This chapter deals with: As well as taxation records and references to owners/occupiers in title deeds, leases and manorial records, there are other records that can help you trace the owners and occupiers. As always, it’s best to work backwards and you may need to work with different sources to find the lines; and you may find that the sources also shed light on the building as well as the occupiers and owners.This chapter covers different sorts of records to help you find out who lived in your house – what they are, where to find them and where to go next. These include:
Census Returns
Census returns are records of who occupied a property on a particular day. The census was taken every ten years and records are closed to the public for 100 years.
The census returns up to and including 1831 are simply a count by overseers of the numbers of people (male and female), houses and families in each parish or township. For the most part they do not include names; but some enumerators made lists of names which are available at county record offices. Some family history societies have also published transcriptions.
The census returns from 1841 onwards are more useful because they give more detail. The census takers tended to use the same route, so it’s possible to follow the records backwards from 1901 by checking details of the neighbours. However, remember that properties were built and demolished over the years, so the reference number of the house you’re trying to track down won’t necessarily be the same in every census.
The originals of the 1841–91 census for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are kept in the Family Records Centre in London. However, the ones for your county should also be available in your local record office and in some local studies centres, either on microfilm or on microfiche. You can also search digital images and transcriptions of the 1901 census at www.1901censusonline.com. It’s free to search the indexes although you’ll pay a small fee to see the census pages and transcripts.
You can also search the 1891 census at www.ancestry.co.uk, though again this is for a fee; it’s worth asking your local library if they have a subscription to ancestry.co.uk , in which case you can access the site on a computer at the library without charge. The Society of Genealogists www.sog.org.uk also holds copies of the returns 1841–61 and 1891 on microfilm.
Census returns for Scotland are at the General Register Office for Scotland, though there is a computerised index to the 1881, 1891 and 1901 census at the Family Records Centre. You can also search the indexes online for a small fee at www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/.
It’s also possible to buy CD-roms which cover the census returns for one county in a particular year, from specialist genealogy suppliers. You can also buy microfiche copies of registration sub-districts from the National Archives.
Some Difficulties With Census Returns
The census only lists the people who stayed at the house on census night. Places of birth are not always correct – the enumerator might have misheard them or spelled them wrongly. And people within the family may not be at home on census night: for example, servants who lived in at their place of work, people in the army and navy, or people in institutions such as workhouses, hospitals, schools and prison.
It’s also possible that ages are inaccurate; some women didn’t want to admit that they’d married a much younger man, and children are often shown as older than they really are because they could earn better wages as a 15-year-old say than as a 12-year-old. Family relationships could also be inaccurate; an unmarried woman’s illegitimate child was often described as being the youngest child of her parents.