Census Pitfalls
1. Age/Date Problems
1841 Census - ages of people over 15 were usually rounded down to the
nearest 5 years.
Ages in all censuses may be subject to error:
- Indexes may show incorrect dates because of transcription errors
- There may be accidental misrecording of ages
- People may simply have lied about their ages - amending them upwards
or downwards.
- Sometimes ages have been obliterated by other marks, or completely
omitted.
2. Addresses
Addresses in censuses may appear to include house numbers. Be careful not
to read too much into these. In the earlier censuses they don't represent a
particular house in the way that modern house numbers do. They are often
just a sequential number applied by the census taker (the enumerator), and
in the next census the same property may be given a different number.
3. Missing People - missing census
Another census pitfall for the unwary is that the census records we have
access to are not complete. Some records which were taken at the time are no
longer in existence. Some streets or parts of streets were simply missed by
the enumerator.
4. Marriages
A woman may be described as 'wife' in a census and yet no marriage record
comes to light in the BMD indexes. This may mean that the couple were, in
fact, not married but simply living together. On the other hand, there may
be an error in the marriage indexes, or the index may be incomplete.
You may have difficulty finding a woman because she has been widowed and
remarried between two censuses. If she had children from her first marriage
this may help you identify her, though bear in mind that such children may
have taken the second husband's surname!
On this site, a date of 'before xxxx' or 'after xxxx' has been used to
enable a relationship to be displayed in the appropriate time period of the
couple's lives. If there is no BMD reference or marriage certificate given
as source then the marriage is only an assumption.
5. Children
Bear in mind that children shown in census records are not necessarily
all the children that have been born into a family. Children may have been
born and died within the ten years between two censuses, and so not show unless other sources are
checked. Sometimes a child doesn't appear with their parents because they
are living with another relative.
6. Relationships
People are sometimes shown as 'visitor', 'lodger' or 'boarder' when they
are in fact related. I've found it very helpful to record the whole
household when noting census information; being able to look at all the
censuses for a family has often revealed a lodger or visitor to be a widowed
parent, married sister, or other relative.