Census of Canada, Québec, categories created, big problems

Question

There are a number of census categories that were created under the header x year Census of Canada, Québec. Under the parents Québec census records and Canada Census records.  But when I look at some of the profiles in there, they are ALL OVER the province.  From Percé to Montréal (hundreds of miles apart), just from a quick look.  This is an ongoing disaster.  

Census records are one thing, but censuses are done by district, and contain huge numbers of people.  I am not aware of any coordination with Canada project or me for these.  

Eeeeeeek!

Comments

Yeah, it seems like this is a very inefficient use of census categories, and might quickly take more effort to fix than it will help. The district level categories need to be made.

I emailed you directly, maybe we can talk to the people involved about how to contact the categorisation or Canada projects for help.

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Somewhat recently-not sure when- there was a conversation about creating categories for people listed on various US census.

Comments included, censuses are by their nature already categories of every one counted in a census in a country or area, by the  government of that country or area they do not need to recreated on WT.

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M. I agree, personally want to delete these categories, they are poorly made, names leading to confusion, and considering that there are millions of profiles that could fit under each one of them, not at all useful as categories per se.  The only places where somebody has made an actual study of a census for a location, they created free space pages to deal with it.

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The Free Space for a particular place in specific census is something I have contemplated for my Cemetery Project, which will at some time in the future morph into a One Place Study.

But the place only had about 300 people in 1851, almost all of whom were connected to each other if not by immediate family then by marriage.

Danielle, you will know how much the 1851 Census of Canada was mistranscribed.

Having a place to park all the information would be useful but I certainly would not create a category for it.

Answer 1

Categories are great, but we certainly don't want duplicate efforts. Can we figure out the categories added we don't want and provide or point to education on what we already have and how to apply them consistantly?

Comments

Censuses are a source.  There's no way we can duplicate all the censuses without spending gigabytes worth of effort, on something that has already been done more correctly by Census Canada.

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The amount of effort to fix things would be quite large for very little benefit. For Québec alone it would be large task and have to be done by going through every profile and figuring out where it should logically fall and the districts can be different for each year. Then, if we were to keep these, someone would have to write a proposal for how to create subcategories and get agreement. Then a proposal for each Province or region.

In any case, profiles should never have been categorized at the Provincial level.

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The number of entries right now is small relative to what it could be and wouldn't really be that hard to change.  Now is the time to decide the structure of this system if we're going to have a system at all.

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The 1851 census for the Province of Canada (when Canada was not a country) has information for 2,312,919 individuals distributed as follows: 

Canada West (952,004), Canada East (890,261), New Brunswick (193,800), Nova Scotia (276,854). 

By 1861 there were 3,112,269 people counted. 

There is no need for categories for censuses 

Danielle is right ' Censuses are a source.  There's no way we can duplicate all the censuses without spending gigabytes worth of effort, on something that has already been done more correctly by Census Canada.'

Answer 2

Might one solution not be to consider these census categories as high-level categories individual profiles shouldn't be added to, and have individual profiles in district and sub-district categories? I find browsable census categories useful as a researcher, and district categories seem to index well with categories for geographic locations.

Comments

If the district always stayed the same, might work, but from one census to the next they often change name.  It's a huge amount of work to fix all this mess.

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As Danielle says, the districts change.

Québec is different from the other Provinces and Canada is different from other countries.

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In New Brunswick, the Counties were fixed by the time of the 1851 census.  The parishes don't change a lot but I did notice that some towns got their own sub-divisions in 1921.  You can see in Westmorland County the existence of census for Sackville Town and Sackville Parish. Prior to that census they were together.

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New Brunswick is very stable as long as you don't go to a finer level than parish. The census districts within the parishes do change. Towns/cities/villages have been rearranged in recent times. Some have changed multiple times in the past couple of decades. 

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In 1921 they combined 2 counties into 1 district 5 times.  The only way to sort out which county someone is in is to look at the sub-district. With Sub-districts they went the other way. For example there are 8 sub-districts for the city of Fredericton.  There are 53 numbered Subdivisions in York-Sunbury with 23 unique names.  We would need to create a spreadsheet with how to categorize each sub-division.

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Even more reason to not categorize by census. New Brunswick would probably be one of the easier cases.

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Another reason not to create census categories for Canada.

The 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901 censuses were used for two purposes, counting the population and creating a voters list, this is why the name of the electoral district is on the 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901 censuses. The electoral district names were not the names of the places where people lived.

As one example Cardwell was the electoral district that included the village of Alton, in Caledon Township, Peel County, Ontario, Canada from 1867 to 1904. It was not the name of a place or town or village in the area.

Ancestry and some other census transcriptions have used the name of the electoral district on the census.

