Census documents are great sources for basic facts about one’s ancestors, such as where they lived and with whom, their ages, religions, places of birth, languages spoken, and even in some cases, the number and type of livestock they had! A service like Ancestry.com is based upon making these documents from around the world easily accessible and searchable, for a fee. There are other, more economical, ways to use these resources, particularly for people searching for family members in western Canada. Library and Archives Canada has digitized census pages available on-line; these can be used directly if you know the precise location of your ancestors.

However, if you don’t know the location, you need a nominal index such as that provided by the volunteers at Automated Genealogy. This site is useful for the 1851, 1901, 1906 and 1911 censuses. The most recent census to be released was the 1916 census and it has not been indexed yet by these generous people, so you may need to use the information from family legends or the earlier censuses to find entries of interest. Another option is to find a library (or friend) that has a subscription to Ancestry.com that will let you use it for free. Once you have located the correct census pages you can print them off the government site (which I have found has higher quality digital images, allowing you to magnify the images to a greater degree).

With any index, someone has had to transcribe the original handwriting and this causes errors. I always check an entry against the scanned original. Often you will find information that was not transcribed or explained in the index. Sometimes you can see how the enumerator tried to make the answers he received match the pigeonhole classification scheme. Besides, it is really exciting to see what such an old document looks like!

This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.