On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of meeting with Kris Inwood, Director of the 1891 Census Project at the University of Guelph along with his staff at a review of this exciting project.
Census project staff have been entering data since 2002 and as of last Friday have completed the data entry phase. They have compiled a database comprising 328,000 records which represents a 5% sample of the entire population of Canada in 1891. They have oversampled in certain urban areas as well as in the west of Canada to 10%. There is also a 100% capture of group quarters (households with more than 30 residents indicated in the manuscript census records). The next step in the project is to begin coding columns such as religion and occupation to allow for systematic use by researchers.
Over the life of the project participants have also been conducting research on their own interests using census data. A number have completed very interesting papers examining topics such as the character and nature of the enumerators, the foibles of the enumeration process, methodology involved in locating aboriginal persons in the census and a survey of contemporary newspaper coverage of the census itself.
Additionally impressive, many of the participants have contributed to a series mini-biographies of individuals and families in the census which will hopefully be shared via the census website. These papers illuminate the human side of manuscript census records and they also provide very useful case studies demonstrating how census manuscript data can be used in a variety of research contexts.
Kris suggests that they are very close to being able to provide researchers with the opportunity to begin to use this data outside the project and avenues are now being explored to provide systematic dissemination of the dataset.