This creates significant problems when people look for records for a place named Cardwell, and sometimes depending on the name of the electoral district, they find a place with that name. There is a Cardwell Township approx. 230 km north of Alton. The place has has nothing to do with the village of Alton, the town of Caledon, or the town of Caledon East or the Township of Caledon.

The names of electoral districts change often, and the electoral districts cross county, township and municipality lines.  I have lived in the same house for 31 years, the name of the electoral district has changed 4 times in that time. The name of the place has been the same since 1974.

Even contemplating this idea is a 'nightmare waiting to happen'.

Answer 3

Following from here: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1679476/should-we-be-creating-census-categories

It seems like there has never been a categorisation project standard for censuses. I could imagine that for specialised use cases, in one place studies for example, sub-district level categories would be practical. So https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1901/Pages/item.aspx?itemid=5681844 would have a category like  [[Category: Census of Canada, 1901, Quebec, Hochelega, Westmount (City)]]

I can imagine this would cause a lot of maintenance effort and confusion, since districts and subdistricts change between censuses, so I'm not convinced it's worth it. If it is worth it, we should probably:
* make a proposal for Canada
* get a census template
* restrict profiles to the lowest level (subdistrict)

Otherwise we have people using categories as if they were tags, stickers, or sources.

Edit: we'd also need to develop different guidelines for different kinds of censuses, like the 1752 Sieur de la Roque, the 1851 Nova Scotia Census, and the 1891 Canada Census all have very different structures.

Comments

I agree. Canada doesn't currently have the volunteers to maintain something that would be broken every time someone needed to Categorize in a district that doesn't yet exist and then assumed it would be the same each census year. I'm most familiar with New Brunswick and there the parish pretty much stays the same but smaller than that is problematic. Census districts change under the parish.

The effort would far outweigh the benefits.

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yikes!  There would be confusion galore, since Hochelaga gets used for another part of Montréal island that is not particularly close to Westmount also.

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In the Acadians project we have not discussed the need to create categories for censuses (including the 1752 one that you mention).  We have a few early ones that have their own space pages.

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we have categories for the main New France censuses for Québécois project, but they contain less than 10k people each, much less for the first 2 censuses, and divided by location also.

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Space pages make a LOT of sense for me for specific small censuses. For towns that I've done a lot of work in, I've made a census table in space page, and used it to link out to all the existing profiles (and as a basis to create new profiles). Used like this, it can be a nice way to structure research. These are usually manageable size, on the order of 50 heads of of household, for instance.

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I agree Brad.  One thing I would discourage is placing profiles in categories without a link to the respective census.  Preferrable the LAC page but many people use the one on Familysearch.  Familysearch doesn't properly index 1851 or 1891 so that's useless as a source for those particular year. I don't use Ancestry but I gather they have census reports too.

Answer 4

I support census categories.

To this end, I've actually created several test categories, mostly in New Brunswick in order to get a handle on how they might work and to set an example.  No one seems to have taken notice and that's telling in itself.  

The main reason I think census categories are important goes to a key issue that no one talks much of on Wikitree.  It's my opinion that everyone with a record should have a Wikitree profile.  It seems that some people want to limit Wikitree only to people that are genealogically interesting.  

Census categories can help to sort out those that are missing from our database.

This really only works if the categories get to a low enough level to be meaningful.  Trying to fit a whole state or province into a single category is very unwieldy.  I suggest taking it down to sub-division (Parish) level. Otherwise there's no point.

Comments

Hi Stu, not sure where you get the notion that some people want to limit Wikitree only to people that are genealogically interesting.

While lots of people stick to their own genealogy and family tree, that is an individual choice.  I've worked on lots of profiles who have no descent.  Nobody said boo about it either.  Just look at Samuel de Champlain, Jeanne Mance, Marguerite Bourgeois (first head of the Notre-Dame Congregation of Montréal), lots of priests and nuns, the list goes on.  I know I'm not the only one who adds clergy in this province, and there's a site devoted to them also.

I see your page on Westmorland County Census 1770-1820.  That is basically something like a One Place Study.  And its parent would not be New Brunswick Census Records, which is miscategorized for parents, it should all go under Category:Canada Genealogy Resources

For an example of how these categories are being mistreated / misused, take a look at the profiles that are found under Category:1921 Census of Canada, New Brunswick 

Basically, nobody asked before creating all these categories.  And profiles are being stuck into provincial categories rather than municipal or district.  It's rampant.

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Danielle, I know there are islands of productivity and you're an example of someone that cares about the wider community.  However, from what I've seen, most people rarely move out of their comfort zone.  

The early Westmorland County census pages were done before census categories were allowed.  I then had to fit them into the overall structure retroactively.  Perhaps the top level of the census categories should be under resources.

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Your page that I looked at deals with several municipalities / parishes.. that fall within that census district.  So each of these locations should have its category added to the page, that way the page connects to the places it deals with.  And the category for sources as outlined above would also be added.

