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.
Friday, 27 March 2009
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
St George's--Here I Come
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!
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!
Thursday, 12 March 2009
The unknown ones
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.
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.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Transcribing: the First Rule
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.
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.
Sunday, 22 February 2009
Filling in the Form
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?
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?
Thursday, 5 February 2009
Back to Work
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.
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Care to Join Me in Transcribing?
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 .
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 .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
