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Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief ... they are all recorded in the census, the ultimate in democratic databases. Everyone counts. Hardly surprising then that censuses form Library and Archives Canada's
single most popular collection. They are accessed especially, although far from exclusively, by family historians, LAC's largest identifiable user group.
Long available on microfilm, demand grew to provide the historic census online. Digitization was beyond the resources available in-house if LAC was to fulfil its other mandates. Cooperative projects provided a solution. Now all census returns from 1852 to 1916 have been digitized. All but 1916 are currently available, most on multiple websites.
The largest such arrangement is with Ancestry.ca, the Canadian arm of US-based public company Ancestry.com. They have all the historic censuses, index linked to original images, available by subscription and free at many public libraries and in-house at 395 Wellington.
FamilySearch, an arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was the first to offer a complete online census transcript, for 1881. You can now search names in all censuses from 1851 to 1891 freely available online.
Also free to access, and with links to images of the enumerator's returns, are the indexed censuses for 1901, 1906 for the Prairies, and 1911 at New Brunswick-based Automated Genealogy.
Proving that it's not only genealogists that use the census, the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH), of the Department of Demography at the University of Montréal, has complete 1881 census, and 1852 partial census databases online.
You can link to each of these, and more, through www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/genealogy/022-911.009-e.html
LAC Assistant Deputy Minister Doug Rimmer said that the success achieved through cooperative arrangements in making census data available online has been convincing evidence for the viability of
extending the reach of LAC service in this way for other popular datasets.
By the summer of 2011, shortly after the next census is taken, all digital images and indexes to the historic census returns will be freely available on the Library and Archives Canada website.
John Reid
December 2009
