The Grossmans and the Glionnis were neighbours on Edward Street. They came from different cultures but shared much in common: both took in extended relatives; both pooled incomes from several low-paying jobs to make ends meet.

It’s a typical tale of immigrant life in Toronto. But this one is set in 1921.

And now, with that year’s census fully indexed and searchable online, it’s easier than ever to get a glimpse into what life was like at the time.

The census was released this summer by Library and Archives Canada — there’s a 92-year waiting period before census contents become public — but the searchable version was just released Tuesday at Ancestry.ca. It’s free for Canadians to search, although registration is required.

The volume of information available in the census is what makes it fascinating for genealogists and people digging up their own family histories, said Lesley Anderson, a genealogist at Ancestry.ca. You can see when people were born, what language they spoke, what they did for a living, and who their neighbours were.

“What kind of house did they live in? How much money did they make?” Anderson added. “You can see it all as a nice little family picture.”

The decade leading up to 1921 was a formative one for Canada. Since the previous census was conducted in 1911, the country’s population swelled to 8.8 million, an increase of 22 per cent.

Immigration played a big role in that growth. But just as important as the number of new immigrants is where they were coming from, said Mark McGowan, a history professor at the University of Toronto.

“Twenty-three per cent of the people that appear in the census were actually not born in Canada,” he said. “And only half of that 23 per cent were born in the U.K. So now you have close to 10 per cent of the Canadian population that isn’t of British background or born in Canada.”

While the era is typically remembered for the settling of the Prairies, lots of newcomers came to Toronto because that’s where the jobs were, he said.

“There were parts of this city that were as multicultural a century ago as they are now.”

One of those places was known as the Ward — the area just north of City Hall where the Grossmans and Glionnis lived. There were Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews — the Grossmans were listed as “Polish-Russian,” which was a common type of designation because borders in the region had been shifting since World War I. There were newcomers from China and Greece and a small black community, including a group of railroad porters from the United States who rented a place at 142 Edward St. for $30 a month.

It was one of Toronto’s most vibrant areas, but also one of the poorest, McGowan said.

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“There are photographs of that period with ramshackle housing and you look down the lane of Elizabeth St. and you see Old City Hall. So juxtaposed against the movers and the shakers that should be doing something about it is some of the most impoverished pieces of property in the entire city, and the whole area is inhabited mostly by immigrants.”

The indexed census will be available free on Ancestry.ca for at least three years. After that, the census will remain on the website, but possibly as part of its subscription package. Free access remains available through Library and Archives Canada and at subscribing libraries.

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