Home and Away: Patterns of Residence, Schooling, and Work among Children and Never Married Young Adults, Canada, 1871 and 1901

Abstract

Microdata samples of the 1871 and 1901 censuses of Canada document a significant shift in which residence with parents increased substantially among young children, while leaving home was increasingly likely among those in their late teens and in their twenties. There were striking rural-urban and regional differences in these patterns. Surprisingly large numbers of children and young adults living away attended school; others worked. Both were especially common in the still partially settled regions of the west. Religious and ethnic differences were muted. Multivariate analysis confirms the significance of schooling and working for living away from home. The normalization of familial child nurturing did not rapidly undermine informal practices of child fostering.

Lives of their own, a place of their own? The living arrangements of ‘business girls’ in early twentieth-century Canadian cities

“…Deeper 'drilling-down' into the distribution of young female office workers between the familial, small-group quarters and larger commercial boarding, lodging, and rooming establishments has now become a possibility for the beginning of our study period, with the August 2015 release of the public online version of the 1921 microdata sample. Similarly, regional differences in women clerical workers' recourse to large commercial boarding and lodging establishments -more prevalent in the 'frontier' context of the Far West at the turn of the century (Darroch 2001) -can now be examined for 1921.…”

“…Scholarly work on single urban working women's living arrangements is very limited, especially in Canada. It focuses either on lower-paid industrial workers (Strange 1995), or on the pre-First World War period (Sager 2014), when young single working women were more likely to have been ruralto-urban migrants needing to lodge with kin or strangers than the children of families already settled in the city (Darroch 2001;Olson and Thornton 2011). The urban housing supply was also less diversified than it would become in the 1920s-30s.…”

“…See also Darroch (2001). Also, where applicable, rather than limiting our concept of 'city' to the core city municipality alone, we created, for all four census years, geographies corresponding to the Greater Cities/Metropolitan Area concept introduced by the DBS in 1941.…”

Une ressource numérique pour l’analyse historique : le recensement canadien de 1891

“…Le recensement de 1891 a été le premier également à prendre note du « lien avec le chef de famille »; la diffusion de cette information fera avancer la recherche sur la composition des familles et la cohabitation à cette époque (Baskerville, 2001;Darroch, 2000Darroch, , 2001Dillon, 1997). D'autre part, les données de 1891 pourraient permettre, indirectement, d'inférer plus effi cacement les liens familiaux au sein de la population recensée en 1871 et en 1881 (Dillon, 1996).…”