Canadian Regional Historical Wealth Micro-Data Collection
The Canadian Regional Historical Wealth Micro-Data Collection is a dataset of probated decedents' estate inventories assembled by economic historian Livio Di Matteo [1] of Lakehead University, and released in the summer of 2022 through the Lakehead University Library and Archives.[1] It is the source of record for Curriepedia articles drawn from probate records; see Category:People from probate records.
The underlying records come from Ontario Surrogate Court probate records — estate wealth inventories taken at death — linked where possible to the 1881, 1891, 1901, and 1911 Censuses of Canada. The collection covers several regional cohorts, and is the basis of much of Di Matteo's published research on the historical distribution of wealth.
This is part of the https://michaelcurrie.com/lakehead-reconstruction.html project.
Coverage
| Cohort | Decedents | Period | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ontario | 3,515 | 1892 | 39 counties; ~83% of traceable decedents census-linked |
| Ontario | 3,641 | 1902 | 39 counties; ~86% census-linked |
| Wentworth County | 2,516 | 1872–1927 | five-year intervals |
| Thunder Bay District | 2,338 | 1885–1930 | 1,646 from Port Arthur and Fort William (the Lakehead) |
| Manitoba (East Judicial District) | 826 | 1873–1927 | five-year intervals; ~26% census-linked |
The records are inherently biased toward older, male, and higher-wealth decedents — a property of who tended to be probated — and census-linkage success varies by cohort. These limitations should be kept in mind when citing any individual record.
The database
The raw source material is dozens of inconsistent legacy Excel files (one per county or region, with drifting column names and codings). For Curriepedia use these were consolidated into a single spreadsheet (38,534 rows across all source files, including Di Matteo's derived analytical files) and loaded into a documented SQLite database, probate.db, holding one row per decedent record. The database defines a single probate_records table and a convenience view, v_wealth_by_county_year.
Each record carries, where available: name, occupation, place of residence, sex, marital status, number of children, testate/intestate status, a full probate inventory broken into line items (household goods, farm implements, livestock, real estate, cash, bank deposits, securities, life insurance, debts, and more), the total estate wealth, and — for census-linked cohorts — demographic and economic variables from the matching census.
The column groupings (a fuller codebook lives in schema.sql in the bundle below):
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| A. Core identifiers | sequence number, name, occupation, county/district, sub-district code |
| B. Demographics | sex, age, urban/rural, birthplace, farmer flag, occupational status, religion, marital status, parents' birthplaces |
| C–D. Probate inventory | testate flag and sixteen inventory line items, in current dollars at death |
| E–F. Family & literacy | farm acreage, children, ability to sign, census literacy |
| G. Wealth | total estate wealth (the headline variable) |
| H. Census-linked (1902) | occupation, immigration/naturalisation, earnings, employment, mother tongue, infirmities |
| I. Manitoba / Thunder Bay | will number, year probated, year of death, location text, GDP deflator |
| J–K. Wentworth & derived | observation year, financial-asset aggregates and liquidity ratios |
Access and reuse
The Lakehead University Library and Archives record states "No restrictions on access."[1] Credit for assembling the collection belongs to Professor Di Matteo and Lakehead University; the authoritative copy is held by the Lakehead University Library and Archives. The consolidated database and loader scripts used on Curriepedia are a reorganisation of the public data created only to make the records easier to reference, and do not replace that canonical copy. Articles citing an individual record should use {{Probate source}}, which points back to this page.
Bundle
A working bundle — the SQLite database (probate.db), the consolidated spreadsheet, the documented schema (schema.sql), and the loader scripts — is mirrored here for permanent reference:
The bundle's README.txt documents a small set of cross-cohort consistency fixes applied during the load (Thunder Bay sex codes regularised to the schema's 1/0 coding; the county field populated for the Thunder Bay and Manitoba cohorts; and a normalised location_norm column derived from the free-text place names). No records were deleted or merged.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Canadian Regional Wealth Micro-Data Collection, Lakehead University Library and Archives. https://archives.lakeheadu.ca/index.php/canadian-regional-wealth-micro-data-collection