Needs race changed throughout census
1901 Canadian Census, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The census is written in French, and the race is written as "B", which the English-speaking indexer incorrectly transcribed as "Black". However, the word for "White" in French is "Blanche", so the "B" refers to "White", not to "Black".
The entire census needs to be reviewed and corrected as needed.
Answers
-
@SerraNola - can you add this to your list? I do have considerable worries about the size of the checking workload here, but perhaps you know someone who might hazard a guess.
Incidentally, I'm fairly convinced that this is not the first time that we have had issues with "race" in one form or another with some previous data items being created from nowhere? Which is exactly why I don't touch the item with a barge pole when searching. (I hope that English idiom comes over 😉)
4 -
"touch with a barge pole" works in American English as well. Although we often use "10-foot pole," having not gone metric. 😎
I also have a dim recall of an earlier thread about the misinterpretation of race on the Canadian census.
5 -
@WilmethAnnCarol2 Our team will take a look at this and see if it can be updated. It will likely depend on what percentage were indexed wrong. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
1 -
Am I missing out on something here? When I open the link provided in the original post, I see image 1384 of 5000. This is for a page starting with an entry for one Cleophase Lebel which is attached to a profile. The "Colour/Couleur" for his source entry is written as "B" for blanc, but when I select that entry, the record information panel shows "Race: White", as I would expect. The same applies to a number of other sources that I picked at random from that page and other pages. Where would I see the "Black" value displayed?
I first looked at the image within a few hours of this discussion being started. Nothing has changed since then.
1
