Need help with immigration from present day Poland in the nineteenth century

[greyingrey]

  I'd just like the thoughts  of any posters who have ancestors who came to Britain in the nineteenth century from areas covered by present day Poland. According to the standard work on the history of Nottingham's Jews, many were systematically brought over from present day Poland to the city at the beginning of the nineteenth century to work as hawkers. It's implied,  though not specifically stated, that they were  brought from the Warsaw area. Warsaw was annexed by Prussia in 1796, but was liberated by Napoleon in 1806. Thus, when my ancestor said on the census that he'd been born in Germany, he was technically  correct, but I was just wondering if other posters think that it would have been listed as Germany (he was a hawker, so his details would have fitted the pattern) His partner was an Englishwoman, so she could have told the census officer the information.

Shortly after Prussia lost Warsaw, the Russians expelled many Jews from Warsaw....they were afraid of such an important centre having what they considered too many Jewish inhabitants (there had been pogroms before, of course, but this was systematic removal)

Any thoughts most welcome.

[jorose]

Census birth places are notoriously inaccurate - the information, as you say, wasn't necessarily given by him, and then we're assuming the enumerator was conscientious about recording the information accurately from the schedules.  Even where it was, people sometimes list where they were "from" (grew up, etc), which isn't always the same as where they were born.

A note on this:
Household schedules were distributed (unfortunately these have been destroyed), supposed to be filled out by the head of household, and the enumerator then copied this information into his book.  Of course, at a time when a large percentage of people had limited literacy, various issues were bound to occur.

http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/census.html

Illiteracy, language or dialect was also a problem; in 1881 an enumerator in London’s East End found few forms filled out by immigrant “Irish, Jews, Dutchmen, Germans, Poles” and found himself using a 10 year old girl to translate information required for the schedule [3].

So we have no idea if he gave the information, or someone else did, or if a enumerator squinted at the town name he'd written down on his form and thought "Where's that? Eh, sounds German, I'll put Germany." and moved onto the next.

[greyingrey]

Thanks for the information, jorose. I've looked at other people in Nottm who came over at around the same time &, if anything (you usually find "foreign parts), it usually says "Russia". As my immigrant seems to have been slightly older than the others, if they all came from around Warsaw, this would be correct....it was part of Prussia when he was born & part of Russia when they were born. A Jew named David Levy from the Warsaw area was responsible for bringing them all over,  (believe it or not, he became a Freemason) so he may have told them what to put.

I've one instance where you can almost tell that a foreigner has been advised by an English speaker. I've got a German woman named Edith who appears on her first couple of census returns as Ada. In German, the E in Edith sounds like the English A in Ada. You can imagine someone asking her her name &, hearing the first syllable, assuming it must be Ada