Thinking of Starting Family History? The Census

25th April 2020

One of the main sources in family history is the census. This has been taken every 10 years since 1801, and you may remember filling it in yourself in 2011, 2001 etc. In the next part of our family history guide we look at this valuable source.

There is no one place to look to trace your family tree, or one place to stick your name into and your family tree will come out. You need to search lots of different places, where your family members may be recorded, remembering that these records were never created for us today in 2020!

The Census

The aim was to capture the size of the population and other information for the Government to use to plan. So everyone in the country should be on there – rich and poor, male and female, 1 day old or 100 years old. As everyone should be on this means that it is great for tracing ancestors.

The census is available 1841-1911. 1921 will be released 2022 because the census is closed for 100 years. There is a 1939 Register available which has similar information so is helpful.

For many, many years people used to come to us to use the census on microfilm, which we still have, but it is now far easier to look people up on the digitised copies on the family history websites.

Information in the census

1841 – Address, names of all householders, age (rounded up/down), occupation, born in county they are living in or not

1851-1901 – Address, names of all householders, gender, age, marital status, occupation, place of birth

1901 – Address, names of all householders, gender, age, marital status, occupation, place of birth. Plus length of time married, number of children they’d had and how many still alive.

How To Search

The England & Wales Census is on both Ancestry and Find My Past. Free to use in The Hive, they are both currently free to use at home of our users. The Irish Census for 1901 and 1911 are on both websites, but previous years have been destroyed in the past.

Familysearch is a free website which also has some of the census.

The text of the Scottish census is on Ancestry, but the images of the pages are on www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk which is a pay-per-view website.

The family history website have billions of different records so it is best to specifically search census records to avoid being overwhelmed.

Enter the information you know about people you know were alive 1911 and before. The results come back like Google and other internet search engines, ranking them in order of likelihood and you then need to go through and see which, if any, is the one you want. You can read the typed transcript and also look at the image to see if they’ve read it right.

Search screen on Ancestry. Enter what you know, but you may need to be more specific or take information out depending if you get too many or too few results

Results of a search for Edward Elgar

Home page for Find My Past. For census choose the specific option at the bottom

Make a note of the details which you can use for looking for other people.

Keep going back every 10 years to 1841!

I Can’t Find My Person!

We often get people saying this to us. Most people are on somewhere, but a small percentage may be missed. The common reasons for not finding people are:

Names being misspelt at the time
Handwriting hard to read so names being mistranscribed when digitised
People not being in the place you expect
Being called a slightly different name, e.g. middle name
Other details being slightly different from what you expect, such as age

Keep trying variations of the information you have and search for other people in the household.Keep looking at other sources too and clues as to where else to look might appear.

1939 Register

This was compiled at the outbreak of war for ID cards and other official reasons. It’s not quite the same as a census but it is still very helpful and is really helpful if you are struggling to get back to 1911.

If people are likely to still be alive today they will be blanked out to protect their personal data.

The 1939 Register is available on both Find My Past & Ancestry.

Details of logging onto the two websites here.

You can download our free 70 page Research Guide which includes the census and other sources.