Social history in the census

                                                                Interior of an early Ontario School

Get in, find your target name and add the information to your family tree. As large databases and commercial sites have taken over, finding the information you seek has become faster. Instead of spending weeks or months looking for that one elusive ancestor, an electronic search can find the information in seconds. The trick is using the right search name.

Looking over the information I had amassed on Angus Clark and family, I decided to see if I could find them on the 1851 census. I didn't have that one yet. This time I tried a different strategy. My target name was the oldest daughter, Ellen. I found them!

The discovery added a different understanding of Margaret McPherson Clark's place in the family. In 1851 Angus Clark was a widower with five children. So where was Margaret McPherson? A quick search for the marriage of Angus and Margaret about 1853 turned up nothing. When searches inputting Margaret McPherson's name in the Ancestry search boxes for the 1851 census didn't come up with a definite match, I decided to browse through the censuses for the areas in and around Puslinch page by page.

So far I haven't found Margaret but browsing slowly through the census pages was reminiscent of the hours I used to spend trawling through census films. It also reminded me of what we miss by popping in, taking the names we are looking for and popping out again - the commentary. Every so often the enumerators wrote down comments which were a window to the area they surveyed.

Some enumerator's comments gave information about the land the people were on; useful if your target person was a farmer and you wanted to have an idea of how they were doing. I particularly appreciated the remarks of James Brebuer who enumerated district number five. That commentary provided a lively background to those he was recording. He wrote about the roads and the lay of the land but his words about schooling and religion were particularly illuminating.

He blamed the recent school act, a frequent subject of discussion, for low school attendance. He also cast doubt on the information given about the religious affiliations people attested to. His slightly cynical remarks brought a human element to the listing of the population that helped colour the social history of the area. I'm glad my hunt for Margaret led me further afield and introduced me to such interesting nuggets of information. 

Sources:

Ancestry.ca search of 1851 Census of Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia for Puslinch Division p 59 - 61