Greetings All. The following article from CBC News is available online at http://cbc.ca/stories/2002/06/14/online_census020614 There is also a link to an audio new article regarding this. I find particularly interesting the reference in the caption to a photograph about records from 1911 to 1951. Has the government quietly made these records available without any announcement? I am trying to obtain further clarification through Senator Milne's office, and from Chad Gaffield, team leader of this project. Rest assured I will let you know anything I can find out about this. Happy Hunting. Gordon A. Watts gordon_watts@telus.net Co-Chair, Canada Census Committee Port Coquitlam, BC http://globalgenealogy.com/Census en français http://globalgenealogy.com/Census/Index_f.htm Permission to forward without notice is granted. Online census database to offer link to Canada's past Last Updated Fri, 14 Jun 2002 19:01:20 OTTAWA - Universities across the country are working on putting a century of Canadian census records on the Internet for everyone to access. Handwritten census records are stored in the basement of a Statistics Canada building and will have to be deciphered before the information can be included in the national online database. Census records from 1911 to 1951 would be added to existing databases (Note - This line was a caption to a photograph that accompanied the article - GAW) "It'll be easily usable by any number of practitioners from genealogists to historians to sociologists to economists," said historian Peter Baskerville of the University of Victoria, one of the researchers on the project. It's expected it will take the researchers at seven Canadian universities - Ottawa, Memorial, Laval, Université du Québec à Trois Rivières, York, Toronto and Victoria - four years to complete the bilingual database. Chad Gaffield is the head of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa and team leader for the estimated $14-million project, one of the largest-ever social science research initiatives. He said researchers have already made some interesting discoveries from the census data. "We found that in 1901, there were roughly the same proportion of single parent families in Canada as today," said Gaffield. "So what's happening through our research projects is that we're really rethinking a lot of what we considered unprecedented phenomena." The census project is part of an international collaboration that Gaffield said will give Canada a solid foundation upon which to debate the nature of social change. Written by CBC News Online staff