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I would say the opposition to census style categories is that some people don't see how they can be useful to other people and thus have decided that the categories should be deleted.

Personally I do not see the point of Migration categories as they can lump people in that are centuries apart whereas a Ship voyage category has greater meaning to me as that could help me find other people who travelled at the same time. A lot of people do find value in Migration Categories though and I respect that.

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Danielle,  Yes there should be many sub categories created.  Even a little province like NB has 15 Counties, each with about 6 parishes.  However there are about 1/2 million entries in each census which works out to a few thousand for each parish.  It's a lot of work but, like cemeteries, once there is a plan, thee will be systems support and I think it's the way to get beyond linear growth.   We need to get people away from thinking that Ancestry is the place to host their family tree.

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Ontario/ Canada West was not counted by parishes.

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And right there is the problem. WikiTreers from other countries or provinces have scant knowledge of what their ancestor's birthplace was named at the time they lived there. Back in the day, several of us reorganized the township and county categories for Upper Canada, Canada West and Ontario. It had been set up in a somewhat haphazard way by a now deceased member. It was hours of work. Even then WikiTreers who used FindAGrave were using its place name system, which uses modern post-amalgamation location names, rather than the WikiTree naming system. Upper level categories are easy to click and few visit the category page where it states they shouldn't be used for individual profiles. Today there are 366 profiles under 1871 Census of Canada, Ontario. Stu's right. It can be done, but, oh, what a mountain of work!

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Stu Perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment " It's my opinion that everyone with a record should have a Wikitree profile"

There are thousands and hundred's of thousands of people listed on censuses whether in Canada or the US or multiple places in Europe that do not have profiles.

People who create family histories whether here on WT, on Ancestry, Family Search, Find my past or on multiple other sites are usually only interested in their own family history. They are not interested in every person who may have lived in the same area at about the same time.

We know that the majority of 'family trees' on any number of websites are not accurate or sourced.

We already have the existing census records for Canada and many other places.

Why would we even think about recreating that information on WT?

We are not a source, for Canadian censuses, Library and Archives Canada is the primary source.

Who is going to create profiles for the 2,312,919 individuals listed on the 1851 census of Canada?

It would probably result in the thousands of duplicated profiles on FS, based only on the mistranscribed records of various censuses.

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I think you stated my point quite clearly.  The choice is between universality and genealogically interesting.  I am a believer in universality.  

As for who's going to do it, I'm close to being universal when it comes to my ancestral home of Rockport, New Brunswick. I've been working on it for 40 years. My brother wrote a book about it.  Still some work to do but I'm working to that end.  Working outward, any opportunity I get to add new people in Sackville Parish, I take it.  I'm not as good working out in all directions.  I am almost done categorizing the cemeteries in New Brunswick according to Ales' list.  I sometimes will take a random cemetery and connect everyone in it.  

The point is that if everyone did what they could, it can be done.  Start local and work your way out.

My one place study is Rockport: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Rockport%2C_New_Brunswick_One_Place_Study

Answer 5

The various countries census categories have been around for a long time but have never formally had their structure sorted out. There are some in Canada that were created years ago and some created very recently as well. That is the same for most of the countries that have census categories. The structure created a while ago but never formally done and then added to in a way that follows the same structure. The categories for Canada's censuses never went below the province level for some reason. That is not reason enough to dislike them or complain when people use the categories as they are intended to be used at this time. 

At this stage the categories are divided by year of censuses and the various provinces that they occurred in. Some have small numbers and others have bigger numbers. The highest is 722 profiles currently. The highest location category in that province has 3339 profiles. I didn't check the other provinces for Location categories with more profiles but I would say there is some with more. That location I would say is a big location. 

So at this stage most census categories have well less that 1/5 of a location category and are likely much much smaller. So smaller divisions are not needed at this time on these numbers. That does not preclude creating smaller categories at any time but there needs to be a consistent structure for those categories. If Districts can be different between each census year then that isn't suitable.

For the argument that the may not be useful and it just duplicates a source, That same argument could be made for cemetery categories, Location Categories, Military categories and so forth. Some people see no point in a Cemetery category or a Military category or a Migration category or they restrict the Location categories on their profiles to the Birth/Death/Marriage locations when someone could have lived elsewhere for the majority of their life. That is their choice but it does not mean that their choice prevents others from adding profiles to any category. Every Category should be backed up by a source and a lot of times that source would be governmental based like a census or a birth record or a military service record. 

Comments

Hello Darren, I saw that you were among those who created some of these.  Are you part of Canada project?  Did you communicate with the project leaders before creating these?

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I am following a structure that was put in place back in 2016 and expanded every since. And not every category created gets communication with any project leaders either. So why would I be expected to contact a Project leader to edit or add a category that follows an established pattern. Not every structure has a formal structure like the Census categories don't have.

