Toronto’s Early History

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.

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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.
4. Researching Yonge Street edited by Sheila Jean Brown, published by the Ontario Genealogy Society, Toronto Branch, 1996
5. 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

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

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.