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EASTERN PEOPLE ON WESTERN PRAIRIES... census was so thorough it even included the instruction that “the decisive hour of reckoning” be considered precisely the midnight between 31 May and 1 June, “so that everyone born before that hour and dying after it are to be counted.” As censuses are often conducted over a series of days, particularly in large rural areas, such an instruction provides a clear and precise measure of reference for the populations being counted. This is especially important considering that the actual timeframe for taking the census was the entire month of June — a great many immigrants, births, and deaths can happen in a month, so having a firm date helps eliminate such potential variables in any given region.** The census counted 495,351 persons in Alberta, the lowest amongst the prairie provinces.** There is of course variation in the place of birth in the census records, but there are five that are by far the most common at this time: Alberta and England roughly tie for first in terms of most listed place of birth, followed by the United States, Scotland, and Ireland.* Though there are other birth places listed, such as three members of a Swedish family living in Hanna, there are exceptionally few from Russia and other Eastern European countries.?° Where such families do exist, they were generally living already in established groups on nearby farms or in small towns, demonstrating the close ethnic language tie that we have already observed in Russian censuses before the period of the October Revolution. One interesting difference between the Canadian and Russian censuses on this point however, is the treatment of language as an ethnic identifier. Many ethnic groups were subsumed in the Russian census into a larger heterogeneous group under the umbrella of shared language — all whose first language was German, for example, were listed as German, even though there were ethnic German, ethnic Rumanian, and ethnic Bessarabian groups that all spoke German. Instructions in the 1916 census of the prairies, however, explicitly attempted to avoid this. Instruction 81 on the document given to census takers is written out in bold letters as “Language not evidence of birthplace.”*’ The instruction further points out that this should be considered especially true for German speakers, as “over one-third of Austrians** and nearly three-fourths of the Swiss speak German” in addition to Germans, Bessarabians, and others.*? We can be somewhat more certain in the prairie census that when there is a cluster of ethnic groups, Instruction to Commissioners and Enumerators, Census and Statistics Office, 24 March 1916, Textual Records, R233-47-9-E, Volume 7180260, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), 3. 33 Tbid., 3. 34 Census of the Prairie Provinces, Census and Statistics Office, 1916, Textual Records, R23347-9-E, Volume 3800575, Microfilm Reels T-21948 to T-21954, LAC. 35 Ibid., 1906. 36 Ibid., Reel T-21948: 897. Instructions to Commissioners and Enumerators, Census and Statistics Office, 27. That is, individuals originating from the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, which was not officially dissolved until two years after the census. 39 Tbid., 27. + A7 +
