One of the best sets of records to trace family groups in 19th and early 20th century England and Wales are the UK Census returns. I've been using them extensively to try to uncover my extended family's history, and have enjoyed looking up the places they lived, speculating on what life was like for them. The starting point for a family tree is information from the memories of living relatives, but, unless you have a close family with lots of notes on who's who, perhaps even a family bible, maybe still living locally to your ancestors, then there are still plenty of gaps to be filled.
The census returns are a great resource, revealing a lot about how people lived; the size of families, the work people did and where they lived. The way in which, early on and especially in rural areas, there were no addresses - everyone knew each other, and few received letters because illiteracy was quite high.
The census returns are by no means perfect, something which, for me, adds to the fascination and frustration of working with them.
The recorders/enumerators had a very important job. Some created beautiful records, with clear handwriting, taking care to check and spell names of people and places correctly. At the other end of the scale, the records are almost faded to illegibility or are in a scarcely legible scrawl, with mistakes and misspellings, and on some, the black marks made by people checking or counting up the returns obscure the information.
This however pales into insignificance against the sheer weight of transcription errors I find. Many come from an inability to read older handwriting, failure to compare script on the same page and perhaps no knowledge of copperplate or cursive hand to work it out. (I'm old enough that we were taught 'joined-up' writing from age seven, with a big chart on the wall and hours of practice at forming the shapes of letters, then writing syllables and words.) Some errors are down to reading with insufficient magnification, the transcriber typing what they think they see, or expect to; others are due to downright laziness, or someone unfamiliar with the language, or perhaps they'd been drinking, or something. There was evidently no quality control, so if the genealogy company paid for this work, they were robbed, and if they didn't pay for it, well they can't expect anything of reasonable quality. Okay, so correct spelling is something I care about, but it's important in this context because of its effect on searches, in terms of their success and the amount of time and creative guesses it can take to get results.
An then there's the misreporting, which can be very entertaining. I expect most people told the truth to the best of what they remembered, but ages can float around (quite apart from the strange 1841 thing of rounding down adults' ages by up to four years!). I've had relatives grow younger by a couple of years on each successive census, or a couple who both reduced their ages by five years (which would have made their marriage illegal, if it were true) and a family of siblings, still single in their thirties, who variously selected ages up to nine years younger than they were according to their birth records.
Tracing the Irish parts of the family is proving very difficult, because the original census returns for Ireland 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after the censuses were taken. Those for 1881 and 1891 were pulped during the First World War, probably because of the paper shortage. The returns for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were, apart from a few survivals, notably for a few counties for 1821 and 1831, destroyed in 1922 in the fire at the Public Record Office at the beginning of the Civil War.
Wonderful though these ten-yearly records are, they are still only snapshots. Some families are quite stable, remaining in the same house or the same area, with the same spouse, and you can track the children growing up, getting married, leaving home. Others seem to disappear, a particular problem when dealing with common names and moving to another county, or if you happen to need some of the missing records.
And there are some things that a ten yearly snapshot will miss, because a lot can happen in ten years. For example, it's long enough to lose one wife, marry another, have three children, for the youngest of those children and then your second wife to die, and you decide to foster the two remaining children with their aunts and emigrate to the USA. There are no records which will reveal whether the younger children of the first marriage were left with their older siblings, or whether the second wife became their step-mother, no personal histories to know how they felt about that.
I feel like a detective. For every small step forward and question answered, a whole new crop of questions can arise. Every chink of light creates more shadows.
I can't wait for the 1921 census to be released, although it won't be available until 2022. It will be essential to help fill some holes in my knowledge of who did what, where and with whom. And I hope I won't see as many transcription errors!
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