1861 Canadian Census Online at Library and Archives Canada

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has certainly been busy. Their latest online offering is the 1861 Canada Census. Oh how I wish it were the 1921, that long-overdue census they promised us for June 1st....  If you want that 1921 census released sooner rather than later, please sign the petition to our new Minister of Canadian Heritage, Shelly Glover

Please take a moment to sign the petition. Your signature is important!

Following is the announcement of the 1861 Census and a link to the index and images. You might also want to take a look at my previous article about the 1861 Agricultural Census which provides a great deal of valuable information on those who owned land.  This agricultural portion of the 1861 census has been scanned and put online on Ancestry.com which is great.... BUT they have only scanned one of two pages for each person. See Ancestry Goof with 1861 Canadian Census

Since I'm pointing out errors today, let's talk about the index that LAC has put online for that 1861 Canadian Census. I'm guessing they  used the Ancestry.com index  since both sites have badly MISindexed my PEER family as ROSS. Here's what LAC shows in their index. It was probably part of the deal they made with Ancestry when they allowed Ancestry to index and put the images of the Canadian Census records on the Ancestry site. The bad part of that is that bad indexing gets perpetuated!

Census Year: 1861
Item Number: 2819914
Surname: Ross
Given Name(s): Levy
Age: 50
Province: Canada West (Ontario)
District Name: Halton
Sub-District Name: Nelson

Ancestry shows the same surname - ROSS. But check out the image. It doesn't look like ROSS to me, it is clearly PEER. 

In any case here's the announcement from LAC:

Library and Archives Canada is pleased to announce that the Census of 1861 is now available online. Information was collected for people living in Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Canadians can search this new database by nominal information, such as the surname, given name(s) and age of an individual, as well as by geographical information such as district and sub-district names.