Historical Canadian Persons

Unnamed individuals are included with labels such as “A Free Black mother.” Place names are geolocated. A small selection of links to digitized Canadian census records and fonds published by Library and Archives Canada are included.

The data includes links to the sections of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries from which the set of individuals covered in the datasets and the primary assertions about them were derived. Although the team devised a preliminary model for nationality aligned with other LINCS data, in the end designations related to individuals’ nationality, national origin and ethnicity were not carried over from the source. The team lacked decolonized vocabularies against which to map terms for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, and was wary both of perpetuating colonial terminology and of omitting such designations solely for Indigenous people.