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The Perils of the Census

 

Thanks to Ancestry, FindMyPast, ScotlandsPeople and a host of other websites we can all look for our Victorian British relatives with comparative ease. And we do; according to the ONS (Office for National statistics) over 386 million people have accessed census data since 2002. However, there are many traps that the unwary researcher can fall into; ages get rounded, districts go missing and the whole process is, as with any human endeavour, prone to occasional errors.


It might be assumed that the British national censuses are definitive but in fact it relied on household schedules which were then then copied by the enumerator into the official books; the Census Enumerator’s Books (CEB). The schedules for each residence were completed by the head of the household, and Victorian literacy levels were variable. If they were wholly illiterate the schedules were completed by the enumerator. Those original census schedules were destroyed, so until 1911 we only have the CEB. Unfortunately, the process of transcribing the information from the original schedules into the books was prone to error. On top of that the enumerators handwriting can be hard to read and modern transcriptions can be very inaccurate e.g. I found Innes transcribed as Jones in one instance (and there are numerous others).


Even if the data looks good the researcher needs to exercise caution. These are records of flawed human beings and thus they can contain deliberate misinformation. People sometimes exaggerated their social standing, their occupations and their ages (either claiming greater antiquity or youthfulness depending on their situation). Sometimes they would hide illegitimacy by attributing children. Enumerators sometimes make judgments about the inhabitants, other times they are reliant on their hearing & their assumptions for names and places; my Hoccom relatives are variously recorded as Hoccom, Occom, Occum, Hoccum. Women’s occupations are generally under recorded in the censuses and don’t forget that many Suffragists refused to participate in the 1911 census.


I was recently working on a project in which we had two censuses. As well as the national 1841 census the local vicar had taken a parish census. The differences between the two were very interesting, names and occupations varied and a classic Victorian attitude was apparent; the Vicar’s parish census rarely lists occupations for women beyond wife and even adult children are often just noted as “child”.


I started off thinking that the vicar’s census was likely to be the most accurate: he might well know the people better than a non-local enumerator. His census had carefully recorded place names and people grouped together but soon it became apparent that that might not have been so. The parish census listed one Thomas Coombs, an agricultural labourer, his wife Mary and also Susan Howse a fifty-year-old servant in a single grouping. Thus, implying a single household. However, the idea that in a poor rural village an agricultural labourer could afford to keep a servant seemed unlikely. Recourse to the CEB showed that the household consisted of only Mary and Thomas, Susan Howse the servant lived in a different household entirely. She could have been a non-resident servant but given Thomas’ occupation it seems unlikely.


A typical example of the variable occupation data was John Capel, he was recorded in the Parish census as a carpenter but entered himself in the census schedule as a wheelwright; possibly he thought that had more status  or maybe the vicar did’t know the difference. There were name variations too. This was probably the difference between formal / baptismal names and what they were known as by friend and relatives, e.g. Roseannah in the census was Hannah in the Parish census.


Overall the lesson from the census is trust nothing, cross check everything and make as many searches as possible. Use wildcards and intuition when searching. Cross reference everything, and never, never blindly accept those helpful hints that on-line genealogy programs offer – check, check and check again.

Originally published 2020

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