LITMIR.BIZ

      HOW TO SEARCH

      Don’t run before you can walk, as the plethora of information available can be very confusing. If you have not used General Registration properly to trace back records to 1901, then focus on doing so: only when you have found the birth or marriage closest to 1901 is it time to start using censuses. Once you know exactly who was who at that time it is time to start using these exciting records. First, look for the family in the 1901 census. Even if you are not yet computer-literate, the ease with which people can now be found in online versions makes it worth your while learning how to use the search facility when trying this method, or prevailing on someone else to do it for you. The sites’ search facilities are easy to follow: if the name is a very rare one, just look at all the entries under your surname; if it is not, you can use the ‘advanced search’ options to narrow the search down, but be open-minded when you do so – just because someone lived in Kent, for example, does not mean they were definitely born there, and whilst men having children around 1901 were most probably aged between 18–40, they could have been anything from 12 to 80–plus!

      If all goes well, you will find the family in the 1901 census. Your pennies are precious, of course, but please don’t stop when you see a transcription of the right entry – pay the extra and see (and print) the image of the original page. This (and not the transcription or index reference) is the original record, and you are far less likely to go wrong, or become confused, if you have this in front of you.

      The people you have found in 1901 are likely to appear more or less ten years younger in the 1891 returns, so you can now seek them there, and if you are lucky you can work right back to 1841. At each stage, you will see the story of your family unfolding through the century – children growing up, leaving home, starting work, living with their young spouses and having children, and then grow older as their own children grow up and repeat the same process. Now that the returns are fully indexed you can do what we never could in the past, by finding children away at boarding school, or working in service, or people away on ships or in hotels or prisons, staying with relatives or working night-shifts in factories, and the elderly living with one of their grownup children, or in workhouses or hospitals. In fact, since the online censuses appeared, we can learn more about 19th century families than ever before, and with a better overview of what happened to these families than, in many cases, the families knew themselves. We live in privileged times indeed!

      Do not ever base your research solely on censuses. Right back to 1837, birth and marriage certificates can be found, and you should always seek these for your direct ancestors, regardless of how complete you feel the census returns are. They will help you avoid making errors, and will tell you more detail than will be found in censuses. They compliment each other, and the details from both are very precious.

      OVERCOMING PROBLEMS

      In many cases, your research will not go smoothly and you will not be able to find the right people straight away. A chief reason for this is that the indexes are full of mistakes, made by the indexers either through carelessness, or failure to understand the records (some of the 1901 census returns were indexed by prisoners), or because the handwriting in the originals can be very hard to read. So, if you think you know where the family lived but cannot find them using the indexes, search the originals (see here). The other main problem with using the indexes is that your ancestors were not recorded originally in the way you would expect. You might expect your ancestor to appear as ‘James Dinnie’ age 24, born in Kirkintilloch, but he might actually have been recorded as Jim Dinny, 23, born in neighbouring Lenzie. You may therefore need to try and second-guess how someone might have been misrecorded at the time, before successfully finding them in the indexes. If you do find someone whose details are slightly different to what you expected, as in the foregoing example, you will of course need to make sure the other co-ordinates match up and that you have found the right person. You can see, for example, if the father’s name matches that given on James’s marriage certificate.

      Almost all records used in family history are likely to be inaccurate, but censuses are amongst the worst. This is because if you ask people fairly intrusive questions, they are likely to be rather evasive in their answers. People were, and continue to be, highly suspicious of the Government’s reasons for wanting to know about them. In the 19th century, many poorer people were (not always unjustly) afraid that, if they owned up to having come from somewhere else, they would be ordered to return thence. Therefore, the most common answer enumerators received to the question ‘where were you born?’, was therefore a blunt ‘here!’.

      Places of birth could be wrong for other reasons too. Someone who was born in Oxford but grew up from an early age in Cambridge might very well think that the latter was their birth place. People also tended to generalise. If someone was born in the tiny village of Sturry near Canterbury and then moved away, they would probably tell everyone they were from Canterbury, and this is what might then be recorded on a census form (and hence in the census indexes).

      Information about the family was usually supplied by only one person, but not necessarily the head of the household. A child might supply information about their parents and siblings, and there are cases when the task seems to have been delegated to servants or even the lodger: no wonder details were sometimes inaccurate. Ages could also be wrong when people did not want to admit to being as old or as young as they really were. In 1876 it became compulsory for children under 13 to go to school. However, many hard-up parents still sent their children out to work and lied to the enumerators, saying their children were ‘scholars’, the standard term for a child at school, when they were in fact out at work every day and receiving no education at all.

      Greater inaccuracies arose when institutions were enumerated. In some cases, prison governors simply noted down the inmates’ initials.

      Relationships to the head of the household were sometimes given inaccurately or falsely. The illegitimate son of the head of the household’s daughter might end up being enumerated as the head’s youngest son, for instance.

      Addresses can cause problems, not least because streets could be renamed. House numbering was virtually unknown in rural areas and, when used in towns, it would change as extra houses were built in streets. Therefore, if your ancestors are not at the house number you expected, check the rest of the street, and if they are not there look around the area or examine maps and contemporary street directories (see Chapter Eight) for guidance. Related problems arise when houses had doors on two different streets, thus giving the house two potential addresses. This is another area in which studying a map can suggest different solutions to the problem of not finding your ancestors where you expected them to be.

      When using the censuses to ascertain where someone was born before 1837, bear in mind that their place of birth might not be the same as their place of baptism. Wives often went home to their mothers to give birth to their first child, but the child’s baptism would usually be in the wife’s new parish of residence.

      The general, catch-all solution to remaining problems surrounding the use of the censuses is to use earlier or later censuses, General Registration records, or other records described later in this book, to gain further co-ordinates about the family.