Delivering results more quickly: the impact of the 1911 census
16/03/2009
The newly available 1911 census resource is making an impact on the research we do and here’s why.
In England, the decennial censuses have customarily been subject to a 100-year closure period. For example, the 1891 census was not opened by the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) until January 1992, and the 1901 census was first released in January 2002. However, the 1911 census of England & Wales has been released before the customary 100 years have elapsed.
The decision to release it early is the result of lobbying by family historians following the exponential growth in recreational family history over the last eight years. The Information Commissioner reviewed the proposal to lay aside the customary closure period and in December 2006 decided in favour of early release, subject to redaction until January 2012 of information deemed especially sensitive. The one column to be redacted in the original schedule filled in by householders is Infirmity, which asked the householder to record whether any residents were deaf, dumb, blind, “lunatic”, “imbecile” or “feeble-minded”. Any infants detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure along with their convicted mothers in English and Welsh gaols in 1911 are also to be discreetly redacted.
Initially, from January 2007, it was possible only to apply for a paper copy of the household schedule for a particular address, and The National Archives would fulfil the request under the Freedom of Information Act for a £45 fee. However, in the background a project was under way to digitise the census records and, following a soft launch in December 2008, the census was formally released online in January 2009 and is now available to search at www.1911census.co.uk. At the time of writing, English counties have been published, while Welsh counties, the Channels Islands, the Isle of Man and the armed forces serving overseas (for example, the Royal Navy stationed at Malta, and the British Army in India and Egypt) will follow in coming months.
For the recreational family historian, one of the chief excitements of the 1911 census is that, unlike earlier censuses, for the first time the original household schedules have been preserved (rather than destroyed after a summary had been made). This means that it is possible to see a specimen of an ancestor’s own handwriting and signature.
For professional researchers such as Title Research, the 1911 census is of even greater value. Earlier censuses merely provided a snapshot of who was resident overnight at a given address. However, the 1911 also asked married householders to provide better “Particulars as to Marriage” – this is why demographers refer to the 1911 as the fertility census. As well as asking for the number of years a couple had been married, it also requested the total number of children born to the marriage, the number of those children still living and the number now dead. This information is of self-evident value in determining family size and composition as at 1911. Furthermore, the 1911 census bridges the research gap between the 1901 census (published in 2002) and the appearance, coincidentally in 1911, of the mother’s maiden surname in the birth indexes. Previously, having to search the birth indexes from 1901 to 1911 exerted a brake to research; now, with the 1911 census we can move ahead with greater speed and confidence.
So what does this mean for the work we do for you? It means that we are able to deliver results for you more quickly than ever before. Specifically, the 1911 census provides greater certainty as to the structure of a family, speeds up the research process and thereby helps us reduces the cost of most investigations. By way of example, consider the following. Our probate practitioner told us that their lay client, a maternal first cousin, was “pretty confident” that there was only one long-dead spinster aunt, and no uncles, on the paternal side of the deceased’s family (named Johnson) – in other words, no paternal heirs to partake in the distribution of the estate. Our client properly erred on the side of caution and asked us to look into it for them. As the surname is common, before the release of the 1911 census it would have taken a good while to verify the extent of the paternal family and identify any/all uncles and aunts. However, a quick search now showed that there were four paternal uncles and aunts born in the 1900s and that, moreover, they had been born at various locations nationwide (which would have made them even more time-consuming to research under the old order). As a result, we were able to kick-start the research into that side of the family and soon had found heirs equally entitled to benefit under the intestacy along side the cousins on the maternal family.