The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI) is a census-based digital project which involves scholars from seven Canadian universities and partners at IBM and Statistics Canada. The first project based in the Humanities and Social Sciences to receive a major grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the CCRI’s mandate is to create public use microdatabases of the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 national censuses of Canada. This new research infrastructure represents a fresh contribution to the study of the making of modern Canada, and has combined ‘traditional’ research methodologies in the humanities and social sciences with an array of digital products and data processing software. As a result, a wealth of new research on individuals, families, households, and communities (ethnic, religious, geographic, etc.) will be supported and enriched. This article provides an overview of the creation of what has become an innovative cyber-infrastructure, one which has successfully merged quantitative and qualitative data into one interactive digital platform. In 2002, the CCRI received its initial funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. Over the course of the following five years, project participants created 1.8 million case records from five separate Canadian censuses, all in computer-readable format. Each census year was then overlaid with a GIS mapping sequence, representing the shifting boundaries of census districts over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, the database information received added value from both a national survey of newspapers (in both English and French) covering the social and political context of census-taking and the dissemination of result, as well as a host of internal working documents, memoranda and correspondence from the officials who conducted the original censuses and tabulated the original data at Statistics Canada. The result is a massive, searchable and interactive research infrastructure capable of supporting research in history, geography, sociology, Canadian Studies, medicine, and a host of other disciplines either separately or as multidisciplinary efforts. Beginning with an overview of the project’s history and inspiration, the paper explores the broad range of goals and challenges which coloured the construction of the database, as well as the innovative means and solutions which were crafted along the way. It will examine the tools and strategies which have been created as a result of the project; these include the project’s sample points identification, date entry, and reporting program (S.P.I.D.E.R.), the spatial analysis of the updated geodatabase, and the cleaning, coding, and conceptual organization of the wealth of contextual data which the project has amassed. A number of specific elements – such as the integration of the contextual data and the building of an effective User Guide – are also explored. In addition, the long-term contributions and possibilities of the CCRI database, and the type of new research which it can support and has already fostered both in Canada and abroad, are discussed.