How do I know if a child was born and died between censuses?
QCan you explain how to search for any children who could have been born, but died, during the 10year periods between censuses? Also, how do you search for any siblings of an ancestor before 1837?
Colin Newman
ABefore 1837, you can often find such children by careful searching of the parish baptism and burial records. From 1837, you can add the online indexes of the General Register Office (GRO) to your
arsenal: https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ certificates/indexes_search.asp.
For a married couple, one approach is to identify the family in each census, and see which children appear and disappear between one and the next. Use the GRO birth and death indexes to find entries for the children you have identified. Note the maiden name of the mother on each entry in the birth index. If this changes, consider whether there has been another marriage.
Search the birth index using the surname of the father in conjunction with the mother’s maiden name to find any other children of the marriage, then check for matching deaths. The searches need to be carried out separately for males and females and the time span is limited to ±2 years, so quite a number of searches may be needed.
Always consider possible spelling variants of surnames, that ages and even first names can vary slightly between censuses, and that names of dead children can be reused within the family. Check for more than one family with the same combination of names having children in the same registration district, and that some missing children might be elsewhere in the census, perhaps with a relative. In addition, it is possible that not all of the births were registered.
Finally, for the 1911 census alone, wives were asked how many years they had been in their current marriage, how many children had been born alive during the marriage, and of those children how many were still alive and how many had died.
Antony Marr