Some Districts, like cities and towns have more than one Sub-District included in the table. The program automatically loads the images for the first Sub-District in the group.
When you get to the end of the
images for a particular Sub-District, you can click the "Choose Next Image Set" button and then choose the button in sequence below the image viewer to load the next set of images. If there are no extra Sub-Districts for the area, the "Choose Next Image Set" button will not be shown. Click the "Toggle Sub-District Menu" button to show or hide the Sub-District buttons.
You can choose to use either the Ancestry image viewer (if you have a subscription), or the image viewer I created to view Library & Archive Canada's free images.
1861 Census of Nova Scotia - Queens County - Polling Districts 1-7 - Roll: M-885
The 1861 Census of Canada is a collection of five provincial censuses. The first national census wasn't held until 1871, because confederation didn't occur until 1867. In 1861, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island only recorded the names of the heads of households, while New Brunswick, Canada East and Canada West recorded the names of everyone in the household.
The census for Queens County is divided up into seven polling districts. Unfortunately, no place names were listed. I was able to correctly determine the place names for each poll district by reading the book "Report of the Secretary of the Board of Statistics on the Census of Nova Scotia, 1861", that was published in 1862. The table below is from the book as well. You can see the book that has been digitized by Google. I have included the count of males and females in the households. This helps the researcher work backwards from later censuses that list the names of all household members. I have also attempted to transcribe all the names with the common spellings used today.
Named in honour of Sir Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Queens and Lennox, who was Governor General of British North America 1818-1819, Queens County was created in 1835. Queens County comprises that territory known as the Southern District which was established in 1824 at the time of the dividing of Cape Breton Island into three districts. The boundaries of the Southern District were defined at the time of its establishment. Those same boundaries were determined to be the boundaries of Queens County by statute in 1847.
Click the buttons below to see the complete Queens County census records for 1861.
Click here to return to the Nova Scotia census map.