Genealogy Chat

Gillian, has you have the 1851 census you do have a starting point at least!
However, do consider the benefits of going backwards from what you know - much less likely to slip up that way.
Have you made use of the freebmd site? On it you can search for births, marriages and deaths from 1837 onwards, up till around 1935 or so. The site is www.freebmd.org.uk
Jan

Thank you very much the info you all supplied was brilliant

It's a bit of work if you trying to do it for free - you can't really get the info that a sub buys, but you can make a fair bit of a show with effort. Lets take as an example a father & son - Paddy Freeman - their farm later formed a chunk of a Newcastle park (Jesmond Dene). So we'll look them up in 1861. We can do a free search at Ancestry. (I do an old style search of the "Census and Voter Lists" for England 1861 - exact matches & exact spelling) I look for Patrick Freeman, s/o Patrick - there's only 1 hit.
If I click on the view image link, I get a big long URL and embedded in the middle of it is the image ID:
iid%3dNBLRG9_3834_3835-0107 (or iid=NBLRG9_3834_3835-0107 in the bottom bar if I just hover over it).
The actual ref for the image is rg9/3834/54/10, but it's too much trouble to find this out. RG9 is the 1861 census and 3834 is the piece # that covers this bit of Heaton. I do know from the image ID that I want either 3834 or 3835, so I just redo the search adding the trial piece #, and find it's 3834. Next I try for the folio # (54 here) - I clear out the peoples names and just make a guess, say 100, and hover over the view image linksé Now these image IDs are all NBLRG9_3834_3835-0194 or NBLRG9_3834_3835-0195 (a folio # usually covers 2 pages), so this is too big, so I try lower and eventually get ref=rg9/3834/54/? The last bit of the URL as I hover over the view image link is the personal ID which runs from pid=12887206 thru 12887214 for this h/h. Fortunately things are in order here - they aren't always - but anyway, we can proceed. Next I search for the heads at rg9/3834/54/? - now Patrick Snr has the largest pid of all the heads, so possibly this h/h is continued on the next page, and checking heads and others on rg9/3834/55/?, we find that is indeed the case here.

We can assemble this h/h, but we get less info than is usually posted.

Patrick Freeman name abt 1817 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland
Ann Freeman name abt 1822 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland
Patrick Freeman name,name abt 1845 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland
Thomas Purvis abt 1836 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland
William Hunter abt 1838 Durham, England relation city, Northumberland
Robert Crawford abt 1826 Down, Ireland relation city, Northumberland
Margaret Dunn abt 1841 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland
Phillis Dodds abt 1843 Northumberland, England relation city, Northumberland

We can now start guessing relationships to get:

Patrick Freeman abt 1817 Northumberland, England head
Ann Freeman abt 1822 Northumberland, England wife
Patrick Freeman abt 1845 Northumberland, England son
Thomas Purvis abt 1836 Northumberland, England servant
William Hunter abt 1838 Durham, England servant
Robert Crawford abt 1826 Down, Ireland servant
Margaret Dunn abt 1841 Northumberland, England servant
Phillis Dodds abt 1843 Northumberland, England servant

Usually, we lack info on pob, but here their census doesn't specify this any more fully than above. We can guess here that they're living in the civil parish of Heaton, but if we're totally lost, we can try searching at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/default.asp?source=ddmenu_search3&j=1
and type in the ref rg9/3834 at top left and "go to reference" and find this piece covers Byker, Heaton and parts of Jesmond. We will not find the address (except in 1881) as this isn't indexed - one would need to see Heaton High Fatm on the image to learn this. We will also not find their occupations (except in 1881) - we might (correctly) guess Patrick Snr is a Farmer - but not the 271 acres. Nor would we know that all the servants were unmarried.

If one were looking at 1881, then better info can be gotten at:
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/frameset_search.asp?PAGE=census/search_census.asp
rather than the free search at Ancestry:

1881 Household:
Name Relation Marital Status Gender Age Birthplace Occupation Disability
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patrick FREEMAN Head M Male 64 All Saints Newcastle, Northumberland, England Farmer (Emp 12 Men)
Ann FREEMAN Wife M Female 59 Earsdon, Northumberland, England
Ann MC DONALD Serv U Female 23 Bedlington, Northumberland, England Dom Serv
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source Information:
Dwelling Cambois Farm
Census Place Bedlington, Northumberland, England
Family History Library Film 1342236
Public Records Office Reference RG11
Piece / Folio 5116 / 64
Page Number 41

I couldn't live without Ancestry. Apart from census records it has a wealth of other stuff, depending on the type of subscription you have.

Even the basic one gives access to all censuses bar 1911. Well worth the money. Ask for a sub as a Chrissy Present, or tell your OH it is cheaper than his football season ticket.

Margaret

Gillian

I use Ancestry which is not cheap, but as" ladytee" states you can use the facilities for free at some libraries if you are UK based, don't know about other countries.

George

HI Ladytree

I am in the UK

What country are you in?
Some public libraries susbscribe to a version of Ancestry.com & offer it free to users. When you pull up census there you can get all names in household and all names on the census page.

George

What site would you recommend

Gillian

Gillian

One of the drawbacks of using GR to search for census records im afraid.

George

I am looking in GR. The funny thing is I have a copy of a full census report and to be honest I havn't a clue how I got it, I only know that it was from the 1851 census with a reference H.O. 107/2423 (38 126).
Sorry to be so vague. I am so impressed by the searches other people find and I still can't retrieve the same info as some of you out there
I AM SO IMPRESSED

Thank you anyway

Where are you searching for census records? is it on GR, if its on GR you cannot view the next or previous page, which would show the rest of the family if they are either at the bottom or top of the page.

George

I'm not sure what you mean.

Are you just looking at an index?

Where are you looking?

Can anyone advise me how to get the census sheets which supply all members of the family living in the same house during the census. When I do a census search I seem to only get the person I've named. I hope this makes sense.