Between Rural and Urban Settings : an Assessment Based on the 1901 Canadian Census

Marie-Eve Harton, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

The turn of the twentieth century was marked by growing urbanization in Canada, as the proportion of people living in cities rose from 13% to 37% during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1901, the authorities responsible for designing the questionnaire added a question about whether Canadian-born individuals were born in a rural or urban environment, an addition that was not included in subsequent Canadian censuses. While various studies have used this dichotomous information in their analysis, there remains ambiguity regarding the definition of each environment. In 2007, Ken Sylvester used the “rural-urban” question to analyze rural-to-urban migration in Canada and wrote: “The example offered by census authorities in the instructions leaves the impression that to be country-born one had to live on a farm. Testing the idea with any rigour would be difficult.” (Sylvester, 2007: 155) Almost 20 years later, the Integrated Infrastructure for historical microdata on the population of Quebec based on the linkage of census data (1852-1921) and civil records (1621-1924) provides an opportunity to “test the idea”. This paper takes Quebec City and Trois-Rivières as two case studies. In both cities, a large number of individuals come from the surrounding countryside and near 60% of the individuals enumerated in 1901 were linked to civil records. This paper aims to assess which geographic entities respondents had in mind when indicating that they were born in either a rural or an urban area. Preliminary results appear to confirm that the conception of rural and urban environments conveyed in the instructions corresponds to the two ends of a spectrum, and that between them lies a large number of intermediate environments combining characteristics of both. This aligns with numerous studies that have highlighted the complexity of Quebec’s urbanization and industrialization processes.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 159. Building and Interpreting Censuses I