A GUIDE TO CENSUSES AND CIVIL REGISTRATION
CENSUSES
CENSUSES 1841-1911
THE PROCESS
For every census each area of the country was divided into DIVISIONS. Within each division, there were COUNTIES. Each division was divided into SUPERINTENDENT REGISTRAR'S DISTRICTS, based on the poor law unions that extended over county boundaries. ‘Whenever a District or Union extends into more than one County, it is assigned wholly to the County in which the greater portion of the population of such District is located’.
Each SR District was divided into SUB-DISTRICTS. Each Sub-District was divided into PARISHES, TOWNSHIPS OR PLACES. These 'parishes' were then divided into ENUMERATION DISTRICTS e.g. 1a, 1b, 1c. Each Enumeration District comprised a number of pages in the census enumerators' books which varied in size e.g. in 1851 from 16 pages to 72.
In the days leading up to a census night an enumerator delivered individually numbered household schedules to each household in his district. On the morning after census night, the enumerator went round to each house and collected the forms. He had a duty to ensure that all the forms were completed properly and collected, even if this meant going back to some houses many times and helping to fill in the schedules with whoever was available to supply the information. In towns and cities in particular, with levels of illiteracy, various accents, dialects and languages spoken and even just a lack of teeth, meant understanding what was said and written, in order to copy the information from the schedules into the census enumerators’ books was a mammoth task for the enumerators. Spellings on censuses can be somewhat
flexible.
Once all the household schedules were gathered in the enumerator, perhaps tired and working by candlelight, copied the information from each schedule onto large sheets, which were bound into volumes with a folio number stamped on the top corner of each right hand page. These volumes were then delivered to government statisticians whose job it was to extract important data about the population as a whole. In the course of this process, they often made marks and notes on the pages, which can cause confusion when we try to decipher the information. The original household schedules were destroyed. The 1911 census was the first one where the household schedules were kept and not copied.
It is understandable how errors crept into the system. People, for various reasons, were not always accurate with the information they gave, sometimes intentionally, but also because ages and dates of birth were much less important then and children had to rely on what they were told by their parents or what they remembered about where they were born sometimes confusing where they grew up with where they were actually born.
The National Archives podcast
SOLVING CENSUS PROBLEMS is a talk on
‘a practical approach to overcoming the most common problems faced by family historians when using the 19th century census returns.’ The date of census nights for each year of the nationally released censuses
1841 6th June 1851 30th March 1861 7th April 1871 2nd April 1881 3rd April
1891 5th April 1901 31st March 1911 2nd April
The population of England and Wales at the time of each census
1841 - 15,914,148 (Surrey 582,678)
1851 - 17,927,609 (Surrey 683,082)
1861 - 20,066,224 (Surrey 831,093)
1871 - 22,712,266 (Surrey 1,091,635)
1881 - 25,974,439 (Surrey 1,436,899)
1891 - 29,002,525 (Surrey 521,551)
Between 1889 when the London County Council was formed and 1965 when Greater London was created, London formally absorbed parts of the surrounding counties including major parts of north Surrey.
1901 - 32,527,843 (Surrey 653,549)
1911 - 36,070,492 (Surrey 845,578)
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES NUMBERING SYSTEM
The TNA has a numbering system to identify the censuses. 1841 and 1851 have the CALL letters, HO - Home Office and the 1861-1911 censuses, RG - Registrar General. These initials then have a CLASS number for each census:
1841 HO 107 1851 HO 107 1861 RG 9 1871 RG 10 1881 RG 11 1891 RG 12 1901 RG 13 1911 RG 14
The number after this code is known as a PIECE NUMBER and refers to a particular bound volume of enumerators' books. The FOLIO number comprises two pages within each book.