Census records are wonderful documents for discovering addresses of where your ancestors lived. They can also reveal ages, names and places of birth for other members of the household. With the particulars of the street, or road, name we can turn to a map to see if we can locate where our forebears lived in a particular town, city or area in the countryside. But this simple task can be fraught with difficulties if over the years the road name has changed or the area has been redeveloped.

A handy and often quicker way to discover where an ancestor’s home had been is to search the census using TheGenealogist. This platform has the added benefit of being able to click straight through from the census transcript to then view a historical map of where your ancestor lived on its Map Explorer for a number of census years. This tool makes it possible to see a pin dropped on a map of where your ancestor had lived and also to change the type of map that it is displayed on from a Victorian Ordnance Survey map to various modern maps. The modern maps include not only present-day street maps but also a satellite version, all of which can be very useful for seeing how the area looks today.

From Scottish Lighthouses to Treasure Island

In March of the year 1851 a population census was taken in the United Kingdom. It was the second such endeavour to include details of household members present on the night and it revealed that the total population of England, Wales and Scotland was recorded as being 21,121,967.

In Edinburgh, we are able to find a four month old boy who is counted in his very first census. This child is living in his parent’s home in Scotland’s capital city and the house in question is in the parish of St Cuthbert’s at number 8 Howard Place. The baby is the son of a civil engineer whose expertise saw countless mariners saved through his groundbreaking designs for more than thirty lighthouses around Scotland. The boy’s father was not only a civil engineer, but was also a meteorologist and a co-founder of the Scottish Meteorological Society. He was responsible for designing a meteorological screen, a shelter that is still in use today to protect the instruments needed for obtaining weather readings.

The infant, given the Christian names of Robert Lewis Balfour, was the grandchild of another lighthouse designer, as well as being the nephew of two others. With this amount of engineering dynasty around him, as he grew up, we may well have expected the young man to end up as a lighthouse designer as well. As it turns out, he didn’t – as the man became a leading Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer.

Changing the way he spelt his second Christian name from Lewis to Louis and then dropping his mother’s maiden name of Balfour, he is best known to all as Robert Louis Stevenson and his father as Thomas Stevenson. Robert was, as most people will recognise, the writer of such major classics as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

A search of the 1851 census of Edinburgh for Robert Stevenson with a birthdate of 1850 +/- 1 year returns four results on TheGenealogist. The last of these individuals, however, carries the name Robert followed by the initials L and B for his middle names – this is surely him? As we have already discovered he had been christened with the names of Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson and so it is no surprise that his parents had provided the enumerator with this information and for it to have made its way onto the record as middle initials.

Opening the transcript of this return shows us that the head of the household is Thomas Stevenson, 32 years of age and a “civil engineer practising in Edinr” (the last word being short for Edinburgh). This is, of course, the celebrated civil engineer whose groundbreaking lighthouse designs lead to a new era of towers topped with lifesaving beacons around Scotland’s coast and the Stevenson Screen that is used in meteorology.

This is the actual house in which the celebrated writer came into the world, as a glance at Wikipedia tells us that “Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850 to Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a leading lighthouse engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella (born Balfour, 1829–1897)”.

In the next decade the family would move from here, first to Inverleith Terrace and later to a large Georgian terraced townhouse in Edinburgh’s New Town whose address was 17 Heriot Row. By the date of the next census (8th April 1861) we are able to see that the Stevensons are now ensconced in Heriot Row.

A further search for other records that could add something to our research and we will come across a record that is of interest. Fascinatingly, we discover in the 1877-1878 Post Office directory for Edinburgh and Leith that Robert L. Stevenson, advocate, was the name listed for this house and not Thomas Stevenson the civil engineer.

Firstly, we may not have been aware that our author had been a Scottish lawyer, as this record suggests. Secondly, we may question whether it is still the address of the famous lighthouse engineer, as he would not die for another ten years?

Some online research and it turns out that in November 1867, Robert Louis Stevenson had entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering and continue the family tradition in this discipline. Problematically, for this idea to be achieved was that Robert showed no enthusiasm for his studies, avoiding the lectures when he could. By April 1871, he told his father that he had decided that his future lay with the pursuit of a life of letters instead of engineering.

Though disappointed by this, his parents agreed with his decision and it was resolved that their son should change course and should now read law (again at Edinburgh University). The law qualification would provide him with a profession to fall back on if need be. With his studies completed, Robert went on to qualify for the Scottish bar in July 1875, aged 24. It was then that his proud father added a brass plate to the Heriot Row house reading “R.L. Stevenson, Advocate”. Despite this, and the inclusion in the street directory that we have found on TheGenealogist, Robert Louis Stevenson never practised law. His law studies did, however, influence his written pieces, but most of his energies were poured into travelling and his writing.

Travelling life

Robert Louis Stevenson travelled extensively in his life and so manages to miss being recorded in further British census records. Always having suffered from poor health, many of his trips were to provide him with a climate that was more suitable for his chest.

In 1880 he married an American divorcee named Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in California and they sailed to Europe where they spent time journeying back and forth between Scotland and the Continent. Between 1885 and 1887 they then settled into a house in Westbourne, near Bournemouth in England. The Stevensons once again returned to the United States in the hope that a different climate would help his health. His father Thomas, had died in 1887, and so Robert, his widowed mother and his wife took a ship to New York.

In June 1888, Robert then chartered the yacht Casco and with his family they set sail from San Francisco. With the benefit of the sea air and also the positive nature of the adventure lifting his spirit Robert’s health recovered. For nearly three years they then meandered around the eastern and central Pacific, with various extended stops at the Hawaiian Islands, where the writer became a good friend of King Kalākaua and others of the Hawaiian Royal family. His wandering then took him to the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands. All through this period, he continued to write, completing the novel The Master of Ballantrae and he also used the legends of the islanders as a basis for two ballads that he composed plus he wrote The Bottle Imp.

Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife finally decided to settle down and chose to do so in Samoa. In 1890 they chose to buy land in Vailima, some miles inland from Apia the capital, and it was here that they built the islands’ first two-storey house. It would be his last home as, at the age of 44, on 3 December 1894, Stevenson died of a stroke at his house in Samoa and was buried on a spot overlooking the sea on land on Mount Vaea.

We have seen that this highly admired Scottish writer was just a baby at the time that the 1851 census was taken. With the resource at our fingertips, provided by TheGenealogist’s census records being linked to its powerful Map Explorer™, we have been able to see the Edinburgh neighbourhood into which this famous author was born. We then noted the family’s move to Heriot Row, by the time of the 1861 census and the listing in an 1877-78 Trade, Residential and Telephone Directory record for R. L. Stevenson, advocate. The entry was presumably submitted by Robert’s proud father who had attached a brass plate to that effect on to their house in Heriot Row. Thus the leading lighthouse engineer had come to terms with the fact that his son was not going to follow the family tradition into engineering, but had not seen the success that his son’s writing would actually bring.