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. Unfortunatel...