Collins Tracing Your Family History. Anthony Adolph

of those over 16 were rounded down to the nearest round five years. Thus, people aged from 50 to 54 were all to be recorded as 50. Luckily, some enumerators failed to heed this and wrote down the exact ages.

       Occupation.

       Whether the person was born in the same county. Usually ‘Y’ for yes and ‘N’ for no, or ‘NK’ for not known. If the birth was outside England and Wales, the abbreviations were ‘S’ for Scotland, ‘I’ for Ireland or ‘F’ for ‘foreign parts’ – the rest of the world! Relationships were not stated, and should not be assumed: two 50-year-olds of opposite sex and a 20-year-old could be husband, wife and child, or otherwise brother, sister and a child of one of their cousins – or one of many other possible permutations.

      A page from an 1841 return.

      POPULATION FIGURES

      THE POPULATION of England was (roughly) 18 million in 1850;

      6 million in 1750;

      5.5 million in 1700;

      4 million in 1600;

      2 million in 1500;

      4 million in 1300 (i.e. before the Black Death), and

      2 million in 1200.

      You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. Most of your ancestors, therefore, were reasonably close cousins. If someone alive in Roman England left descendants who are alive today, and you have any English ancestry, you are probably descended from them.

1851–1901 CENSUSES

      These are broadly similar in their detail and survive almost complete. They give:

       Address. As 1841. In 1891 and 1901, the number of rooms occupied, if less than five, was recorded. Double dashes indicate the break between buildings; single dashes indicate the break between different households in the same building.

       Name of each person in the household. Initials of middle names could be and often were recorded.

       Relationship to the head of household. Usually wife, son or daughter, but also step-child, in-laws, servants and, if you are very lucky, parents or grandparents. Sometimes the terms ‘in-law’ and ‘step-’ were used differently to nowadays: a son-in-law today means the daughter’s husband, but then it was sometimes used for the wife’s son by a previous marriage, what we would now term a ‘step-son’, and vice versa.

       Marital condition. Married, single or widowed.

       Age. Ages were recorded precisely.

       Occupation. In 1891 and 1901, the census notes whether the person was an employee or employer and, if the latter, how many people, if any, they employed. The acreage of farms was also noted.

       If working at home. This was a new column added in 1901.

       Place of birth. Recorded by parish and county. If the person was born outside England and Wales, usually only the country would be given, although sometimes you may be lucky and find the parish or nearby town stated too. If luck does not strike with the first census return you examine, try another.

       Physical and mental condition. This was a column for those who were blind, deaf and dumb. Further categories, ‘imbecile or idiot; lunatic’ were added in 1871, subsequently changed to ‘lunatic, imbecile, feeble-minded’ in 1901.

      1911, 1921 AND 1931 CENSUSES

      You can pay £45 to search under a specific address by contacting www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/1911census. The Office of National Statistics plans to create an online service for the 1911 census by 2009. The 1921 census should be released in 2022, but the 1931 census was completely destroyed by fire in the Second World War.

WHERE TO SEARCH

      CENSUS RETURNS

       The original census returns are not available for public searching. But they are available on microfilm rolls and on the internet. Microfilm copies can be searched at TNA, Mormon Family History Centres, and many archives and libraries have films covering their area. Full details are in J. Gibson and E. Hampson’s Census returns 1841–1891 in microform; a directory to local holdings in Great Britain, Channel islands, Isle of Man (FFHS, 1994), 6th edition.

       For many decades, family history societies worked on indexing their local census returns. Some indexes just gave reference numbers and others were almost complete transcriptions. Many of these indexes are still available in local archives, from the societies concerned (see www.findmypast.co.uk) or in major genealogical libraries, such as the SoG and IHGS. They are covered by J. Gibson and E. Hampson’s Marriage and Census Indexes for Family Historians (FFHS, 2000).

       There are fiche indexes, compiled by the Mormons, to the 1881 census, and some counties in the 1851 census. They were indexed in a number of creative ways: you can scan through the index of everyone in with your surname, or you can search by birthplace, enabling you, for example, to easily pick out all the Smiths who were born in a certain village.

       Firms such as www.my-history.co.uk, S&N’s www.genealogysupplies.com and www.archivecdbooks.org sell CDs of sections of census returns, with varying degrees of search facilities. The online censuses have largely superseded these, unless you want to make an in-depth study of your ancestral village, or area, and spend a lot of time studying how all the families were interrelated, in which case they have a lot to commend them.

       The first census to be indexed online was the 1881 census, which appeared on the Mormons’ site www.familysearch.org back in 1999 – so many people logged on that the site crashed. This was the first time that the press realised that genealogy had progressed from a moderately popular hobby, to a mainstream interest. The site provides a free transcription of the 1881 census for England and Wales, but not images of the original pages.

       The Mormons’ success encouraged commercial firms to start indexing the other censuses. The 1901 census appeared in 2002 (with similar computer problems – so many people logged on that the site crashed and took several months to restore!). Now, you have a choice of which pay-to-view site to use to gain access to the fully-indexed censuses from 1841 to 1901, and to online images of the original pages. Foremost are www.genesreunited.co.uk, www.ancestry.co.uk, www.findmypast.com (1841–1891 only) and www.1901censusonline.com (1901 only). www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census offers access to the www.ancestry.co.uk censuses for a cheaper rate than the www.ancestry.co.uk site offers directly.

       The site www.freecen.org.uk is a growing database of census returns which have been