Tips

Name Problems

Spelling of names can vary considerably in records used by family historians. There may be several reasons for this:

Spelling was not formalised until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
Many people were illiterate, so their names would have been recorded by other people who would use their own idea of spelling.
Sometimes the name would have been misheard and a completely 'wrong' name would be entered in the records.
Sometimes different versions of Christian names would be entered - Helen, for example, instead of Ellen.
Finally, watch out for transcription errors where the person transcribing a hand-written text misinterprets personal or place names.

As a real life example of the sort of problems that can occur, look at one of my ancestors: Helen Razzell, nee Headington. Her name appears variously as:

Eleanor Headington (birth certificate)
Eleanor Heddington (1861 census)
Ellen Edginton (1871 census)
Ellen Headinglow (1881 census as indexed on Ancestry.co.uk)
Ellen Headington (marriage certificate)
Helen Razzell (daughter's birth certificate and her own death certificate)

One reason I was able to track her down through the different records was that for much of her short life she lived at the same address.

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 dates
People may simply have lied about their ages - amending them upwards or downwards.

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.

In these pages 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 had 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.