CENSUS RECORDS
Census records for 1841–1911 are very useful for locating individuals in family units, and finding information on ages, birth parishes and occupations. Records from 1841 merely list occupants in a household, while from 1851 the relationship to the head of the household is noted. Although census record images need to be paid for online, many free transcription-based databases exist that can provide some of the information the images contain.
FamilySearch ( familysearch.org) offers free transcriptions from 1841 to 1911 for English and Welsh censuses, although the source citations offered are quite poor. Records for Scotland are also searchable from 1841 to 1891; however, unlike the returns for England and Wales, the Scottish returns only provide information for a single individual, and do not show who else might have been present in the household. FreeCEN ( freecen.org.uk) is a long-running volunteer-based project to provide searchable databases of records for England, Wales and Scotland from 1841 to 1891. Coverage on the English and Welsh front tends to start at 1891 and work back, while the Scottish effort, which has stalled, started with the earlier returns, and is mainly good for 1841 and 1851. Many useful transcriptions from 1841 to 1861 for counties on the Scottish Borders can also be found freely at scottish
indexes.com, with the returns connecting households between censuses, and links to contemporary maps hosted by the National Library of Scotland and current satellite imagery. Fragments of some transcribed censuses from 1801 to 1831 may be located via censusfinder.com, and the 1821 census for part of Orkney can be found at www.southronaldsay.net/1821.
For Ireland, the 1901 and 1911 censuses are freely available on the National Archives of Ireland genealogy platform at genealogy.nationalarchives.ie, although third-party indexes at ancestry.co.uk allow you to search for more than one person in a household at a time, and to then link back to the site. Surviving census fragments from 1821 to 1851, and surviving information from 1841 and 1851 used for pension applications after 1908, are also available via the site. Similar thirdparty indexes for all of these collections are also free on findmypast.co.uk.