Scottish Migration Since 1750 by Docherty James C.;

Author:Docherty, James C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Making the Sources Speak

The first general counts of the Scots in what is now Canada were made between 1842 and 1844, covering modern Ontario and Quebec. There were counts made earlier than this that included birthplace, but they only covered the small settlements of Red River and Nova Scotia (1817). Details of all these counts were published in Volume 4 of the 1870–1871 Canadian census. The Scots-born were first identified in the US census in 1850. The printed versions of these and later censuses usually showed only their location; the numbers of males and females were not published until 1900 in the United States and 1911 in Canada. This information can be supplemented by unpublished information from the North Atlantic Population Project for the United States (1880) and Canada (1881); as well, the printed US census for 1870 gives labor force figures for the Scots-born for persons age 10 or older, and the 1890 census published them by sex.

The bald figures for the Scots in these printed censuses disguise how the two countries offered different things to different groups. Canada offered opportunities in agriculture and the reassurance of staying a British subject, and it also seems to have been generally easier for poorer migrants to establish themselves there. The United States offered greater and wider economic opportunities but more for those migrants with money or skills in demand. Both nations viewed the Scots positively and they were ideally placed to use North America as they wished. They could go there as settlers or as seasonal workers. If they did not like Canada they could try the United States, and if they did not like either, they could go back to Scotland. So what did they do?

On their own, the printed censuses of both countries are incapable of answering questions such as these, not just for the Scots but for any immigrant group. What is required is information on when immigrants arrived by age and sex, information that was not published in Canada until 1931 and never for the United States. Limited, general information on when immigrants arrived was published for the United States from 1890 and for Canada in 1901, but this is of little value for particular immigrant groups. To fill these gaps, I searched publicly available genealogical sites for the Canadian census for 1901 and the US census for 1910; this yielded samples of 10,000 commonly occurring Scottish family names for Canada and 7,300 for the United States. The family names searched for both countries were Brown, Campbell, MacDonald, Smith, and Stewart. Because less information was published about the Scottish population of Canada, I added Anderson, Cameron, Fraser, Johnson, MacKay, MacKenzie, Miller, Morrison, Reed, Robertson, Ross, Scott, Sutherland, Thompson, and Wilson to the search.

Knowing the ages by sex of immigrants for particular decades enables their past numbers to be reconstructed by restoring to them the expected deaths that would have occurred after arrival. Not all the Scots told the census collectors when they came, and the quality of their responses may have degraded with failing memories too.

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