Essential Resources - The Census

The other primary source any researcher will need to access is the census. Though you can dabble in the early stages with free access to the 1881 census through Family Search and Ancestry, I'm afraid this is one resource you will either need to invest money or time into, as the only way of accessing all censuses for free is by getting on your bike and accessing a Family History Centre (provided by the Church of Latterday Saints) or your local library.

If you're serious about researching your family pretty thoroughly, you will need to pay for these records, but I feel this is a cost worth weathering for the extra resources you'll have at your disposal. Subscriptions (the most cost effective means of accessing paid-for resources if you're using them on a regular basis) are currently just over £100 per year from Ancestry and Find My Past, with the latter usually offering 10% discounts for new and renewal customers. Though the outlay seems high, you can manage with only one (as both offer the basic resources you'll need), and the subscription will cost less than £10 per month - a couple of quid per week - which isn't too bad compared to other pastimes. Though my income was low in my first few years, I did indulge in an Ancestry subscription from the outset. I now have a subscription for both, as each have their own special collections that are useful when you start to dig a little deeper into your ancestor's lives.

I'll work on the assumption that you can access all census returns through some means.

The census Act was passed in 1800, and a regular census was first introduced in the UK in 1801, though the first few are of limited use to the family historian, as they gathered very little personal information and they are not included in the subscriptions mentioned above. The census was taken in England, Wales and Scotland and, from 1821-1911, included the whole of Ireland, though very few Irish censuses before 1901 survive. Each census was taken as a snapshot of the population on a given night of the year. With the exception of 1941, a full census has been taken every 10 years since 1801.

Dates of UK censuses:
1801 - Tuesday, 10 March
1811 - Monday, 27 May
1821 - Monday, 28 May
1831 - Monday, 30 May
1841 - Sunday, 6 June
1851 - Sunday, 30 March
1861 - Sunday, 7 April
1871 - Sunday, 2 April
1881 - Sunday, 3 April
1891 - Sunday, 5 April
1901 - Sunday, 31 March
1911 - Sunday, 2 April

Later censuses are not yet available to the public.

The censuses 1801-1831, mostly carried out by local overseers of the poor, were only concerned with the numbers of people, households, occupations and church records to provide a summary of the number of people and how fast the population was increasing. Generally, the individual records used to gather this information was destroyed, and only the summaries survive. In my research, I have only found one case of individual household data being preserved (for a village in Norfolk in 1831), and this only records the name of the head of the household and how many males and females therein.

The population act of 1840 allowed for greater detail in the information gathered, and was implemented in the census of the following year. From hereon in, the census was administered on a national level. Forms were delivered to households a few days before the census, to be completed by the householder. Enumerators would assist the illiterate to complete them. It is from this point that census returns become useful to the researcher. The 1841 census recorded the names and occupations of the occupants and their ages rounded DOWN to the nearest multiple of 5 - so anyone aged 45-49 would be recorded as 45 years old. Only children under 15 were recorded with their exact age. Each individual was also recorded with a "Y" or "N" to indicate whether or not they were born in the county in which they currently resided. The only exceptions to this were: "I" (Ireland), "S" (Scotland) and "F" (Foreign Parts). Occasionally more exact details were recorded, sometimes crossed out later.

From 1851, the census recorded names, exact age, marital status, relationship to the head of the family, occupation, birthplace and any recorded disabilities. The information contained in the returns remained largely unchanged until 1911, when the number of rooms in the household were included and, for a wife, the number of years married, how many children born to the marriage, how many of these died and how many still alive.

The 1881 census has been available on www.familysearch.org for many years free of charge, and is duplicated as a free transcription on Ancestry.

Not only are censuses an obvious means to leap back a generation, when you trace backwards until you find an ancestor with his or her parents, but other family members living with or visiting the family can help sort out difficulties when you need to distinguish between two people of the same name from the same area (not uncommon if you come from a family who have lived in the same town for centuries).