Tollgate Keeper, a Stationary Occupation?

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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?