1921 Census and Addresses in Ontario

Over the past year I've written about finding the location of a property in Ontario in the 1851, 1861, 1871, 1901, and 1911 Censuses of Canada. I've even written about the "missing" images of the 1861 Census of Canada West on Ancestry. A number of times I've mentioned that the schedules for the 1881 and 1891 Censuses of Canada which have the property details didn't survive to the present day. So this leaves the 1921 Census of Canada to be covered (at least until the 1931 Census of Canada is released to the public). So off we go...

Much like the 1911 Census of Canada, only "Schedule 1, Population" was preserved to be digitized and the other four schedules no longer exist. But like the 1911 Census of Canada, the Population schedule for the 1921 Census of Canada can include specific details of where the household resided.

Before we look at what we might find we need to read what was required to be recorded. The information can be found on the Census of Canada, 1921 landing page at Library and Archives Canada under the Column headings and interpretation section. For column 4, the description says:

Column 4. Place of Abode (Section or Township)
In rural localities, give parish, section, township, range and Meridian.

What do the instructions to the enumerators state? For that we need to read the "Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, Instructions to Commissioners and Enumerators". On page 20 and 21 we find written:

71. Columns 4 and 5. - Place of Abode.  In the case of a city town or incorporated village (see Instructions Nos. 55 and 56) the enumerator will enter the Number of the house and the Street in column 4 and the name of the Ward in column 5. In the case of rural districts, the name of the Township, Lot, Parish or Cadastral number will be entered in column 4 and the name of the Municipality in column 5.

Provided, however, that in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Section, Township, Range and Meridian will be entered respectively in columns 4, 4a, 4b and 4c, adding the name of the Municipality, Local Improvement District or Unorganized Territorial Unit, where such exists, in column 5.

Let's look at some examples of what might be found in the records for Ontario.

The 1921 census of Canada is available on the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) site for free. You can search for people and view pages there. It is also on Ancestry.ca under their "1921 Census of Canada" collection. It is free at access on Ancestry as long has you have a login account but you DO NOT need a paid subscription!

For non-urban locations you will quite often only see the township recorded such as we find for the district of Bruce South, sub-district of Huron Township, Division 1:

1921 census of Canada, Ontario, district 70, sub-district 36, Huron Township, p. 5; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 17 Nov 2013).

Yet some of the enumerators went the extra distance (mile? kilometre?) and also included the concession and lot number for the property as seen in this extract from Middlesex East, London Township:

1921 census of Canada, Ontario, district 102, sub-district 14, London Township, p. 3; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 12 Aug 2018).

As we can see, not only did the enumerator record that the household of John L. Morris is in London Township but they are on Concession 3, lot 18.

What about the folks in the villages, towns, and cities?

Again, it depends on the enumerator and type/size of the city, town, or village. For example, we can see that the household of Charles Heatherington is residing at 94 Hamilton in Dalhousie Ward, Ottawa.

1921 census of Canada, Ontario, district 71, sub-district 46, Ottawa, p. 4; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 1 Jul Aug 2020).

Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Here the enumerator for Kingsville only recorded the street name. This is quite common for the smaller towns and villages.

1921 census of Canada, Ontario, district 78, sub-district 34, Kingsville p. 9; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 8 Sep 2014).

Yet it still helps us narrow down where the people lived. And any clue, no matter how small, is a good clue!

Finding That Lost Family in the Census

One of the challenges we have all faced in researching our family histories is locating those sometimes elusive ancestors in the various census records. It is becomes particularly frustrating when you are positive that you know exactly where they are but they don't show up in any of the searchable indexes. So what do you do? I will be using Ancestry as the online tool for some of the examples but the same approaches work with other sites also. The case study this time was posted on the Ontario Genealogy group on Facebook.

First of all, create a time line out of all the records you have that surround the date of the census. What you are attempting to do is to place the family or person on the ground at a specific time. Use birth, marriage, and death registrations, newspaper articles and city directories (or anything else you have on them). Record the following details if they are on the documents:

• the specific date of the event from the records you have
• the exact address if it is given. Of course, sometimes only the city is recorded
• possible name variations

If you are very fortunate you will have a document or two that records where they were the year of the census and the year or two following. Why a year or two after? Maybe they moved in the year of the census and they might be found in the new location.

So let's look at the family of George Haney that was supposedly living in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada when the 1921 census took place. We know he was born about 1889 in Ontario. It was also known from various documents surrounding the 1 June 1921 date that the 1921 Census of Canada took place that they were living at 24 1/2 Oak Street.

Approach 1: Name searches with wildcards

Make use of the wildcards and filters within Ancestry search feature. In this case, replace the vowels with question marks '?' and put in some other identifiable details such as the date and place of birth and use an exact matching keyword of "Niagara Falls" to restrict it to that area. Why replace the vowels? well a cursive 'o' and 'a' can often look the same to transcribers. The resulting search returned the following:

Ancestry search of the 1921 Census of Canada using wildcards

As you can see, there is a Geo Honey living in the Niagara Falls sub-district, Welland district born about 1890 in Ontario. Looks promising and when you view the image you find that he is living at 24 1/2 Oak Street.

Approach 2: Address search

For some of the census enumeration returns, especially for those of cities, they will record the street address. This is most commonly seen in the United States Federal Census enumerations but in 1921 Canada also recorded that information.

So let us search using an exact match for the street "24 1/2 Oak" (I left off the "Street" or "St" since I don't know how it was recorded in the census) and also restrict the municipality (you can do that for the 1921 census) to an exact match of "Niagara Falls":

Ancestry search of the 1921 Census of Canada using Street and Municpality

As you can see there are several "Honey" family members at that address. Again, looking at the image itself and carefully looking at the writing you can see that it appears that the name is transcribed incorrectly.

