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NY[_2_] NY[_2_] is offline
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Default The last census?

"Martyn Barclay" wrote in message
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The census is quite a valuable source of information for those doing
family genealogy. What annoys a genealogists, historians & family
members doing research is the UK's insistence on sticking rigidly to the
"100 year rule" whereby the 1921 census will be released in 2022. The US &
Australian census (for example) are released under a "72 year rule" & can
be researched up until 1940, & the US 1950 Federal census will be released
in 2022.


It is also scary how many errors creep into transcriptions of census and
birth/marriage/death records. My mum discovered this when she happened to
check her birth record in the index at Kew and noticed that her mother's
maiden name was recorded incorrectly: an O had been mis-read as a C (the
perils of flowery joined-up handwriting instead of capitals!). Kew confirmed
that this error also affected the full record from which a certificate would
be made. It took her a long time to get this officially corrected:
fortunately her father was alive at the time and was able to sign a
statement to the effect that his dead wife's maiden surname had been X, to
corroborate what was on the marriage certificate. As with many things, if
there's a discrepancy you need *three* sources of information to show which
one was the incorrect one; initially Kew said "how do we know that it wasn't
an error on your mother's marriage certificate rather than an error on your
birth certificate?".

On transcriptions of censuses done by genealogists, some of whom aren't too
good at reading old handwriting, it's amazing how many people in rural areas
were "daisy farmers", which should have been "dairy farmers" ;-) It got to
the stage that when my dad was writing a database data-entry program for
censuses, he had a list of common mis-readings which prompted a warning "are
you sure - get someone else to verify this".

I wonder what information will be released in 100 years' time for censuses
that I appear on. Will they tabulate and release all the answers to
questions about religion, income, sexual orientation and race? It would be
interesting if the census office released specimen entries for each of the
forthcoming censuses as a list of column headings, so you knew what was
coming. We'll find out in two years' time what info the 1921 census
contains.

Were there any cases when the wife was listed as head of the household even
though her husband was still alive and living at the same address - ie where
"Relation to head" was listed as "husband".


FindMyPast recently released a special "census" ("The 1939 Register"
https://www.findmypast.co.uk/1939register) that was carried out when WWII
was expected, with the names of anyone who was now dead being listed and the
name of anyone still alive (supposedly) being redacted. My mum was amused to
see that her entry (as a young child) was not redacted so she was visible
alongside her (dead) parents' names. She was quite happy for it to remain
that way, but she contacted FindMyPast to alert them to the error, even if
she declined their offer to redact it from now on. Interestingly, her entry
lists her married name as well as her maiden name, so someone must have gone
through and retrospectively annotated the 1939 entry with much more recent
information from her 1960s marriage.