I’m a great fan of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and I have also enjoyed watching Heirhunters - which is a similar type of programme - recently.
Both these series rely on being able to research the records from the Censuses held over the decades to learn most of their facts.
But how did the Census get started?
In 1801, Britain was about to go to war and they needed to know how many soldiers could be called up to fight Napoleon, so they held the first Census They also needed to know more about the health of the nation.
Their first methodology was to count people as they left their local churches on Easter Sunday.
Their count were around nine million.
Ten years after that, they decided that they had better check their findings.
On this occasion, they calculated the number of people in each parish and arrived at a figure of 10.5 million which caused a bit of alarm at the thought that the population could be increasing by 1.5 million every decade.
Then they realised that they had miscalculated by not counting the people who did not go to church.
By 1871, the Census became the more ordered document that we are more familiar with where families were listed showing their relationship to each other, their ages, where they were born and addresses. They also asked how long couples had been married.
This order made life much simpler for the family tree researchers because prior to this they had asked if a person had been born in that county. The problem with this was that if someone had been born in Essex but was now living in Hertfordshire, the answer to that question is ’No’, which is of no value to those looking back over a century later.
The completion of the Census fell to the head of the household in 1901, rather than a visiting enumerator. Many of today’s researchers find it fascinating to see the handwriting of their ancestors.
The hundred years rule means that the most recent Census we can access is that of 1911. The idea is to protect the privacy of people who may still be alive.
Having said that, some basic data from the 2011 Census is available for researchers who want to know more about how we live today http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html
