basic census question

[Guy Etchells]

this is probably pretty basic. I don't fully understand why someone's place of birth changes from census to census. If you were born in a little hamlet near a village near a town near a bigger town, then you were born in the hamlet, not the big town. Did the enumerator "re-interpret" a person's stated birthplace ?

I would suggest you are approaching the census with the wrong view; you are looking at the 19th or even the early 20th century from 21st century eyes. Forget about today’s values and today’s demand of proving who you are, how old you are and where you come from and think in the values of the 19th century.
If you are fit enough to do a job and big enough to do it then you get the job, you don’t have to show a birth certificate for this or that if you say you are 12 you are accepted as 12. If your parents have moved around a number of times being employed on one farm or another or in one household or another they may forget which child was born where or even when, such things were not of great importance then as they are these days.
Cheers
Guy

[David Tuson]

One of the families I am researching have people reported on the various censuses with a birthplace as Pembrokeshire and differing ittle villages therein. Over the census the place of birth changed but when I checked the Pembrokeshire maps those places were only a few miles distant. So now I always use a map (e.g.Google Earth) to check the whereabouts of a persons birthplace that changes from one census to the next.

[wimsey]

I must read up more on the history of the census to understand why it was started. If it was never expected to be particularly accurate, was it primarily a head-count ? When the results of the 1840 census landed on some politician's desk, what did he do with the information ?

[macwil]

I must read up more on the history of the census to understand why it was started. If it was never expected to be particularly accurate, was it primarily a head-count ? When the results of the 1840 census landed on some politician's desk, what did he do with the information ?

Hi wimsey,
These might be a start to your elucidation.

https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Ce...ales_1841-1911

This is information about the census given as background to the main aims of the project 'Old Bailey Convicts'.

Amongst the references for further reading is:-

Glass, D. V. "Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain. Saxon House, 1978

Regards,
Malcolm.

[macwil]

. . . When the results of the 1840 census landed on some politician's desk, what did he do with the information ?

He either filed it in the round receptacle at the side of his desk or handed it to his secretary, who handed it to his secretary, who. . . . . until some conscientious? bod read it.

[pwholt]

There are some few surviving earlier censuses, such as 1821 for Trowbridge. Here it is apparent that it was a counting heads exercise. Enumerators were meant to count men and women separately and in age tranches. However, in order to be sure they didn't count some people more than once, the enumerators recorded the head of household's name along with the age tranches for the household. When submitted to those higher up, they sent only the numbers, but fortunately for us, the tallies with the family names have survived, and one can work out a fair amount about the family even without the first names. pwholt

[Guy Etchells]

The Parliamentary Archives puts it this way-

"The late 18th century saw increasing discussion about the question of population and its effects on society. The economist Thomas Malthus took an extreme viewpoint, arguing that Britain had a falling populace and population growth itself would outstrip food supplies and lead to starvation and famine. The civil servant and statistician John Rickman, and politicians such as Charles Abbot and William Wilberforce, didn’t agree with these fatalistic views. Rickman suggested the introduction of a population census which would provide the Government with information on societal patterns, and which would also be a useful aid to formulate military recruitment in the continuing war with France. Parliament passed the Population Act in December 1800, and the first United Kingdom census was conducted the following year, continuing the trend for acquiring accurate demographic information that had developed in Europe and America in the previous century."

Cheers
Guy