A glimpse of what life was like in Deseronto in 1906 and 1907 has come to us courtesy of a conversation recorded in 1967. Bill and Jack Duncan were taped as they reminisced about their arrival in Deseronto and Bill’s early experiences of work in Canada. Their father, John Duncan, had been a shoe laster in Leicester, England, but his involvement in the trade union movement meant that it was difficult for him to find work there and the family relied on their oldest son, Bill, for their income (26 shillings a week).
John and his wife Maria decided to move their five surviving children across the ocean to Canada. The family spent less than a year in Deseronto before moving on to Stirling and then Toronto, but Bill and Jack had some strong memories of their time here, including loitering in the Post Office in order to get warm in the winter!
Library and Archives Canada have made the 1921 census available through Ancestry.ca. The census has not yet been indexed (which means it can’t be searched by name at present), but it is available to browse. You need to sign up for a free Ancestry account in order to see this, or you can get access without having to sign up if you use Ancestry from a public library which has a subscription to the Ancestry service (most libraries in Ontario do).
To see the entries for Deseronto, you’ll need to select ‘Ontario’ from the menu on the left of the Ancestry 1921 page, then go to the ‘Hastings East’ district. You’ll find that Deseronto is covered by three sub-districts: 44 (Centre Ward), 45 (East Ward) and 46 (West Ward of the town). This census was taken on June 1st, 1921.
And speaking of libraries and 1921, we’ve just digitized the first ten pages of Deseronto Public Library’s register of books borrowed in March, April and May 1921. This volume was maintained by Deseronto’s fourth librarian, Flossie Hall.1 So if you do find a Deseronto relative in the 1921 census, you can also check the borrowing register and see what they were reading!
Register of books issued in 1921
The books aren’t available in the library itself these days, but you can find scanned copies of many of them online through Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and the Open Library, to get a taste of what people were enjoying back in 1921.
1 There’s a photograph of Flossie featured in this earlier post.
Deseronto Archives 