TIPS FOR CENSUS SEARCHING
Laura Berry shares some advice for optimising your search results if at first you don’t succeed
Finding ancestors on the 1841– 1911 censuses is one of the most enjoyable elements of researching a family tree. You find out so much information about the household in one hit – who was living together, where they lived, what they did, how old they were and where they were born – and in theory, with all UK census returns having been digitised, the process should be straightforward.
In practice, though, it’s common to hit a brick wall and there are many reasons why your ancestor might not appear the first time you hit the search button. Census enumerators were responsible for copying the answers given in hundreds of household forms into a census book for each enumeration district, and this is the record that we search online for the period 1841–1901, so it’s hardly surprising that mistakes were made.
To add a further complication, the census books were transcribed more recently to create the online databases, so in a worst-case scenario you could be searching for a name that has been misread by an enumerator and then misspelled a second time when transcribed for an online database.
Householders were not always consistent with their answers to the questions posed by the census forms from decade to decade either – spellings for names in particular could be very fluid. It often takes a bit of lateral thinking to overcome these problems, and the tips in these pages offer tried-and-tested methods to quickly improve your results.