How do we begin to understand neighbourhoods and communities? What tools can we use to help us explore these worlds? Historical sources on immigrants can be divided into three groups. First there are municipal records, statistical and circumstantial, ranging from assessment rolls and city directories to pedlars’ license lists, arrest logs, police books and student records. This material can be used to recreate the encounters that immigrants face with official Canada. Second, there are the numerous written records of religious groups and missions, reports of settlement houses, royal commissions, medical officers’ reports, boards of education papers and the English-speaking press. These materials provide a broader picture but to enhance our understanding of immigrant and ethnic neighborhoods and communities we need to hear from the immigrant’s own view. Here we can rely on oral testimony that uses the memory of immigrants themselves. There are also written materials such as church almanacs, jubilee volumes, letters and guides to letter writing in English and the language of the country of origin. There are also reports and letters from intellectuals and government officials from the homeland from which people migrated.
The census can’t tell us about attitudes, identities and ways of thinking in the world of ethnic groups. They can tell us about residential segregation that is how some groups live in particular areas. Immigrant quarters or ethnic neighbourhoods can be seen as many things. They are the beginning of the process of acculturation or as breathing spaces for immigrants and their children. They are also working-class neighbourhoods, or internal colonies within the larger world.