The Census

The majority of census has now been transcribed and others in the process of transcription have also been indexed by volunteers.

What is the census?

The census is a statistical exercise undertaken to inform the government, counting and recording facts about the population. You could say that the first large scale census taken in modern history was Domesday and there have been others over the years, such as Muster rolls, taken to see what able bodied men and weapons were available for war.

A census as we understand it now has been carried out every decade since 1801. The only exception was 1941 when other things seemed more important. It is not intended for family historians to use, but as a government exercise in finding out statistics about the population, to enable them to make informed decisions on a wide variety of topics including housing, transport and food, and to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the economic structure of the country.

What does it tell us?

To view a sample page click on the picture, right (requires Acrobat Reader)

From 1801-1831 purely statistical data was collected with no usable genealogical material, however the 1841 census introduced records with some personal information for the first time.

The usefulness of the 1841 census is limited to family historians because it didn’t accurately record people’s ages, or where they were born, only noting if they were born in the same county or not.

The amount of information collected was extended in 1851 and from 1851 to 1901 there are only minor changes to the information recorded on the census form. The principal information you can expect to find is:

Address Unfortunately not always very accurate, unless your ancestors lived in a named house or farm, you may have to settle for simply knowing the name of the road or the village.

Name The surname with at least one forename, although it could turn out to be a pet name, and sometimes you find second forenames or initials.

Relationship How the individual is related to the head of the household, information providing the structure of the family, especially where married children or relations are included in the household.

Condition Whether married, widowed or single, again useful in establishing family structure.

Age From 1851 onwards, these are usually as accurate as your ancestors were able or prepared to supply. In the 1841 census they are usually rounded to the nearest 5 years for adults.

Occupation The rank, profession or occupation can be useful in helping to establish that you have found the correct person, especially if they share a relatively common name.

Where born Another field that is useful in helping you identify individuals, although for a number of reasons it frequently contains mistakes.

Possible pitfalls

Many people don’t realise that the census page images we see are actually transcripts of the household census forms, the details were copied into the books by the enumerators. This provides several opportunities for mistakes to occur, firstly as they tried to decipher the writing on the household forms, which were later destroyed. Illiterate or barely literate ancestors may not have understood the form or even know with any accuracy the answer to the questions. They may have been suspicious of this government prying into their affairs and been less than honest in their answers. Just as today, a certain percentage manage to avoid being included, either deliberately or accidentally. With the possibility of errors and misinformation creeping in from the very outset, you should always use your own judgment when assessing the information from the census, it may be completely accurate, but you will often find discrepancies.

Using the census

We will have to wait until 2012 for the release of the next set of census returns for 1911, but there is a wealth of information in the 7 decades of census that are currently available to us.

The biggest problem for the family historian is actually finding the entries they need amongst this vast collection of data. Unless your ancestors never moved more than a mile from their origins, some sort of finding aid is required.

At first the only help available was an index to places, to help you locate the relevant section to manually search page by page, and for larger towns and cities a street index. Family history societies then started to index their areas and make some name indexes available. These didn’t make a very large impression though and most of the census remained unindexed until the joint project to transcribe and index the 1881 census took place and showed what could be done. The upsurge in the use of home computers and internet have brought a complete new set of tools to the aid of the family historian, and an ever growing demand for more information to become accessible online.

British Data Archive have made the census page images available on CD, for everyone to use on their own home computers at any time. This itself was a great improvement, as only a couple of years ago you would probably have to travel the country to get only a couple of hours access. Having produced the images for everyone to use, the next logical step was to provide those images with the indexing necessary to make them easy to use, and with this aim in mind, the S&N setup TheGenealogist indexing and transcription project.

Paleography (how to deal with difficult handwriting)

On many of the census pages the handwriting is hard to read. If you are having difficulty in reading a name the first thing to do is look at other entries to get a guide to how the author writes various letters. It can take a while to “get your eye in” as to how a particular enumerator writes. First names are more readily recognised and so gives a basis as to what letter shapes an enumerator uses.

When trying to interpret a line you should look at the line above and follow any descenders down and try to imagine the line without the clutter of descenders from the line above.

If a name is particularly difficult you will need to break it down into a range of names from the possible letters.

As a general guide the following rules apply:

Letters such as p, f and q normally have straight descenders going below the line.

letters such as y, g, j are likely to have loops to the left where as letters that swing to the right could be f or q.

Look for the crosses on t and the dots on j and i

Look for straight strokes of l

If you can’t distinguish a forename don’t forget to look at the column the age is written in to check the gender of the person and their position in the household: “Dau” Daughter, “Son” etc.

Consider all the information given about the family to verify you have found the person you are looking for. Don’t forget: early census material may show a different surname spelling to a later one; as literacy improved these variations reduced.

Working with the census

Indexes are the key to finding those important entries in the census and TheGenealogist aims to provide indexing of the very highest accuracy. You will find two types of indexing for census data is available:

Census Name indexes can be used to quickly locate the entries you want, and can be used in conjunction with census page images on CD or microfilm.

Census transcripts have all of the important fields transcribed, providing a greater range of search options to locate your ancestors. If you don't have broadband, then they are a faster option, as all the information can be seen without downloading the page first. When you have located an entry it can then be checked against the original page image. Online census page images linked to the Census transcripts are now available for many counties and years.

Follow the other census links to find out more: