1931 Census of Canada - Major City Street Indexes

As I keep digging deep into the Seventh Census of Canada, the one started on June 1, 1931, additional resources are starting to appear to make it just a little bit easier for us to find our kin.

On Friday, June 9, 2023, Ancestry published the first public version of their name searchable index for the 1931 Census of Canada. This index was created by Ancestry's Handwriting Recognition software. Of course, as with any transcription, there are challenge with reading the handwriting. So what if you can't find your ancestor using the name index, what else can you do?

I was creating a short presentation on the 1931 Census of Canada and was reviewing my material and all the pages I have stumbled upon over the past month on this topic. That is when I noticed the Library and Archives Canada Collections catalogue page "Census returns for the 1931 census [textual record (microfilm)]" had been updated with all kinds of potentially useful links.

One of them was a reference to Library and Archives Canada Finding aid 31-80 where there are the street indexes which may cover censuses from 1911 to 1941. If a person lived in one of the following cities, then we are in luck: 

• Calgary, Alberta
• Edmonton, Alberta
• Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Hamilton, Ontario
• London, Ontario
• Montreal, Quebec
• Quebec, Quebec
• Saint John, New Brunswick
• Toronto, Ontario
• Vancouver, British Columbia
• Winnipeg, Manitoba

For my great-grandfather, George Kaye Warrener, who ended up with the mangled transcription of "George Heryekaner", it took me about 40 minutes of manual searching for the street address of 28 Collahie in Toronto where he lived to find him on an image. I used Google Maps and the technique I talk about in my post "1931 Census of Canada - Success Stories". I've found that to be not too bad for a place like Toronto.

Ah, but what about using that street index finding aid?

Extract from Library and Archives Canada Finding aid 31-80 for Collahie in Toronto.

In the extract above we see that Collahie in Toronto has four entries:

• 11-128-104
• 21-113-52
• 31-138-53
• 41-163-6

The first set of digits is the census year. So I would want to look at the entry "31-138-53" for the 1931 Census of Canada.

The next set of digits is the district number, 138, followed by the sub-district number, 53.

But the districts listed on the Library and Archives Canada 1931 Census search page and in Ancestry's "1931 Census of Canada" collection only list the district by name. How does one map a district number to a name?

That information is also found in Finding aid 31-80. Those pages have been extracted and are available in PDF form so that we can even download and save the files to our computer:

• Alberta
• British Columbia
• Manitoba
• New Brunswick
• Nova Scotia
• North West Territories
• Ontario
• Prince Edward Island
• Quebec
• Saskatchewan
• Yukon

In looking in the PDF for Ontario I find that district number 138 is the Parkdale district.

Now I can quickly browse the images on Ancestry or LAC for the Province of Ontario, Parkdale district, and select sub-district 53 from the list. Then just skip through the pages until I find Collahie listed as the street address.

Total time using the street address to find George Kaye Warrener using the street index this time? Less than 5 minutes!

Keep in mind that some streets may be found spanning multiple sub-districts or even districts. College street is one such place in Toronto. So you will need to look at multiple locations to find the right range of street numbers. Yet this street index really does make it much easier to find the possible district and sub-district for a street address.

Best of luck in your searches!