After the legislated 92 years in a vault, the highly anticipated 1931 Census of Canada will be made available to the public on June 1, 2023. Ancestry is working with Library and Archives Canada and FamilySearch to digitize these precious records for future generations.
Collected during the Great Depression and at a time of significant immigration, the Census provides a snapshot of the more than 10 million people living in Canada in 1931. It will also offer a unique window into life during the interwar period.
Ancestry will work with LAC and FamilySearch to create an advanced searchable database for Canadians, and those with Canadian heritage who wish to look for their ancestors.
In this collaborative effort to increase access to the 1931 Census of Canada, all 234,687 pages of the census will be digitized and Ancestry will apply its state-of-the-art handwriting recognition technology to the digital images to create a full index of the entire census. The images and indexes will be available to search on Ancestry.ca and FamilySearch.org.
The release of the 1931 Census could enable millions of Canadians over the age of 60 to find census data for their parents for the first time. For those aged between 35 and 49, the census offers the first opportunity to access records for their grandparents.
Being able to uncover information about parents and grandparents for the first time through the 1931 Census will have a profound impact on how Canadians will be able to reconnect with their ancestors. For many this will be the beginning of a journey of personal discovery about the lives their predecessors lived at a unique moment in Canadian history.