The Canadian families project and the 1901 census.

Abstract

he Canadian Families Project (CFP) is a five-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and T Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and by five participating universities. The research team includes fourteen scholars, three of whom are postdoctoral fellows, as well as several graduate students and two computer programmers.’ Disciplines represented include anthropology, demography, geography, history, and sociology. These simple facts are essential for those who wish to know something about the CFP’s national sample of the 1901 census of Canada. In its conception and its content, the database bears the imprint of its Canadian provenance in the 1990s. When the project was conceived in the early 1990s, SSHRCC did not fund the creation of databases or research tools; it did (and still does) fund major collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects under its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) program. Our national sample of the 1901 census was created, therefore, as part of an interdisciplinary research project on family in Canada. To this extent our national sample of the 1901 cencus differs in its origins from most public use microdata samples (PUMS) created from historical censuses in the United States, and from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) created by the Minnesota Historical Census Project (Ruggles and Menard 1995; Sobek and Ruggles 1999). The articles in this issue are, therefore, explorations by scholars from several disciplines, each of whom has a specific research agenda connected to the study of family in Canada. Canada has seen a number of large projects in which historians have worked with scholars from other disciplines. In the field of family history, however, major collaborative projects have not appeared outside the Province of Quebec, where there is a long tradition of team research in the study of population and family.* The CFP is the first collaborative research project that focuses on the history of families in Canada as a whole. We propose to revisit family not as a singular or unchanging social unit but as a dynamic set of associations varying with time, region, class, gender, and other historical conditions of Canadian experience. We hope to set our findings in the context of the wider international literature, and it follows that we are interested in the relationship between family and the sweeping changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. Given our sensitivity to the plurality of family and household, and given the heterogeneity of the Canadian cultural mosaic, it is unlikely that we shall find a specifically Canadian type of family or household at any time in our past. For historians as much as for the makers of constitutions, the Canadian geopolitical entity remains a problematic and fragile analytical unit. We wish nevertheless to move beyond the microhistorical and regional focus of Canadian family history, to seek commonalities and patterns of family reproduction that may transcend the boundaries of both region and nation-state. In Canada, however, we can never escape the preoccupation with local and regional contexts, and the sensitivity of Canadian scholarship to place and region may be one of its conspicuous strengths. The results may allow us, and those who follow us, to reconnect the local and the regional to new transnational models in ways such as those suggested by GCrard Bouchard (1994, 1996). A key obstacle to creative synthesis and to comparative analysis is the absence of source materials capable of supporting transregional conclusions. Before the CFP created its sample of the 1901 census, there existed only one machine-readable national sample of a historic census (the census of 187 1, when Canada had only four provinces). The nominal information from decennial censuses since 191 1 is closed (although an intense lobbying effort intended to reconcile privacy concerns with controlled access to these censuses is under way). The public use samples created from national censuses by the federal statistical agency, Statistics Canada, commence only in 1961. The CFP’s sample of the 1901 census is intended to initiate the task of filling an