14 January 2020

Which Site for Canadian Censuses?

Which is the best website for genealogy? You're probably fed up to the teeth with being asked the question. It depends on the enquirer's needs. Where are you searching? For what time period? Completeness, ease of use, cost ... all are considerations. You can think of others.

The table below is a year by year compilation of the Canadian census records available for five major organization websites. It shows the number of records available and whether the information is linked to an image of the original. More records is not necessarily more complete. There may be duplicates; some organizations may be counting corrections submitted as additional entries.

Overall Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has coverage of all censuses, and some earlier ones not listed, with images of the original available. And it's free.

Ancestry($) and MyHeritage($) both have complete coverage with image access, except for the 1926 census of the Prairie Provinces. The value added by the commercial sites is the suggestions for other records of interest — based on the record found, and a more reliable website — LAC's was down for a day when I was preparing this post.

There are gaps in both FamilySearch and Findmypast($) coverage.

Not included in the table, but worth considering is automatedgenealogy.com which has 5,665,421 lines transcribed for the 1901 census, 802,230 for 1906 and 7,584,277 for 1911 with links to the images at LAC.


CensusRecordsOrganizationImages
1926
2,073,271FamilySearchYes
2,067,393LACYes
0AncestryNo
0FindmypastNo
0MyHeritageNo
1921
8,800,634AncestryYes
8,788,483LACYes
8,683,491MyHeritageYes
0FamilySearchNo
0FindmypastNo
1916
1,811,736FamilySearchYes
1,690,193AncestryYes
1,686,666LACYes
1,590,785MyHeritageYes
0FindmypastNo
1911
7,246,159FamilySearchNo
7,223,678AncestryYes
7,204,838LACYes
7,157,334FindmypastYes
7,157,334MyHeritageYes
1906
805,908MyHeritageYes
804,734AncestryYes
802,443FamilySearchNo
802,442LACYes
0FindmypastNo
1901
5,371,315LACYes
5,343,565AncestryYes
5,343,565FamilySearchYes
5,213,095MyHeritageYes
5,167,205FindmypastYes
1891
4,833,239LACYes
4,790,154AncestryYes
4,787,225FamilySearchNo
4,539,639FindmypastYes
4,539,588MyHeritageYes
1881
4,281,168AncestryYes
4,281,160FamilySearchYes
4,278,327LACYes
4,273,931FindmypastYes
4,273,931MyHeritageYes
1871
3,519,941FamilySearchNo
3,516,910AncestryYes
3,485,761LACYes
3,292,788FindmypastYes
3,292,788MyHeritageYes
1861
3,112,269LACYes
3,087,518FamilySearchYes
2,958,892AncestryYes
2,764,253FindmypastYes
2,764,253MyHeritageYes
1851
2,312,919LACYes
1,487,802AncestryYes
1,487,802FamilySearchNo
1,364,567MyHeritageYes
1,364,597FindmypastYes

2 comments:

  1. I appreciate your post on the Census. However, I would question your comment on "more reliable" if you are talking about Ancestry. They too have had down days. But much more important to me is the fact that their transcriptions are completely unreliable. While searching Great War soldiers from my town, I have found the town name spelled in at least 20 different and incorrect ways making searching difficult, and reliability a joke.

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  2. Thank you for this chart. I found one years ago but haven't seen an up-to-date chart for several years.
    The thing that I like about Ancestry is that you can see the entire household in the index and know if you have the correct family or possibly the correct family.

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