Library and Archives Canada is allowed to release the census today, 92 years after it was completed and imprisoned retained by Statistics Canada, according to The Statistics Act (1918 and 1971.)
Initially, the census will be available from LAC by browsing images (234,678 of them) by district and sub-district. It’s not clear to me how fine the sub-district will be. The pie chart shows the population for Ontario’s Carleton County seperated by “Municipality, township or sub-division” as given in Volume II, Population by Areas, in the publication Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, at https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statcan/CS98-1931-2.pdf
Trolling through Fitzroy or Osgoode will be a joy compared to Ottawa. On the Prairies there are many small population communities that appear to be sub-divisions.
If your person was in a larger community, or you’re not even sure where they lived (their normal residence), you may want to exercize patience until Ancestry and FamilySearch have transcribed the census using handwriting recognition technology. Based on their experience with the 1950 US census it shouldn’t take long — but who can be sure!
UPDATE: The census came online at 8 am at the LAC website. By 8:30 am the site was overloaded and delivering only page load errors. At 9 am still delivering page load errors. At 9:35 am delivering images, intermittantly page load errors.
At 9:50 am LAC Tweeted “The 1931 Census sure is a hit! Within one hour, we have received over 3600 hits.
Due to high levels of traffic, the web page is slower than usual. We appreciate your enthusiasm and patience!”
6:20 pm and LAC’s 1931 census webpage has a notice “Due to high levels of traffic, all our search engines, including the one for browsing the 1931 Census, are slower than usual. We appreciate your patience while navigating our website.”
In fact the website is delivering the message “Unable to open [object Object]: Error loading image at https://central-d.dev.bac-lac.gc.cal.item/?id=e011742967&app=census1931&op=img”
LAC would gain credibility if it acknowledged that since the first few hours in the morning there has been essentially no 1931 census service, instead of suggesting it’s just slower.
Is there a direct link to the images? I can’t find them. Thanks.
Wow! Was the website ever crowded. I was anxious to find my fam because I wanted to see my name and also to find if my uncle was still living with us. The wait turned out to be so formidable that I have decided to wait a few days.