Loving the 1921 Canadian Census Images Online!

Over 7 hours of scrolling page by page but I finally found my mother with her parents in the 1921 Canadian Census online on  Ancestry.com and Ancestry.ca!

Mother was four years old and listed with her middle name of Doreen instead of the name she used later in life. That was a little tidbit of information as we never knew that her parents called her anything other than Joan.

Grandpa Fuller is listed as a bookkeeper which I also found intriguing. Why? Because I suspect that being a bookkeeper in 1921 meant you were pretty good at Math. My children and I are all pretty good at Math - I taught High School Math and my kids are much better at Math than I am. They're Math whizzes. Is it genetic? I believe that DNA plays a big part in our abilities.

But the big surprise (a happy one) was finding my great-grandparents living next door! I knew they had at some point come to Canada from England with plans to stay, but that after a few years they returned to England and lived out the rest of their lives there. The census shows me their immigration year of 1920 so my next step is to search the ships passenger lists, both inbound and outbound, on Ancestry. 

See the little 8 year old boy, Walter living with his parents (my great-grandparents)? Well that's my Uncle Wally and last month he turned 101 years young! I'm going to print this census off and mail it to him.

I also found my dad and his parents in the 1921 Census which was thrilling for me. It's the first census for both my mom and dad to show up in.

It wasn't an easy search, as many of the pages are challenging. The handwriting is bad, the pen nib used was fat so there are wide strokes of ink which obscure the letter shapes, names are written on top of other names and a lot of the pages are basically scribbles and ink blotches. But I'm very happy we were given images to browse instead of having to wait for indexing. I shudder to think about the indexing project that Ancestry is taking on. I suspect genealogists will have to use lots of wildcards in their searches once that index goes online.

The page with my dad and his parents is  more legible than many that I pored over. But still challenging. For example does it say that my Grandpa McGinnis was an "oil wiper"? And was he working for the railroad? That would be news to me. I know he was with the Guelph Fire Department in 1909 and that he worked as a construction foreman in 1911. 1917 shows him working at Page-Hersey (they manufactured iron pipes) and in 1928 he worked as a carpenter.  I can see that my Uncle Clare was a driller in a factory but am just not sure about my Grandpa's place of work. So this is a nice little puzzle I'll work on. Any thoughts on "Oil Wiper" and "railroad"?

It was kind of sad to see the names of two of my dad's brothers - 13 year old Lindsay and 4 year old Frank. Lindsay died 3 years later at age 16, and little Frank died when he was 8. I often think of my poor Grandmother losing two of her sons so young.