Taken from LFHHS yahoo forum
*Census Secrets*
The decennial censuses in England and Wales, giving personal returns
from 1841 onwards, should be one of the surest routes from tracing
ancestry: it is generally acknowledged that coverage was close to
universal, so it should be possible to trace an individual back through
the 19th century, finding him or her ten years earlier, same name, same
birthplace, just ten years younger, and back into his parental family.
In theory.
In practice there are many pitfalls. Some arise from particular
circumstances:
1. In the case of a married woman, unless her maiden name is known, the
transition back to a girl in her parents' household is not so simple.
2. In many industrial areas, particularly South Wales and the clothing
districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, certain surnames are so
common, and the range of christian names used so limited, that full
name, age and birthplace are often not unique. Hosts of coal miners
called John Williams or Thomas Jones thronged the valleys, almost
impossible to distinguish from one another.
3. Then there are the people who were away from home at the time of the
census - in the army or navy, sailors, fishermen, prisoners,
navvies, paupers in workhouses, and so on.
4. And although a single nuclear family can usually be traced back
census by census, the very large slice of the population that did
the meanest jobs, servants, casual agricultural labourers, shop
assistants in lodgings, are rarely at the same place ten years
before, and their identification depends more on judgments as to the
rarity of their name. If Solomon Thundercloud is aged 52, born in
Shelton, in the 1861 census, there is reasonable certainty that he
is the same Solomon Thundercloud, aged 42, born in Shelton, in the
1851 returns. But a John Smith, aged 52, born in London, recorded in
1861, will have several contenders in 1851.
So, if tracing back through the census returns is not always so easy,
what can be done to solve the problems that arise? And is there more to
be gleaned from the census returns than the simple snapshot of a
household at gaps of ten years?
Until recent years the key earlier census returns - 1851, 1861, 1871 -
were largely unindexed, more having been done on 1851 than any other,
partly because it was released to the public earlier, but also because
it was the earliest return to record relatively precise birthplaces, a
chance to get a hook back into the parish register sources for people
who were already old in 1851.
With the rise of the internet, there was a goldrush to stake out
uncharted territory: census indexing was done rapidly, often outsourced
to non-native speakers, and inevitably the results are patchy. An
independent survey of internet census indexes found up to 40%
mistranscriptions. Equally, although many of the original returns are
calligraphic in their beauty, others were compiled in execrable scrawls,
and would have been hardly decipherable by the writers on the following
day. The fact that in many cases occupation names and common placenames
were misspelt by the enumerators, and that the same surname can be spelt
in two or three ways in the record of a single household, indicates that
some enumerators were cavalier about such niceties.
If, then, it is unsurprising that you are unable to find a particular
individual in a particular return, what can be done about it? There are
two initial steps. Firstly, before the rise of the internet large
swathes of the returns had been indexed by local family history
societies: these indexes have in theory been superseded, but in the
event that there was such an index for your area of interest for the
missing year, it is as well to search it out. The people that compiled
the indexes knew their territory well, knew what surnames were likely,
were working at the records conscientiously and diligently, and are much
less likely to have made mistakes.
The second thing to do leads us to the heart of what can be wrung out of
the census records. Whenever researching any person in the past, there
are four key elements to consider: family, house, job and religion.
Genealogists' cardinal sin is to concentrate on the first, family, to
the exclusion of the other facets of life - which explains why so many
'genealogies' are fragments of unrelated pieces of ancestry spatchcocked
together like fragments of DNA.
House, location, is almost as important as family. When you find someone
in a census return, you find them not as a disembodied person, but where
they lived, worked, worshipped, and had their friends - some of whom
would be their present or future relatives. There, in the census return,
you have laid out before you the intimate details of a whole locality.
A few decades ago, when the London census returns were virtually
unindexed, a major genealogy company had traced a family for a client
back to the 1851 census. The client also wanted to trace the maternal
line, but all was known was the wife's maiden name, her father's name
and occupation, and that she was born in London. It was clearly
important to trace her father's family in the 1851 London census, but
there was no hint of where he lived: he did not appear in the trade
directories. The client was told that the only way would be to work
through the whole of the London census, a very expensive undertaking.
The client agreed, the search took place, and her father's family was
found - living next door to her. This brings home vividly how important
it is to make a note of who was living in the neighbouring houses when
you have found an ancestor in the census returns. It is a simple thing
to do, just a matter of a little bit of diligence, and it often proves
invaluable.
Secondly, if a family has been found at an address in, say, 1861, and at
different addresses in 1851 and 1871, you should always trace the
original (1861) address in the 1851 and 1871 returns: again, the rewards
from this little bit of diligence are often very great, revealing other
parts of the same family at the one address.
But to do all this requires a precise understanding of where any address
was actually located. Places change, house names change, street names
change, and streets are often re-numbered. So the most important part of
a census return, after the record of the household of interest, is the
cover sheet, the first page of the enumeration book, because that
specifies exactly the area covered by the enumerator. It may be as
vague, in the countryside, as 'The Township of Newton', or in a town
give a whole list of street names and numbers, mentioning various key
landmarks such as public houses or churches. With the help of a
contemporary map it is then possible to locate precisely not only where
the ancestor's house was, but the boundary of the enumeration district.
That area, so delineated, is the first to look to for workplace, chapel
or church, school, graveyard - all of which may have records relevant to
your search.
Although the registration districts and sub-districts, being those used
by the registrars of births, marriages and deaths, changed little in the
19th century, the enumeration districts, particularly in towns, were
redrawn for each census, so where there is difficulty in locating a
precise address in the next or preceding census it cannot be assumed
that the enumeration district number will be the same: but, again, the
cover sheet of the enumeration district books indicate precise
boundaries - essential so that no household was omitted, and none
counted twice.
In Victorian times there was a great surge in the building of Anglican
churches in the cities - belatedly, in the face of a population that had
been rising rapidly since the 18th century. Rather than create new
Anglican parishes, ecclesiastical districts were formed, and the census
administration was given the task of allocating population statistics
accordingly wherever new ecclesiastical districts had arisen. This had
to be done down to street level, and in consequence each enumeration
district book cover specifies ecclesiastical district, and if more than
one, which streets fell in which district. The same information is
usually given on the top of each sheet of the return. These new
Victorian churches - many of which have since become redundant - have
baptism, marriage and burial registers too late to be duplicated by
Bishop's Transcripts, and too late to be covered by most computerized
indexes. When they were brand new, spacious edifices they attracted huge
congregations, had their own parish magazines and organizations -
knowing the ecclesiastical district in which an ancestor lived is a
first key to exploring this resource.
*Surname Source Books*
13,830 Surnames Available
www.theoriginalrecord.com/database/ebooks <http://theoriginalrecord.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=9bb299c75702434cca4f0b1e0&id=04ffde5982&e=d373e9e7ab>
Collections of entries for individual surnames from historical records
from the British Isles and colonies from the 11th to the 20th centuries,
hand indexed and extracted by surname, and available as ebook (£75) or
DVD (£90). Each ebook contains the full set of descriptions and matching
scans for the particular surname from the 10 million and more records
hand indexed by Theoriginalrecord.com. All scans are in PDF format.
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