1921 England & Wales Census - some tips and tricks
The 1921 England & Wales census - some tips and tricks
A page from a 1921 census return - original image from The National Archives in Class RG15
Today, early 2022, the only public access available to see returns from the 1921 census is through FindMyPast. This access is charged on a pay per view basis (unless you use FindMyPast on computers based at The National Archives and a couple of other locations, in which case access is free). FindMyPast provides a search engine allowing you to search on more than 35 different fields. You may think this should make it easy to find any record, but the number of fields available can instead lead you to over-search and get no results.
First, the bad news. This searchable index is chock full of transcription errors.
Remember, what you are doing when you search is scouring the index that the FindMyPast website makes available to you; this index was created by transcribing the contents of all of the census returns and entering this data into a computer database. The returns were handwritten, so the success of the transcription depended on how clear the writing was. If a transcription error occured for the record you are looking for, this will affect the success of your search, even though the final image you find may well clearly show the correct information to your eyes.
When FindMyPast shows the results of your search what you see is just a list of some of the fields. These few fields may be sufficient to be sure that a particular search result is the one you are looking for. But they also may not. You need to keep your wits about you and try to increase your confidence in the search result before you spend your money.
Advice No. 1
Always try to search for a person by name and also (at the same time) by other things you know about them - for example their occupation, age, or birthplace. This will help rule out other people with the same name. But specifying too many thing may give you no results. I always start with just the name, and then add the other things one at a time, checking the search results after each.
Advice No. 2
If you know of other household members whom you expect would have been at the same address, add them to the search too. This will help to filter out other people with the same name; it may also accidentally filter out the result you want if, for example, the second person was away that day.
The search results table
What information appears in the search results table? The first columns give you the name of the person (as transcribed, so subject to error) as well as their birth year and place of birth. The birth year was calculated from their age as written (in years and months) in the return. So, provided that they wrote their true age, the year of birth will be accurate to the year. That is, unless their age was ‘x’ years and five months, in which case their birth year could be the one listed or the year before.
The other columns show official information about the physical volume that their return can be found in: the county and civil parish, as well as the registration district. These should not be subject to the same transcription errors as names suffer from.
Advice No. 3
In the search results table always make sure you roll your mouse over the transcription/image icons in the righthand column. This will reveal the given names of up to three people who appear in the household return. Use this information to confirm whether this is the household you expect. One useful trick is to also search for other expected household members because the results may reveal a different set of three names for the same household.
Advice No 4 - Don't buy a transcript
I know transcriptions are cheaper, but before you pay your money, it is worth reflecting on the two options available to you: the transcript, or an image of the return itself. In my opinion it is not worth buying a transcript because it contains much less information than the image of the return. The image will also give you a lot of contextual information, such as the map used by the enumerator as they went about their work.
Advice No. 5 - Make the best of the images
Once you have bought the image, do not forget to use the "Extra (address)" button at the bottom of the screen to also download the other related images: the enumeration book cover sheet and the address of the household, as well as maps of the area, and the description of the census division. If you forget this, you can always return later.
Citing 1921 returns
Some of you will want to know how properly to cite a specific 1921 census return.
The National Archives holds these census returns in 28,162 separate volumes, each of which can be located using four pieces of information (for each one I include advice on where you can find it):
- TNA Class RG15.
- Piece Number (nnn or nnnn), found at the top of the cover sheet image, appearing as RG15/nnn.
- Registration District Number, found on the cover sheet and the address sheet images.
- Registration Subdistrict Number, found on the cover sheet and the address sheet images.
- Enumeration District Number, found on the cover sheet, the address sheet, and also on the plan of division page images.
There is also a Schedule Number found on the household return page image, which identifies a single household return within a volume.
Following the thinking in Evidence Explained, a citation should consist first of a definition of just what is being cited, then it's original archive reference, and finally how you accessed it. In the case of my great-great uncle this reads as follows:
1921 England Census, Middlesex, Finchley, Schedule 418, Henry Leeson Bunn; The National Archives, RG15, Piece 6653, RD 131, SD 3, ED 9; 1921 Census of England & Wales, database with images, www.findmypast.co.uk, accessed 16 Mar 2022
What appears in the census return image itself?
Much of the information is exactly as in the 1911 census: name, relationship to head of household, age (but now in years and months), gender, marital status, and birthplace and nationality.
The 1911 census returns also contained information valued by genealogists about how long married women had been married for, how many children they had given birth to, and how many of those were still alive. This information is not present in the 1921 census. Instead, for each adult male on the return, there is a count (by age) of all their living children and stepchildren under the age of sixteen. This can catch you out, so beware, a man who remarried will list children from both his first and second marriages, as well as any children his second wife already had.
The occupation and employment columns are more thorough than before and can reveal the names and addresses of employers. Not everybody wrote down this level of detail, so be prepared to be disappointed.
Search by address
This being FindMyPast you can also search the 1921 census by address (you can do this on all censuses and the 1939 Register on their website).
In this case the search results table will list all the households on a street, by house number on the street. Unfortunately this search suffers from the same transcription problems as the name search. What was a "rollover" list of names of people in the household is now seen by clicking on the transcript/image icons.
As an example, I was looking for my ancestor John Sydie. I know he lived at 61 Gondar Gardens in Hampstead both before and after 1921 so I expected to find him at the same address.
Searching for exactly "Gondar Gardens" found no results. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Easing the search to "Gondar Gardens", now with spelling variants checkbox ticked, found a street that had been indexed as “Gondor Gardens”, but only some of the house numbers appeared, in particular not including 61. Hmm.
Easing the search further I introduced a wildcard, searching for "Go* Gardens". This found a street that had been indexed as “Gondon Gardens”, with house number 61 included.
You may think that name search and location search could be used together to narrow down your search to make your purchase more likely to be the right one, but in fact there is surprisingly little overlap in the information the two searches return so little definite triangulation can be done.
Conclusion
To summarise, as long as the 1921 Census Index continues to contain as many transcription errors as it currently does, wildcards in searches will be your friend.
Remember, wildcards mean using a '?' symbol to mean "any single letter or number", and '*' to mean "any number of (different) letters or numbers (including none)".
For example: (these are real searches):
- Searching for “s?die” finds both “sadie” and “sydie” but not “sophie”.
- Changing the search pattern to “s??ie” finds “sabie”, “sacie”, “sadie”, “safie”, “sagie”, etc, etc (over 140 individuals in all). But not “sophie”. Good practice advice here is to use multiple '?' with care because the numbers of results rapidly become intractable.
- Searching for “s*ie” returns over 4,000 individual results making it unrealistic to use on its own. Using a single '?' may work for you on its own; otherwise combine multiple '?' and '*' with search values in other fields as in the following example.
I found my ancestor John Sydie by searching for:
- “S*ie” for surname
- Other person “Margaret” (his daughter I already knew of)
- Occupation “builder” (I already knew this)
- Birth year “1863” (I already knew this)
I picked these because although family names (and middle names) could have been mistranscribed as almost anything, common first names, occupations, and numbers should be relatively accurately transcribed.
This search gave me just 1 result: that’s right, he was indexed as John Sophie of 61 Gondon Gardens. Sigh.
Best of luck with your own searches of the 1921 census. If you discover any particularly awful transcriptions why not come back here and post about them?
Julian Luttrell
The Tree Sleuths, 2022. The Tree Sleuths website.
Sources:
1921 Census of England and Wales, database with images, https://www.findmypast.co.uk/1921-census
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