Abstract
This chapter discusses the issues of missing and uncertain data in the Canadian census sample of 1852 within the context of automatic linkage with the complete census of 1881. The resulting linked sample from these two censuses was created to provide an opportunity to study intergenerational social mobility in Canada between fathers (in 1852) and sons (1881). We discuss the accuracy and representativeness of the automatically generated links and show how the use of marriage registers can be helpful in order to verify the results of the automatic linkage. Our verifications suggest that most of the links are accurate. However, the linked sample is not representative of some subgroups of the studied population, since some attributes favoured while others hindered the fact of being automatically linked from 1852 to 1881. Finally, based on our efforts of manual linkage between the BALSAC marriage registers and the automatically linked census sample for the verification of the latter, we present some considerations about the great research potential of linking census and parish register data in Quebec.
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- 1.
Research programme in historical demography, Université de Montréal.
- 2.
The PRDH has lengthy experience with the record linkage of Quebec parish registers, and more recently undertook linkage of a sample of the 1871 Canadian census to the 1881 census. Our current effort to link the 1852 and 1881 Canadian censuses is funded by the international project Mining Microdata: Economic Opportunity and Spatial Mobility in Britain, Canada and the United States, 1850–1911, Digging Into Data Challenge, ESRC/NSF/CRSH.
- 3.
In both censuses, the only information about the socio-economic status of the individuals is the occupation.
- 4.
This project aims to contribute to the discussion about the social and geographical mobility in North America and in Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- 5.
Since for our purposes we were interested in linking men only, we are not faced to the problem of changing name at marriage. This was usual among women and more frequent among some subgroups of the population than others.
- 6.
According to the instructions to the enumerators of the 1881 census “Origin is to be scrupulously entered, as given by the person questioned; in the manner shown in the specimen schedule, by the words English, Irish, Scotch, African, Indian, German, French, and so forth” (Department of Agriculture (Census Branch), 1881, p. 30).
- 7.
According to the type of place indicated in the aggregated volume of the 1852 census (Board of Registration and Statistics 1853).
- 8.
The 20 % sample of the 1852 census includes the variable “Household number” but not “Family number”. Thus, we can identify who lived with whom (in the same household) but not who belonged to which family in 1852. In order to have an idea of the different families that lived together, the 20 % sample includes some variables that aim to identify the relationship between individuals living in the same household. For example, the constructed variable CANREL indicates the relationship with respect to the household head (e.g. “wife of head”, “child of head”, “parent of head”, “other kin of head”, and “undetermined”). The variables MOMLOC and POPLOC indicate, within each household, the position (in order of enumeration) of the mother and the father of an individual, respectively.
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Torres, C., Dillon, L.Y. (2015). Using the Canadian Censuses of 1852 and 1881 for Automatic Data Linkage: A Case Study of Intergenerational Social Mobility. In: Bloothooft, G., Christen, P., Mandemakers, K., Schraagen, M. (eds) Population Reconstruction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_12
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