Emma Jolly
If you can't someone in the census, a wealth of widely available alternative sources can point you in the right direction and help you locate them, says Emma Jolly
Emma is a regular expert on our ‘Q&A’ panel. Her book A Guide to Tracing Your Family History Using the Census came out last year, and she shares tips
Censuses are one of the staples of every genealogist’s toolkit. When researching ancestors from all parts of the UK, we quickly move to check indexes for the relevant census years.
However, it’s a frustrating truth that we will not always be able to find our forebear in the census. There are a number of potential explanations for this. For example, the ancestor may not have been enumerated on that specific date. Alternatively, the record may not have survived. A number of returns have been damaged or destroyed; other returns may still exist, but have gone missing.
In addition, an ancestor’s census entry may be difficult or impossible to find because it has been mistranscribed, perhaps because of faded or otherwise illegible handwriting, or because of spelling errors.
Another point to note is that in the early years of individuals being regularly recorded on censuses, no record was made of those who travelled, those who were serving in the armed forces or on merchant shipping, or those who were living overseas.
Since civil registration was only introduced in Scotland in 1855, and not all ancestors are found in the country’s Old Parish Registers, details on the census may be the only surviving record of a Scottish ancestor. Therefore, alternatives are often needed also. What’s more, very little census material survives for Ireland between 1841 and 1891, so you will need to explore alternative records when researching Irish family during this period as well.
These alternative records are known as census substitutes. We can use them to discover many of our relations who do not appear (or are not visibly apparent) in the census itself.