Jeff Layman wrote:
More wasted money on legalised snooping. Why don't they just pay Google
for the info?

'cos Google doesn't have the info. Google may have *some* of the info,
but they don't have (all of) The info.

Jeff Layman wrote:
The Census Act 1920 was a short, but very well written piece of
legislation which makes it impossible to refuse to complete a census

The best thing they could do with the census is return to the single A4
per househouse, one line per person form they had before WW2. The current
War'N'Peace effort is a nonsense.

NY wrote:
I wonder how the accuracy and completeness of the "other sources" of
information will be checked.

For census purposes, almost none. How does a birth certificate issued in
1965 in Hemel Hempstead tell you who lives in 23 Acadia Avenue in Hartlepool
in 2031? Almost no alternative documents have the matchup of address,
named person, person's age, person's occupation, person's relationship to
other household members, person's place of birth.

suspect. Using electoral rolls as the primary source of the census is dodgy
because some people choose not to go on the electoral roll (thus forfeiting

And children aren't on the electoral roll. And neither are ages, occupations,
ages, birth places. The census is a list of all people, the electoral roll is
a list of (almost) all adults.

How are people identified in a census - I've forgotten? Is it just by name
or does each person in a household have to give a unique ID such as National
Insurance number?

Just name. It can't be NI number, as they don't exist for children, and - as
I mentioned above - the very definition of a census is a list of all people,
not just a list of adults.

NY wrote:
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!).

I've been transcribing census records, and some of the handwriting is
atrocious. There's still a few entries on one that I cannot manage to
translate into anything comprehensible.

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".

Quite a few in the Whitby censuses which I've transcribed, usually due to
the husband being at sea.

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.

The 1939 survey was used as the basis of NHS records, so it was annotated
through the years up until the mid-1970s with people's changing details.

Andrew wrote:
If the government wants to know where all the people are,
they can always demand all the records from the phone companies
and supermarkets.

Phone directories do not include children, ages, occupations, or people other
than the primary subscriber in the household.