Get your pencils ready. May 14th is just around the corner. Census Day. It couldn’t come at a worse time for farmers, right in the middle of seeding as it is, but haven’t we come to expect that?
Census taking – counting the population and defining details about it, such as ages, national origins and occupations – is not new. Governments have been doing it for years.
Christ was born where he was because, according to Saint Luke, “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled…And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city.”
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A census gives a picture of the country and of the people who make up the country. In the early days, some people didn’t want to be enumerated because they felt it was a way for the government to get information for taxation purposes.
While census returns have a variety of uses for government, business and industry – including, yes, taxation, they also have a more esoteric value: they are an invaluable tool for genealogists, people searching their family histories.
They tell where the family lived at a given time, who the family members were, their approximate ages, place of birth and religion.
Sometimes the census-taker has added notes above and beyond the bare figures he was collecting for the census. The official talking to my great-grandfather in Manitoba in 1881 noted that the event occurred “on a windy day;” the fellow talking to another family noted that the husband could not write and the wife could neither read nor write. It is these small details that add life to long-ago relatives.
Farmers asked to fill in the agricultural census I know want to tear their hair out with the amount of detail which must be provided at such a busy time of the year.
If nothing else, they may want to take comfort from the fact that they are creating an historical document that one day some distant relative may discover in the Public Archives of 2096. They may be as delighted as I was when I discovered the 1861 agricultural census return for one of our forbears: the cash value of his farm was $400; the farm machinery was worth $80. He had 30 acres in crop in 1860 and had on hand 200 pounds each of wool and maple sugar, 50 pounds of butter and one 200-pound barrel of pork.
The livestock, valued at $50, included two bulls or oxen over three years of age, one “milch” cow and four pigs.
I treasured this document from the past and the glimpse it gives of life on the farm at that time. I hope someday someone will take as much pleasure from the census form we will be filling out on May 14.
