Canadian Censuses on Findmypast

Are you researching your Canadian family history? Perhaps you're looking for your first Canadian ancestor in order to take your research across the Atlantic? If so, we've recently added two record sets that may well make your family history exploration on Findmypast a little easier - the Canadian censuses of 1881 and 1891.

These additions mean we now have four Canadian censuses available to search, and Canadian census records are an unusually rich resource. But what can they tell us?

When the earliest census we currently have was enumerated in April of 1881, Canada consisted of British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec. The census began on 4 April 1881 and covered 192 districts broken up into 2,139 sub-districts. Census districts and sub-districts were composed of cities, towns, townships, Indian reserves, and less-defined areas. By 1891, this had expanded to 201 census districts and 2,475 sub-districts.

The 1901 census covered 206 census districts and 3,204 sub-districts. 9,000 enumerators took the details of 5,371,315 individuals (compared to 4.5m in 1891). By 1911, this had grown again to over 7 million.

It's worth noting that it's always worth checking the image for these records, as the information that is transcribed isn't the complete information detailed in the census itself. Also worth bearing in mind is that, depending on from which part of Canada a person hailed, the results can be in English or French.

The transcript page of each census will tell you slightly different things:

For more information on the fields you can find in the 1911 Canada Census, visit the record page.