I think this is Edith and maybe that’s Charlie Gagnon, who died in a Cornwall hotel fire in 1910.
Well, the 1911 Canadian Census includes a bit about conjugal status in, basically, all the towns and cities.
Richmond, in 1911, had 618 single men and 699 single women. The town had a total population of 2,175, a decline from the previous census.
The town had 416 dwelling and 436 families.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the Census man came around on June 15, 1911. Margaret said they did not take Herb or Marion’s stats.
Herb was drifting around the West and Marion was working in Montreal. Odd, because so was Edith and both women were living in a boarding house. But Edith got enumerated as a resident of Tighsolas, with Flora.
So Edith became a statistic and Marion and Herb didn’t. I suspect Marion didn’t figure in any part of the Census, Herb certainly not.
So the many many young people drifting around looking for work (or actually working) didn’t figure in Canada’s big picture in 1911.
Even more odd. The table lists Single, Married, Widowed, Legally Separted and Divorced. There were no Legally Separated or Divorced listed for Richmond. (As the Nicholson letters reveal, people of their acquaintance did ‘break up housekeeping’ and even apply for divorce.)
But the number of married women doesn’t equal the number of married men. And this is the same for many towns. What gives here? Is there a category missing from the Census? Perhaps ‘illegally separated and moved far away’. Norman Nicholson, despite being away on the railroad in Ontario, was listed as living at Tighsolas in Richmond.
In general, in Canada, there were more men than women. Why? Immigrants, I guess. Workers. In the UK, after WWI when their stock of eligible males was devastated, some magazines counselled single women to go to Canada. But they warned the single men were not to be found in the big cities of the East, only on the frontier.
