Читать книгу Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy: The definitive reference guide to tracing your family history - Nick Barratt - Страница 184

This is by far the most common reason for difficulties in locating an ancestor. It could be that, in cases of illiteracy, the enumerator at the time had to interpret and record the information given to him by the head of the household. There was no other way of verifying this data and therefore inaccuracies would not have been picked up.

Additionally, most of the websites listed above have created their own name indexes and searchable databases for the census returns, and errors may have crept in whilst compiling these resources. There are several reasons why this might have happened, ranging from the poor condition of the original returns to the difficulty that the modern transcriber faces in reading nineteenth-century handwriting. Bear in mind all possible variant spellings of forenames and surnames and how easily some letters can be confused for each other. For example, if your ancestor’s surname was ‘Parker’, it could easily have been indexed as ‘Barker’, ‘Darker’ or even ‘Porker’. Lateral thinking is often needed in overcoming such mis-indexing.