Vancouver Island Historical Census Data

In the 4th decennial Census of Canada (1901), the province of British Columbia was divided into five districts. Two of the districts — District No. 3 (Vancouver) and District No. 4 (Victoria) — covered the geographical area of Vancouver Island and adjacent Gulf Islands. The 1901 census of Vancouver Island on this website is based on information recorded by enumerators in those two districts.

The name of District No. 3 (Vancouver) has often caused confusion for researchers. Census district No. 3 (Vancouver) embraced Vancouver Island outside the official limits of the City of Victoria [District No. 4]. In other words, Census district No. 3 refers to Vancouver Island outside Victoria, from the suburban municipality of Saanich to remote settlements near Cape Scott on the north end of the island. The census district name of Vancouver pre-dates the incorporation of the mainland City of Vancouver (1886). [The mainland city of Vancouver is included in Census District No. 1 (Burrard) on the 1901 census.]

The target date for the 1901 census was March 31st. That is, although the enumeration process took several months to complete, enumerators were instructed to record the population as it existed on 31 March 1901.

In the 1901 Dominion census, information was recorded on eleven separate "schedules" relating to living persons; buildings and lands, churches and schools; deaths; farmlands, fruits and plantations; field products; livestock and animal products; agricultural values; manufacturers; forest products and furs; fisheries; and mines. Only Schedule 1 (Nominal Return of the Living) and Schedule 2 (Buildings and lands, churches and schools) have survived in manuscript form.

Schedule 1 comprised thirty-four questions relating to personal descriptions — that is, to a person's name, age, sex, race, marital status and relationship to the head of household; religion; citizenship and nationality (a category that included year of immigration and year of naturalization); profession or trade (including information if a person was an employer or an employee, and the person's earnings and the number of months worked in the year); education and language (including a person's mother tongue, the number of months the person was enrolled in school, and a person's ability to read and write the official languages of Canada); and infirmities (indicating if a person was deaf, dumb, blind or of unsound mind).

For a more detailed description of these headings, researchers should consult the Notes on Enumeration Categories for 1901 on this website.

Dr. Patrick A. Dunae
viHistory editor & project director

Schedule 1 (Nominal Return of the Living) of the 1901 Dominion census consisted of thirty-four (34) questions. Enumerators were issued with a manual, explaining the purpose of the questions and showing the correct way of entering answers. According to the Manual, "Schedule 1 is framed with the object of enumerating the population of the country by name. Every person whose habitual home or place of abode is in an enumerator's district... is to be entered on the schedule by name, irrespective of age, sex or condition."

The Manual used the term "dwelling house" to indicate a place of residence. "Any structure that provides shelter for a human being is a house." Accordingly, family homes and residential hotels, along with barracks, institutions and ships were "dwelling houses" for census purposes.

Here is a list of the questions and a summary of the instructions given to enumerators:

Family

This term applied to traditional nuclear families, consisting of parents and children, and to extended families having other relatives and servants living under one roof. Residential hotels, boarding houses, institutions and vessels were also counted as census families or households. In most cases, a head of household was indicated. Census families were numbered consecutively within each sub-district. Thus, Family No. 2 was in close proximity to Family No. 1, etc.

Names

Family names were entered first, followed by Christian or given names and middle initials.

Sex

The heading on the nominal schedule was Sex. "The sex will be denoted by the use of the letter M in the proper column for male and the letter F for female."

Colour

This term, used for the first time in 1901, referred to race. People were identified with the initials W, R, B or Y, indicating White (for Caucasians), Red (for North American Indians and Aboriginal people), Black (for persons of African descent) or Yellow (for Chinese and Japanese persons). Persons of mixed race were designated according to their non-white parent. Thus, a person with a white father and black mother was recorded as B (black). Persons of mixed European and Aboriginal lineage were recorded in a separate category [see Race below].

Relation to head of family

The schedule was designed so that one person would be identified as head of household and others would be assigned relative positions, such as wife of head, daughter of head, mother of head, lodger, servant, and so on. The head of household was expected to provide "particulars regarding every person in the family, household or institution" to enumerators.

Marital status

Whether a person was single (S), married (M), widowed (W) or (D) divorced. This was the first census where divorced people were so identified.

Month and date of birth

Infants less than a year old were supposed to be entered as a fraction of 12 - e.g. 2/12 for a two month old baby. Infants less than one month were supposed to be entered as "0." In this database, infants less than a year old are entered as "0" and their age, if it was recorded as a fraction, is displayed in the Comments field.

Year of birth

Age

Age on last birthday was recorded here.

Birthplace

The column was headed Country or Place of birth. "If in Canada, specify province or Territory and add 'r' or 'u' for rural or urban, as the case may be." The Manual did not provide any guidelines for distinguishing between an 'urban' town and a 'rural' village. Presumably, respondents or enumerators made the distinction.

Year of immigration to Canada

Year of naturalization

Race

This category was entitled Racial or Tribal Origin on Schedule 1. Persons identified as "White" were enumerated here according to the birthplace of their father - "as in English, Scotch [sic], Irish, Welsh, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian [sic], etc." Persons of mixed European and Aboriginal heritage were described with the now unsavoury term, "breed." Enumerators were instructed to use initials to describe the parentage of mixed-blood people. The initials e. b. indicated an "English breed" - that is, someone of English and native Indian descent. The initials f. b, s. b and i. b indicated persons of mixed French, Scottish and Irish descent. Persons having parents with some other nationality or race were identified with the initials o. b., meaning "other breed."

Nationality

Anyone who was born in Canada or who had become a Canadian citizen (irrespective of their race or place of birth) was recorded as Canadian. The nationalities of non-Canadians were determined by their country or birth or by "the country to which [they] profess to owe allegiance."

