the pictures and I had to repeat some shots. But my entry speed moved from 25 households to an average of 60, and I finished off the third ward at a speed that felt like a cloud of dust!

The three eastern wards were complete by October 2007. I then moved the data to Access where it was easier to inspect my findings on a household by household basis. I spent the following year building up my database and comparing the families with the people listed in Caverhill’s Directory of Toronto of 1860 and Mitchell’s Directory of Toronto of 1864. This part of my research is still incomplete but I have reached the letter S. I feel a lot more ahead than when I had only completed up to L.

Since I am not one to take pictures day in and day out, my camera took “a holiday” over several months, and when I brought it out again it had ceased to work. I sent it away for investigation and possible repair. Once I heard the cost of repair I decided that buying another camera was a better option. The second camera is physically smaller than the original but holds a greater number of pixels. This means that I can comfortably lean my hands on the top of the microfilm reader box instead of using a tripod. I use about three shots for each form or schedule. I now consider the pictures I am taking part of my archive, whereas when I first started, they were just a means to an end. Production speed has now moved up to 70 houses per day, but because the FHC is not open as much as it was I am only working two days a week.