Approach 3: "Old School" manual browsing

So you still can't them? Time for "old school" research.

1. Try looking up the address on Google Maps (or Bing Maps, your choice). However, you may not find the address since over time street names do get changed or disappear due to developments in the area.

2. Still can't find the address on a current map? Look for older maps or city directories that will hopefully indicate where in the city or town the street was at that time.

3. No old maps or directories handy? Then look for clues in the records you have. In this case it was known that a person in the family went to "Maple Street School". Doing a search for that school reveals that yes it did exist (always nice to have confirmation of that fact) but it is no longer there. However, there is a Maples Street Park and in the park they have this monument to the school:

Maple Street Park, http://www.niagarafalls.ca/city-hall/recreation/parks/187-maple-street-park.pd : accessed 21 Aug 2014, "Maple Street Park Memorial"

Now looking at your favourite map of Niagara Falls, Ontario see if you can find Maple Street Park in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

4. Finally we can go browse the 1921 Census of Canada and look through all the images one by one. But don't panic yet as we don't have to look through every single page. We will narrow it down just a little bit further. Unlike the earlier censuses taken in Canada, Library and Archives Canada hasn't made available the list of districts and sub-districts for the 1921 on their web site and neither is it available in the "About 1921 Census of Canada" section on Ancestry. However, because of your extensive knowledge of the area (you did read up about the area first, right?) you know that Niagara Falls is in Welland county at that time so the odds are it is in Welland district in the 1921 census. Of course it doesn't necessarily hold true for all the places. For a large city like Toronto you need to know if the location was in the north, east, south, west or centre part of that city.

Next you have to find the right sub-district. There are 10 sub-districts for Niagara Falls (City). Fortunately each sub-district is described by the streets that comprise their borders. A little more research and it appears that sub-district 31 may be the right location:

Polling Division No. 3 - Being all that part of the City lying between a line running west from River Road, through the centre of Queen Street to Victoria avenue, north through the centre of Victoria avenue to Maple Street, west through Maple Street produced to Stanley avenue and a line running west from River Road through to centre of Morrison Street produced to Stanley avenue

We can now look through the individual pages to find any references to Oak Street to make sure we are in the right sub-district. A mention of Oak Street is found on image page 12 so we just might be in the right place. A little further along on image page 25 (census page 24) there they are once again:

1921 Census of Canada, Ontario, Welland (138), Niagara Falls City (31), p 24; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 21 Aug 2014)

But what if you still can't find them.

• Could they have been visiting friends that day? 
• Maybe, and it does happen, the pages have been lost or misfiled. 
• Possibly they just moved away for a few months and are living somewhere else and then came back ... after the census of course! 
• The family was in transit and were just missed by the enumerator
• Could the enumerator have accidentally forgotten to go down that street?

[Oh, if anyone does come across an Alexander McKinlay (born 1889 in Scotland) with wife Isabella (AKA Bella, born 1886 in Scotland) and son Samuel (born 1915 in Ontario) that should be living in the town of Peterborough (or surrounding townships ... Peterborough was a smaller place then), Ontario drop me a note. I've used all these techniques and have even gone through all the images for that area and still no luck in finding him or the family.]

Coming To Your Census

With the advent of the digitization and indexing of the census pages from Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland and United States we have been spoiled in comparison to what researchers even ten years ago had to go through to find ancestors and relatives. Now we can visit many online sites that have made available those images and indexes. Some of those sites are free while others may require paying a monthly or annual fee to access the records. Even some of those pay sites may be freely available at your local archive, library or Family History Center.

Yet even with the indexes that are available some family members seem to be impossible to find in a census. There are many possible reasons they can't be found. Some of them are:

• the hand writing by the enumerator is atrocious
• the original microfilm was of poor quality
• the original pages were damaged
• the enumerator had no clue on how the name was spelled by the family
• the person of interest has left the country or has died
• the person's name may have changed due to marriage or due to "legal" issues

So what can you do to find them?

Some possible suggestions are:

• Search for the household as a group but leave off their surname. 
• Search for the youngest member of the household at the time of the census. Usually their age will be the most accurate.
• Don't include the age or birth year of the person. For some reason it is not uncommon for women to not be exactly truthful when answering questions about their age.
• Restrict the search to only a specific district, sub-district or town where they are believed to be living at the time of the census. This may reduce the number of possible names to look at to a manageable size.
• If all else fails a page by page examination of the digitized images of an area may be necessary. Sort of an old school/new school approach.

For example, I was looking for the family of Arthur Finnie and his wife Elizabeth Ann (nee McMullen) yet I couldn't initially find them in the 1921 Census of Canada that has been made available on Ancestry. In this case I knew that they probably lived in Windsor and most likely had their 3 year old daughter Margaret living with them. So for the search parameters on Ancestry I specified the following details:

First & Middle Name: Elizabeth Ann
Birth Year: 1881
Birth Location: Ontario, Canada
Spouse: Arthur
Child: Margaret
Keyword: Windsor  [Exact match checked]
Gender: Female

Note that in this case I left off the surname for Elizabeth Ann Finnie but I did include her known birth year. The first match returned was a transcription for the household of Arthur Francise with wife Elizabeth, daughter Margaret and lodger Thompson Officer.

This is why being able to examine the image of the census record in question is so important.

1921 Census of Canada, Ontario, district 77, sub-district 41, Windsor, p. 17, dwelling 182, family 193, household of Arthur Finnie; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 17 Nov 2013); citing Library and Archives Canada.

Looking at the image, at least to my eyes, the surname isn't "Francise" but is "Finnie", the family I am looking for.

So don't give up when searching for those family members apparently missing from the census. You may just need to be a little creative in your searches.