St David’s Ward—Chapter Three

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.

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