The details recorded for each person were:
- Name and surname
- Relationship to head of family
- Age - this was recorded in separate columns for male and female
- Marital condition
- Number of years married (present marriage, question only answered by married women)
- Number of children born to present marriage, number that are still living, number who have died. (again present marriage, married women only)
- Personal occupation
- Industry/service with which worker is connected
- Employment status
- Birthplace
- Nationality (if born in a foreign country)
- Infirmity, one of deaf, dumb, blind, lunatic, imbecile or feeble minded. The age at which the “infirmity came on” was also required. This information is considered personally sensitive and will not be available until 2012.
New information in the 1911 census was concerned with the family, that is the questions that had to be answered by married women on how long they had been married and how many children there were from the marriage. An article in The Times in January 1911 on the coming census said that “no such inquiry had been made at any previous Census, but its bearing on much-debated problems of national progress and retrogression is clear” - nothing changes!
Also extra information was required on professions or trade rather than simply “occupation” as asked in the previous census. The two pieces of information required, “Industry/service with which worker is connected” and “Employment status”, would mean for example that someone who was unemployed at the time of the census would still give his or her usual occupation.
The 1911 census was a household census taken on the night of Sunday 2nd April 1911. It holds information on every household, vessel, institution and overseas residencies that were part of England and Wales in 1911 (including some ships at sea, and some army units stationed overseas). A full entry would contain names of persons in each household, age, occupation, position in household (i.e. head, wife, son, grandfather etc), whether they had any illnesses and the full address of the property where they were residing that night.
The 1911 census is the first census where the householder’s schedule has remained the master entry, rather than the enumerator’s notes, so you will be able in most cases to view your ancestors’ handwriting when looking at 1911 census entries.
The Householder and Institutional Schedules (National Archives document reference RG 14) contains 35,000 volumes detailing information relating to 35 million people in England and Wales. There are (approximately) 8,500,000 pieces of paper each slightly larger than an A3 sheet that make up the schedules, filled in by each head of household or similar authority. There are also 38,000 volumes of enumerators’ summary books (document reference RG 78) to accompany the census. They hold useful and unique information that supports the census information but they do not provide the level of personal details that can be found in the census schedules.
The 1911 census sustained water damage many years ago, before it was transferred to The National Archives. This damage affected about 5% of the volumes and means that information is not retrievable from a “very small number” of household pages from these volumes. On the National Archives website they say that “there is only one volume missing from the whole series in total” but this is contradicted by findmypast who say that all of the original household pages have survived.
The latest census available to the public is the eagerly awaited 1911 census. In recent years, census information has been closed, certainly for family history purposes, for 100 years. The National Archives were planning to make the 1911 census available in January 2012 but a ruling by the Information Commissioner in December 2006 meant that the National Archives was forced to make the information available now. For practical reasons, all that was immediately available was a paid for search by National Archives staff to give the details of people living at a nominated address but this has now changed.
In April 2007, the National Archives announced that brightsolid would be their partner in the project to put the 1911 census for England and Wales online. As from 13th January 2009, it is available from brightsolid’s genealogy subsidiary Findmypast.com on a dedicated website, with a phased release, county by county; this will include images and transcription data, initially on a pay-per-view basis only.
A caveat on this is that “personally sensistive” information will not be available until 3 January 2012. This includes “details of infirmity or other health-related information, information about family relationships which would usually have been kept secret and information about very young children who were born in prison”.
The census is one of the most valuable sources of archive information when trying to unravel your family history. While birth, marriage and death records allow you to discover the exact dates of these three major events in the life of your ancestors, what the census does is bring together families. It is the one place you can go to see family groups, who were the brothers and sisters of your ancestors and maybe even more - it is not unusual to find a census entry where a niece or nephew is staying with an aunt or uncle and this in itself gives you further links and further confirmation when trying to put together your family tree.
This website concentrates on the household census taken in the United Kingdom every 10 years (with one exception) from 1801 on, and in particular concentrates on the censuses of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The Scottish census and the Irish census were taken at the same time with similar information gathered but was organised separately and are now made available to family historians under different arrangements to that for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
To date, the eight censuses from 1841 to 1911 are available for public search while those from 1801 to 1831 are not in general of much help to family historians because they for the most part did not record details of individuals