Logistics of census taking - the early years

[las camelias]

I was lying in bed last night thinking about taking in the early years (yeah, ok, I really should get a life!).

Logistically, how exactly did the enumerators do it?  In rural parishes with say an average of a thousand people, how did they get round every house on the night of the census – or was it done over several days?  With isolated farmhouses up hill and down dale and if the weather was bad, how long would it take them?   Many women worked outside of the home, and for long hours – would the enumerator have had to go back more than once to find someone in? And I suppose town and city enumerators must have had their problems too with so many people.  Were the population told there was going to be a census?  How did they tell them when so many people couldn’t read or write?

If anyone has any answers, please let me know so that I can get some sleep tonight!

LC

[avm228]

See this link:

http://www.british-genealogy.com/resources/census/index.htm

(scroll down towards the bottom for the bit about logistics)

The enumerator left a householder's schedule at each household some time in the week before census night, and went around collecting them in the week afterwards.  Then he copied the material into his enumerator's book.

So no, he did not have to do a Father Christmas and visit all the houses in one night!

Anna

[GeoffE]

The enumerator left a householder's schedule at each household some time in the week before census night, and went around collecting them in the week afterwards.  Then he copied the material into his enumerator's book.

With (possibly) the majority unable to write in the early days, it wasn't quite as straightforward as you make it sound. 

[avm228]

I didn't say it was straightforward - I simply summarised the bare bones of the process as set out in the document which I linked to

[stanmapstone]

The enumerators did not have a week to collect the schedules, thay had to do it on the Monday, enumeration day.

It would have been a practical impossibility for an enumerator to have had to fill in all the household schedules, although they were instructed to do so if for some reason they were incomplete. There would be plenty of people around to do it for the householder, including the local clergy.
In many cases, the original schedule was filled in by a child rather than by the head of the household. The reason is simple. During the 1800s the children went to school, or Sunday school, and learned to read and write, whereas parents (of the older generation) could often not be able to read and write.
Surveys of adult literacy in the early part of Victoria's reign suggest that, for example, 79 per cent of the Northumberland and Durham miners could read, and about half of them could write. Eighty seven per cent of children in the Norfolk and Suffolk workhouse in 1838 could read and write. Thanks to the growth in freelance schooling, all privately financed, literacy levels had risen to about 92 per cent by 1870 and Forster's Education Act.
"The Victorians" by A.N. Wilson ISBN 0-09-945186-7.
Stan

[stanmapstone]

For the Instructions to the Enumerators for the 1851 Census see http://www.rootschat.com/links/02cy/

Stan

[Gadget]

One little snippet that I always remember is that Enumeration Districts were so called because if was, theoretically, the number of households that an enumerator could cover in one day.

Gadget 

[stanmapstone]

From the report on the 1861 Census.
In no case, however, was the District to be too extensive or too populous to be enumerated by an active man within the compass of a single day; and, as a general rule, it was to be assumed that where the enumerator would not be required to visit more than 200 houses in towns, or where he would not have to travel more than 15 miles in visiting a smaller number of houses in the country, the district would not be too large.


Stan

[01debbie]

I
Logistically, how exactly did the enumerators do it? 
If anyone has any answers, please let me know so that I can get some sleep tonight!

LC

LC, thanks for asking the question because I've thought about it more than once & visualised some poor enumerator trying to walk the streets & get everything done in one night!!!

Thanks to everyone else for the answers!!!  Of course, the answers have raised one or two more questions for me...but that's another topic

Debbie