Thursday, February 9, 2017

1971 Census CSD placenames

Question
In the data file of the 1971 CSDs, we have geographic information like this, for St Catharines:
PROVINCE 35
ED 0
EA 0
COUNTY 28
MUNIC 5

We knew 35=Ontario and 28=Niagara (in 1971), but identifying 5 as St Catharines required matching population numbers in this file with the CSD volumes that only have place names, no codes. We can manage that for 12 municipalities in Niagara, but it’s a bit cumbersome for Ontario or Canada…

What I haven’t been able to find is a comprehensive list of CSD place names with their corresponding codes. Appendix 1 in this document has a partial list that shows the sort of reference I’m looking for:
http://data.library.utoronto.ca/datapub/codebooks/c/cc71/geog/gtf71cbk.pdf

We don’t have anything like this in our print holdings, and my attempts to figure out which census volume it might be based on the volume summaries has failed. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer
You can find the documents on the DLI FTP at /MAD_DLI_IDD_DAM/Root/census_pop_recens/1971/Doc

There is a series of digitized booklets with names like cen71-official-list-03-ontario.pdf (one each for Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario and West). The notes at the beginning will tell you how to derive the CSD from the BST variables.