Birth Place Standardization

2009-06-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

I have attemped to standard the entries for the birth place column. It still needs some fine tuning before I try to code these entries. So here is a daft list of the various birth places from the 1901 Toronto Sample.

Locked and Loaded

2009-03-06T07:53:00.000-08:00

1901
Schedule 1
Dist 116, 117, 118, 129, 130 and 131
52701 Individuals - 19.59 Percent
9187 Dwellings - 19.91 Percent

On Toronto's 175th Birthday I would like to introduce Toronto Before's journey through the Queen city during the year nineteen hundred and one. I had the extreme privilege in supervising production the Toronto Area Test Sample (TATS) for a few top academic social researchers over the last 3 years. The TATS is a 20 percent sample of Toronto's dwelling population from the 1901 Canadian census.

Creating the test sample was a smaller side project that I had taken over roughly two thirds the way through the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure project (CCRI). This project involved the creation of a 5 percent sample of the entire country from the years 1911 to 1951. An undertaking that has never been attempted, the CCRI project used the Library of Archives confidential digital images of the census manuscripts to sample and enter into a database the information of the lives of everyday Canadians. When we think of the first 50 years of the last century we think of the life before the automobile, World War 1, the “Roaring Twenties”, the Great Depression and the “Dirty Thirties”, World War 2 and, of course, the Post War Era. This database will definitely provide researchers foundation to produce great understanding to how the country’s population developed and moved forward through these significant periods of our time. This data will be used for further researching Canada’s unexplored history and will be available through Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centers.

Although I would love to reveal my experiences of heading the data collection of Ontario's population through the first half of the last century this blog is dedicated to rediscovering Toronto's Past. A 20 percent sample seems like a small amount but what other resources do we have to look deep into the numbers and know for sure what the city was like 100 years ago. We know that the things we learn from books and stories are the spoken history of the yesteryear. The Toronto Area Test Sample represents a small window to the bigger picture depicting the true life of people living in the Queen City in the year 1901.

The TATS will be available for download shorty.

Toronto 1901 Census

Birth Place Standardization

Locked and Loaded