I would be hard pressed to find the rules for creating a wanted Migration category or Location category for most projects but as long as I followed the established category format of other categories in the structure I could create categories that fit the structure.

I end up creating and editing a lot of different styles of categories as part of the Categorization Project and 99.9999999999999999999% of those would have any feedback from projects that look after the area either good or bad as the categories I created or edit follow what is already in place.

I may have been a Canada project member in the past as I have family there or I may not have applied to join. I can not remember as there are several projects I gave up membership in over my 12 years on Wikitree.

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Do not create a category unless it fits neatly within an existing hierarchy and uses an agreed-upon category naming scheme. If you are not confident about these, click the "request a new category or advice" link that you will see next to the Edit Text box on the edit page of any profile. It's better to start a conversation with the Categorization Project and other advanced members than trying to do things alone.

from Categorization: Creation and removal

So where is this structure that was put in place in 2016?  I've been around for 10 years and have never seen one for Canada.  I know the USA has some such, but it's a different country, and their operating methods don't necessarily fit here.  Just the name ''Québec Census Records'' is totally misleading.  That entails it being a source, not a category where profiles or sub-categories go.  And the sub-categories that have been put into it are for province-wide censuses, and left open to having profiles in them.  Which have had a number of such put into them haphazardly.  They're all over the map.  Which leaves me and a few other people in this area to clean up the mess.

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Québec Facts and figures will give you an idea of what we're dealing with here.  Not mentioning the rest of the country.

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The structure I am talking about was likely never put into a formal proposal but it was started in 2016 and expanded on in a consistent manor in 2021, 2019, 2022, 2020, 2023 looking at the change logs of the current categories. Looking at my census creations for Québec  they appear to be consistent with changing former categories from Quebec to Québec . In other words using the correct usage of the province name. Or would you prefer completely incorrect names?

Looking at the other provinces I can see the same sort of pattern with most created in 2016 with the others more likely created for consistency across Canada. So there was a hierarchy in place and a consistent naming system being used. 

As for the name of the parent category ''Québec Census Records'' it is not misleading and is also consistent with other Census record category names in other countries and the Census records hierarchy as well. 

If we just used the categories that have approved structures a good amount of current categories would likely not be in an approved structure. If we just take cemeteries for example only Australia, Canada and the United States have approved structures with nothing found for the other 195 or so countries. A decent amount of regions do not have any proposal for their location hierarchy. However you would find that probably 99.99% of current categories follow a consistent naming structure and lend themselves for other categories to be made in the same manner. 

The only reason I know that there was never a proposed structure for censuses is from a comment made on Christmas day 2023 by Steven Harris in the G2G post Brad Foley linked to in his answer. The problem with that is that the categories were already in existence and being used by a lot of different people. So it is a bit like trying to close the stables door after the horse has bolted with the horse being the Census categories in this metaphor. 

Sure the ideal thing that should have happened in 2016 is a creation of every possible district and year combination but then you have the rule of not creating empty categories  which goes against creating the categories that you say should have been. There is nothing stopping people from making a proposal to further subcategorize the census categories. But until then people will have to use the current categories if they wish to categorize where people were in the census years. 

For that Cemetery Creation and removal quote none of my actions regarding Canada Census categories goes against those statements with the exception of using the request a new category link as I followed the existing hierarchy using the same naming system and have not worked alone. 

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I don't see a single year created in 2016 for these in this province.  The only one created in 2016 was the one linked to in my original question.  None of the sub-categories for it belong under it frankly.  2 wrongs never made a right.

Answer 6

Which is better: 

[ [Category: 1851 Census of Canada, New Brunswick, Albert, Hillsborough Parish] ]

[ [Category: Census of New Brunswick, 1851 - Hillsborough Parish, Albert] ]

[ [Category: 1851 Census of New Brunswick, Albert, Hillsborough Parish] ]

I think I prefer the 1st simply because it would be easier to correct the ones in provincial level categories, but I've been using the second but they can be changed.   The 3rd is another option.   I do think we need a standard.

Comments

The first one is out, anachronistic.  

I agree we need to create a structure for these, since what has been created is totally out presently, but some people want this for various research purposes.  What I believe would be a correct structure would be:

Top level, 1871 Census, Canada 

Mid level: 1871 Census, New Brunswick

Mid-level: 1871 Census, New Brunswick, Albert District

Landing level: 1871 Census, Albert District, Hillsborough Parish

No need to repeat Canada for each one, our location category structure already runs Top level: Canada, Mid level: Province name, Landing level: City, Province name. (Some areas include county name, that varies by province / territory)

Profiles would only be allowed in Landing level categories, with the rare exception being where a District isn't sub-divided.