Decipher census reference numbers
Reader George J Smith emailed us to ask us to clarify a subject that must baffle many amateur genealogists: census reference numbers. He had the number 20647 265 from the 1911 census, and knew 265 was in a box at the topright of the page, but didn’t know what 20647 referred to. He hoped we could shed light on his research into censuses conducted between 1841 and 1911.
The 1841-1911 records are widely accessible: you can search them and view detailed transcripts for free at Familysearch.org. To view digital scans of the original pages for England and Wales, you’ll need to subscribe to the likes of Ancestry, Find My Past and The Genealogist (visit www.scotlandspeople. gov.uk for Scottish census information).
Learn what the reference numbers mean
Census references can be broken into four elements: series, piece, page and folio. The 1841 and 1851 censuses share the same series number (HO 107), while subsequent ones have unique series, ranging from RG 9 (1861) to RG 14 (1911).
Although households were given forms (household schedules) to fill in, from 1841 to 1901 census staff (enumerators) would copy the details into a series of books. These were organised into ‘pieces’, each comprising multiple books spanning several hundred pages. Not only were individual pages in each book numbered, but all right-hand pages were stamped with their own sequential folio number.
These elements form the National Archives’ reference for a specific page from the 1851-1901 censuses: series/ piece, folio, page – for example, RG 12/1822, Folio 156, Page 5 for a record from the 1891 census.
In 1841, pieces were also sub-divided into the individual enumeration books, so the reference here is series/piece/ book, folio, page, such as HO 107/1298/8, Folio 60, Page 2.
In 1911 enumerators stopped copying the English and Welsh household forms, leading to changes in the census reference: series/piece/schedule number, or RG14/20647/265 from George’s example. Here, the piece represents an enumeration district of around 1,600 households, with each one getting its own schedule number, so George’s two numbers equate to registration district 20647 and schedule number 265.
Make use of the numbers
The references are often found on the original scanned image – look beneath or to the right of the page for the series and piece number – while you’ll find the page and folio information in the top righthand corner. If you can’t easily read them, use Family Tree Maker’s magnifier tool (see screenshot above left). With this tool we can see that this record is from page 16 of a census.
In most cases, this information is purely academic. However, if you navigate to a specific census using the search engine in Ancestry ( www.ancestry. co.uk/search) or Find My Past ( https:// search.findmypast.co.uk) you’ll find options that let you search purely by all or part of a census reference number. Type some of the reference numbers into the relevant boxes (see screenshot above right) and you can perform a targeted search of an area to see who was living there in addition to your own family. It’s a good way to see if any close relatives lived nearby, for example.