Genealogy Chat

Has anyone any evidence or experience of how thorough 19th-century census taking was? I have found nothing about my grandfather's family in the censuses although I have a lot of information to help me on dates and districts - untill somebody put me on to FreeCen when I found one entry in 1891 showing my grandfather as being at school at Brighton College (which I knew was right). This return listed all the staff and pupils. Was it possible for households simply to ignore such returns, toss them in the bin or whatever? I should like to get at the census returns to check details of addresses, confirm ages of parents and siblings etc.
I know FreeCen is still far from complete - but I was wondering if as I click around the various access points for more details for my tree
some households never did get registered.

I don't think they were allowed to ignore censuses and toss them in the bin.
Most likely your family was just mistranscribed.
Have you tried just using first name, year of birth and place of birth or first 3 letters of surname with a * after?

Elizabeth,

There could be several reasons why you cannot find your people in censuses:

1) they may simply not have been registered either by design or carelessness

2) they were registered but the records have now been lost (more frequent than you think)

3) they are there but have been wrongly recorded by the original census enumerator

4) they are there but they have been wrongly transcribed by the website (in my experience this is very frequent on Ancestry)

Peter

Thanks - it was in fact a letter in this month's issue of Ancestors criticising Ancestry strongly for transcription errors and praising FreeCen that made me try it.
I will try the shortened version of names & dates Margaret suggested - perhaps not tonight! but thank you. I do like to add what details I can after I get the skeleton framework of the tree in place.

I think the occasional person/family might go "missing". Maybe deliberately, maybe accidentally - just going home from a friend's house and missing the enumerator etc.

I've never been able to find one of my gr grandmothers and her children in the 1901 - and I have tried every combination possible. I'm sure she went into hiding following the death of her first husband and the birth of her next child!

C'est la vie! Roll on the 1911!

Jill

Take an example. Suppose I'm looking in 1871 for who GR describes as:
Surname Forename Age District
Joice James 35 Gateshead, Gateshead

There's no such record as Ancestry transcribes it. Well, what might they have gotten wrong - the most obvious is the surname. So looking for James b 1836 +/- 0 gets 11513 hits - clearly too unwieldy, so lets look only in Durham - now it's down to 435 hits - manageable. I never know where to put Gateshead, whether as the township or as the town. Even if I knew, GR and Ancestry use different items to locate the place. Anyway, this reduces it to 45 or 4 hits. Suppose instead I now use some extra info I know, specifically, that his pob=Ireland and his spouse=Margaret (which can be misspelled so I'll just enter Marg*). Now there's only 9 hits, and a fairly obvious choice is:
James Joris Margaret abt 1836 Mayo, Ireland Lodger Gateshead, Durham
Source Citation: Class: RG10; Piece: 5055; Folio: 40; Page: 30; GSU roll: 848416.
and Ancestry did mistranscribe it.

I found my great grandmother in the 1901 by using her sons first name, age + - 1 yr place of birth and mother with first name Selina. Thankfully there were only a few James aged 14 with mother Selina in London. Instead of finding a horrible mistranscription of Tocqueville I found that Selina had remarried and was now a Mitchell and so was James.

I have a missing family in 1901 because the side of the street from 18-42 is missing.
I know they should be at 18 because I have a birth cert for a daughter born 20/1/1901 but not registered until the 11th April.

Also ages can be out. I found a son 40 years older than his father due to a mistranscription. Babies ages are frequently wrong. 9 months transcribed as 9 years. Thats why its so important to check images and not acccept the transcription