Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel County, Canada West

In this exploration of the nature of social reality in a mid-nineteenth-century Upper Canadian farming community, Professor Gagan employs the techniques of historical demography to reconstruct the population of mid-Victorian Peel County – specifically the histories of those families who occupied the county between 1845 and 1875. The evidence will be familiar to anyone who has tried to trace nineteenth-century Canadian family roots, but in this analysis the material is used to answer a broad...