With no fanfare, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has completed the transcription of the 1931 Canada Census and made it searchable — for free — on its website.
This means anyone anywhere can search the census by name, year of birth, province and territory, and place. Other search criteria include sex, marital status, birth country, and occupation.
If you can’t find the person you’re looking for after filling in the search criteria, try removing some of the information. For example, I could not find my mother when I included her year of birth, even with a range of a few years. I modified my search by removing the year of birth and there she was among three results.
A somewhat quirky find was a Canadian-born great-great-uncle who is indexed as being born in the United States, not Ontario. He was a member of the United Church, so perhaps that is where “united” was picked up.
As an added bonus, if you register for a free LAC account, you can save the records you find.
On June 1, LAC made the 1931 Canada Census available online, but at that time it could only be browsed by province, district and sub-district.
By law, the census could only be released 92 years after it had been conducted.
To make the census searchable by name or place, LAC worked with its partners, Ancestry and FamilySearch. LAC told us the 1931 census would be searchable by this fall, and they met their target.
The 1931 Canada Census is also available on Ancestry and MyHeritage, but you need to subscribe to search it on those sites. It may not be long before we see the collection on FamilySearch.
