Newfoundland's Grand Banks Message Board

I don't understand how a lot of my ancestors cannot be found in many of the census. I know for a fact that they were alive and living in St. John's but they are not in the census. I know that the numerators went door to door and many people were not home but for two census in a row seems odd. My ggrandmother lived to be abt 85 yrs old yet missing from the 1921 & 1935 census along with her immediate family. Is it they just did not want to be counted? Can anyone explain this?

It's possible that they're there but that the enumerator's hand writing was so bad that the transcriptionist couldn't make it out properly or at all. (Anyone who says that hand writing was better 100 years ago has never looked through census data.)

If you know where they lived try searching on the address or, as a last resort, paging through that section of the census to find them.

It's tedious but it can be done. I was able to find my Grandmother in the 1921 Canadian census by searching page by page. Fortunately, I knew which sub-section to look in. When I found the page, I immediately understood why I couldn't find her by searching. Her last name was Megaw but it was transcribed as Higins. That was a perfectly reasonable transcription given the hand writing.