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The data found on census returns can be used to narrow down searches using other records:

1. If you know from your great-grandfather’s birth certificate that his parents must have married before 1899, you can immediately reduce the number of years you have to search for their marriage if you find the family on the 1901 census and work out that their eldest child was born around 1892. You can then start searching for their marriage back from 1892 rather than 1899.

2. Deaths can also be traced with the help of census returns. If you find a couple living together on one census but on a census return taken ten years later one spouse is missing and the other is listed as a widow or widower, you will know to conduct a ten-year death search for that period.

3. Use the details given on the census returns to corroborate information found on certificates. Check the addresses, ages and relationships on the returns to see if they match those given on civil registration certificates of a similar date. Equally, if you find part of your family living in a particular town on the census returns, you should find out what civil registration district that town was covered by so that you can look out for that place when locating those ancestors in the birth, marriage and death indexes.

The next step would be for the enumerator to use these ‘schedules’ and transfer the gathered information into his ‘enumerator’s book’. He would also record which houses lay uninhabited within his district. These completed books would be checked by a supervisor and then sent to London to allow the statisticians to compile the information they wished. It is these enumeration books that form the census records now available for the general public to view. Unfortunately, the original forms completed by each household were destroyed.

As the records are handwritten, the returns often have the enumerator’s notes alongside the entries, sometimes obscuring the actual information. An important notation to bear in mind is the practice of separating each household by slashes on the top left corner of the head of the household’s name. A single slash on top of the name would indicate a separate household within the same property and a double slash separate households in different properties. These slashes are particularly useful when individual house numbers have not been noted.

The information on the census was organized by distinct registration districts for England, Wales and Scotland. These were initially identical to the registration districts created in 1837 for civil registration purposes, based on existing Poor Law Unions that had been set up in 1834. Each registration district was a subdivision of a county and its size was dependent on population. These registration districts would be divided into smaller sub-districts and the sub-districts would be further divided into individual enumeration districts. The size of the enumeration district was an estimate of how many houses the enumerator could visit in one day. Inevitably, enumeration districts would be geographically larger in rural areas where the population was less dense. Additionally, each enumeration district book would have a cover page giving in detail the area and exact roads included in the district, along with parish, hamlet, village, town or county details.

These enumeration districts were roughly the same for the years 1841 to 1891 in order to make valid comparisons of data collected on specific censuses. However, the large increase in population and the industrialization of urban areas meant it was not always possible to adhere to this. Any such alteration would be recorded in the summaries of the returns, so it is worth looking at these cover pages if you want to find out more about the area in which your family lived – an important part of your work, if you remember the advice about historical context from Section One!

‘Census returns add real colour, as they provide additional information besides biographical data which allows you to investigate the social history surrounding your ancestors’ lives.’