Street-crawling

Even the seagulls that soar above the river of sometimes land among the pigeons bobbing along the city streets. Take a street-level view of one of Montréal’s 505 census divisions, each of which covered between 50 and 300 households in 1901. Make it your neighbourhood and explore it block by block, street by street, or even family by family.

Cultural diversity is one of the key features that make Montréal such an interesting and fast-changing city. Since so many controversies and conflicts arose from differences in religion and language, we have defined cultural communities by cross-tabulating religion and language. In nineteenth-century Montréal, these communities were often segregated, but the level of segregation could vary from block to block. What were the consequences of segregation? The data on Belonging provide a window on how social status interacts with language and religion.

The average Montréal household had five members. But in some cases, there were up to a dozen people living in the same household and as many as a thousand living in the same institution!

Mapping the number of servants per household reveals a high degree of segregation between neighbourhoods where most households depended on servant labour and other neighbourhoods where virtually no servants were employed. Census takers recorded only live-in help as servants, but many women also reported employment as day workers. A family might hire a charwoman by the day or a laundress to wash its laundry in her home once a week.