Religion

Individuals indicated their religion, according to the church or denomination with which they identified. In families where parents had different religions, children were usually associated with the religion of their mother. The Manual reminded enumerators that there "is no State Church in Canada" and so "if a person is not a member of... any one church or denomination he must not be classified with one or another." "If a person be an agnostic, or a non-believer, or a pagan, or a reincarnationist, or whatever his relationship to religion may be, he should be so classed." On Vancouver Island, enumerators were not consistent in recording the religions of Chinese and Japanese people. In Victoria, most Chinese were entered as Confucians; but Chinese people in Alberni, Comox, and Nanaimo were usually returned as Buddhists.

Occupation

On Schedule 1, this category was called Profession or Trade. A person's occupation was indicated here. According to the Manual, the "chief or principal calling is the only one to be recorded; that is to say, the one on which the condition of life chiefly rests and from which the gains, earnings or income are chiefly obtained." We have coded occupations according to the Historical International Classification of Occupations [HISCO].
However, researchers should note that some occupations presented here may not be the same as those actually recorded by enumerators. Our dataset is derived from a transcript provided by the Canadian Families Project. Students employed by the CFP to transcribe and code 1901 nominal census schedules were instructed to modify or conflate occupations to conform to a different classification system. Thus, for example, "draymen," "teamsters" and "hack drivers" were all coded by the CFP as "coachmen." Researchers wanting to verify precise occupations, as they were entered by enumerators on manuscript schedules in 1901, should consult Hugh Armstrong's transcript of the 1901 Victoria census on the CanadaGenWeb site or images of the original records on the Library and Archives Canada web site.

Own means

This category referred to persons who did "not carry on any remunerative calling" and lived on income from investments, annuities, pensions, etc. Large employers, such as factory owners, were also identified here.

Employment

Several headings are summarized and consolidated in this field - namely:

Employer

Employers were persons who paid salaries and wages to employees. Large manufacturers, small businessmen, and householders who employed domestic servants were identified here.

Employee

An employee was someone who worked for a salary or wage paid by an employer.

Own account

This category was not clearly defined and not used consistently by enumerators. It referred to persons "employed in gainful occupation, doing their own work." It was used to identify a wide range of people, from lawyers - who had their own law practices and thus were engaged in "doing their own work" - to pedlars and prostitutes.

Working at home or factory; months employed at trade; months employed at trade at home; months employed at trade at factory

Information relating to these categories was not transcribed in our viHistory dataset. Researchers should consult the PDF files on the Library and Archives Canada web site for these details.

Earnings

Earnings from an individual's "Chief Occupation or Trade" are entered here. The census did not make a distinction between a salary and a wage. According to the Manual, the two terms "have a common meaning, being the amount or sum of money which one person employed by another receives for his service." Remuneration for all kinds of work - such as professional services, manufacturing, sales and manual labour - could be entered here. In most cases, the dollar amount referred to annual earnings.

Months in school

This category referred to "persons of school age, being those over five and under twenty-five years." A "school year" consisted of ten (10) months.

Can Read (English and/or French); Can Write (English and/or French)

For persons who were five (5) years of age and older.

Can Speak English; Can Speak French

For persons who were five (5) years of age and older.

Mother tongue

The Manual defined "mother tongue" as "one's native language, the language of his race, but not necessarily the language in which he thinks or which he speaks most fluently or uses chiefly in conversation." Enumerators were supposed to record a person's "mother tongue" even if the person did not normally use the "mother tongue" in conversation. If, for example, a person was able to speak Russian but was fluent in English and normally spoke in English, the enumerator would record "Russian" as the person's "mother tongue" in Column 33 of Schedule 1. In this example, the enumerator would also indicate that the person "Can Speak English" in Column 31 of the schedule.

Infirmities

The following headings were used to describe infirmities: deaf; deaf and dumb; blind; and unsound mind. Enumerators were supposed to indicate if the infirmity was congenital (that is, from birth) or if it occurred later in life, but enumerators on Vancouver Island rarely provided such details.

Comments

In this field, we have provided enumerators' annotations and other information to augment the record.

The 1901 Census Manual is available here.
Instructions to Officers

The nominal census data for the city of Victoria, 1901, on this website was provided by the Canadian Families Project [CFP]. The CFP is an interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Victoria. The CFP dataset was compiled in 1997 and consists of over 22,000 records. I am grateful to the CFP director, Dr. Eric W. Sager, and his colleague, Dr. Peter Baskerville, for making this data available to the viHistory project.

1901 nominal census data for census districts outside the city of Victoria, from Saanich to Cape Scott on Vancouver Island, was generously provided by the British Columbia Genealogical Society [BCGS] in 2006. The BCGS is a "non-profit organization dedicated to the perpetuation of British Columbia's heritage and the collection, publication, and preservation of materials...relevant to genealogical and historical research." This portion of the Vancouver Island census consists of over 25,000 records transcribed from microfilm by BCGS volunteers in Campbell River and elsewhere in British Columbia. I greatly appreciate their contributions. Special thanks to Iline Gronland, volunteer coordinator for the 1901 BCGS census project; Peter Claydon, database project designer and manager; and Diane Rogers, BCGS secretary, for facilitating this addition to the viHistory database.

Thanks also to David Badke, programmer at the Humanities Computing and Media Centre [HCMC] at the University of Victoria. In December 2006, he integrated thousands of records from the 1901 Victoria City census and the 1901 Vancouver Island census into a single, coherent, machine-readable database.

Dr. Patrick A. Dunae
viHistory editor & project director