1841 on the BBC

A story is now on the BBC about the 1841 census being added to Ancestry. Here's an interesting tidbit:

A. Gwilliam...

[snip]

An interesting little read, and contrary to what usually seems to
happen, it appears to have no errors of either interpretation or fact!

octiger...

Though the statement: "... places of birth are not given and family
relationships are often unclear." is not wholly accurate.

County of birth is given if it's the same as that in which the subject
is living, and there is an indication of Scots, Irish, or Foreign birth,

myths...

The 1841 for my half-gggg-uncle had that he was born in India - I
blessed the enumerator for part-verifying a family story.

and so implicitly of English. And family relationships are "often

A. Gwilliam...

Although that's all true, it hardly disproves the assertion "places of
birth are not given". They're not!

unclear" because they're not stated at all.

A. Gwilliam...

That's not actually correct.

There's no column for relationships, and possibly the enumerator's
instructions made no reference to them... but nevertheless, they're
most certainly identified on some returns. Maybe only for a small
minority, but the information is indeed there.

Martin Briscoe (2)...

I can't remember seeing relationships given in any 1841 pages that I
have looked at so it must be a very small proportion. Perhaps some did
it in an area of the country that you have studied so you have seen more
the rest of us.

The details quoted from the interview seem reasonable to me considering
that most people will have little interest and don't want a lot of
information.

octiger...

Are Scotland, Ireland, Lancashire etc. not places? OK, don't answer
that, the point isn't worth arguing.

Charles Ellson...

Isn't it ? In the absence of more specific location information, there
is nothing on the page to give away the many records where the simple
ticks in the columns have been wrongly applied or omitted.

Fenny...

They may well be. But "Born in County Y/N?" doesn't tell you where
someone not born in the county originated from. In *some* instances, you
might get "Ireland" or "Scotland", but generally, "No" is not a place of
birth.

octiger...

As somebody else has pointed out, relationships are not normally
indicated and so are certainly not clear. If only they were, I would not
be having the trouble I am in trying to disentangle the members of two
families (three households) with the same surname wherein all four adult
females are called Jane.

I'd be interested to see an example of an entry where relationships ARE
shown. Presumably the enumerator has used the "Profession etc." column?

A. Gwilliam...

I'm looking at one now. As you correctly guessed, they've been entered
in the "Profession [etc.]" column. The heads of household have their
profession, and the other members have their relationship to him or
her.

I've only really looked at '41 for a tiny area of Pembrokeshire, but
what else of the census I've seen for other parts of the country have
similar examples, and I've heard the same from others. But it could
just all be the luck of the draw!

octiger...

No Pembrokeshire ancestry discovered so far. Pity my enumerators in
London didn't oblige.

Lesley Robertson...

Jill...

Mind you there was a time when every decent RS reporter / newscaster seemed
to head south with inordinate speed. - Eddie Mair a case in point
:~)

Martin Briscoe (2)...

That won't go well down in BBC Scotland, they get very touchy if called
a "Region". I think they like to be called a "National Region".

I wonder why they chose to give Ancestry so much free advertising, and
didn't see fit to mention that Scotlands people now has the full set of
available census returns on line.......

Jill...

You and me both
But then I have long given up expecting balanced reporting from the BBC on
any level

Lesley Robertson

Hugh Watkins...

1837online made a coup on the BBC with excellent PR for 1861

this time ancestry is better organised

Hugh W

Phil C....

It may just be because Ancestry sent them a publicity handout and
Scotland's People didn't. Anything to fill news pages without too much
effort.

Martin Briscoe (2)...

Perhaps the equivalent programme on Radio Scotland covered the Scottish
1841 Census. If they did or going to do later in the week then I bet
they did not cover the England and Wales 1841 Census being made
available online - would that also be bias?

octiger...

I wasn't aware of any such, but in those cases certainly it would be
true that places of birth are not given. However, that does not make it
generally true that places of birth (in the sense of Scotland, Ireland,
English county) are not given.

Digitising the images from 1841 presented problems that had not been encountered with the other censuses.
"What was unique about the 1841 was that there were about 40,000 pages which were illegible on microfilm and we found that they were unacceptable," explains Josh Hanna, managing director of Ancestry.co.uk.
"So we sent over a team of people over to the National Archives to look at the originals. Around 6% of the pages required special scanning."

mbnilspam...

What do they mean "over"? From the US? Does this mean that the images on
Ancestry are actually images digitised from microfilm? Explains why some
are so bad maybe.

Daniel Morgan...

I have run across a few images on Ancestry's 1841 that are very
obviously modern color photographs of the original enumeration books.
Very nice. Most pages of the 1841, however, and all pages of the other
years, and AFAIK all census images available from other companies
(online or CD) are scanned from the black-and-white microfilm.

Rather than knocking Ancestry again (yawn) for image quality, which
IMHO is really rather good, I think we should give them great credit
for making the effort of going to the originals on these hard-to-read
pages. Also credit to TNA for allowing it.

Hugh Watkins...

if you read the newlstters this was announced months ago 30 000
images was the original figure

Hugh W

Maire Black