Friday, August 9, 2013

Census 1921 Canada is now available on Ancestry with a geographical index

Like everyone else with Canadian ancestry, I too opened Ancestry yesterday to see if I could locate my parents on the 1921 census. My mother was a child of four years of age and my father was a teenager of sixteen years of age. Since I knew their addresses I thought it would be quick but the Westminster Township page was prepared by rural route numbers which I did not know so worked my way through from the District/Sub-District number that I had for the 1911 census and found it!  I did not know the sub district for London where my father lived but I had the street name and house number and found an old map of London giving me the main cross streets and then found the other quite quickly reading the descriptions for the area enumerated.

No new news on the 1921census likely for my personal family but I will extract the Pincombe family for my one name study. There was a Blake family in London besides my father's family and their roots stretch back into the early 1800s. They are of Irish descent I believe but have not yet put that down on paper. By the time I was a child in London we were the only Blake family. The opinion was that Blake was a common name and in some ways it is with occurrence of this surname in a lot of directories worldwide but yet in total it does not place in numbers with names like Smith and Taylor. For instance on the 1881 English census there are only slightly more than 14,000 Blake.

Although it is really nice to have the Census of 1921 for Canada, its use is primarily for my one name studies as it will not provide me with any additional information on my personal family lines back in Canada.

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