Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 121

Most of these returns survive. They give:

Address. This may be precise, or simply a street name or even just the name of the village, with each house numbered sequentially as the enumerator walked around.

Name of each person in the household. Middle names or initials were not to be recorded.

Age. The ages of those under 16 were recorded precisely, and the ages of those over 16 were rounded down to the nearest round five years. Thus, people aged from 50 to 54 were all to be recorded as 50. Luckily, some enumerators failed to heed this and wrote down the exact ages.

Occupation.

Whether the person was born in the same county. Usually ‘Y’ for yes and ‘N’ for no, or ‘NK’ for not known. If the birth was outside England and Wales, the abbreviations were ‘S’ for Scotland, ‘I’ for Ireland or ‘F’ for ‘foreign parts’ – the rest of the world! Relationships were not stated, and should not be assumed: two 50-year-olds of opposite sex and a 20-year-old could be husband, wife and child, or otherwise brother, sister and a child of one of their cousins – or one of many other possible permutations.

A page from an 1841 return.