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The first detailed census was taken on Sunday, 6 June 1841, and recorded every individual that spent the night in a property; therefore family visitors and boarders would be recorded as living in that property, and not at their permanent place of residence. The format of the form was a two-sided columned page, with information running across the top of the page that stated the hamlet, village or borough plus parish details on the right-hand side. Both pages would have the following columns recording information about:

• Place: This would usually be the street, with occasionally the house name or number. However, house numbers were rarely recorded.

• Houses: Uninhabited or building / inhabited: The enumerator would mark each new house on the street. He was also expected to indicate where a house was uninhabited.

• Names of each person who abode there the preceding night: It was common for middle names to be unrecorded. As stated above, each person who had slept in the property on that night had to be accounted for. No relationship to the head of the household was given and it is not always possible to work out family relationships.

• Age and sex: Ages of children up to the age of 15 years were recorded accurately. However, adults’ ages above 15 were usually rounded down to the nearest five years. Hence, an individual whose given age appears as 40 could, in fact, be aged anything from 40 to 44 years old.

• Profession, trade, employment or of independent means: This could be misleading as in the nineteenth century people would often have more than one occupation and not every job was noted. The abbreviation ‘M.S.’ or ‘F. S.’ was for male or female servants.

• Born: whether born in the same county? Whether born in Scotland, Ireland or Foreign Parts: This is the closest information relating to place of birth provided. It would simply state whether an individual was born in the same county as the one they lived in, or in Scotland, Ireland or ‘foreign parts’. These would be abbreviated as ‘S.’, ‘I.’ or ‘F.’ accordingly. The abbreviation ‘NK’ may also be used for ‘not known’. Although in rural areas people tended to be living in the parish of birth, this would by no means be universal (especially in urban areas), and hence finding a birth or baptism record would be difficult from the information provided here.

Two other problems are worth bearing in mind when searching this census. First, unlike later censuses, the original enumerator books were filled in using pencil not pen. Thus many pages have now become faded and can be difficult to read (especially the microfilm copies that are often held in county record offices). Secondly, there are some counties where the returns do not survive in their entirety. A complete list of missing and incomplete returns can be found online at www.ancestry.co.uk (see below).