As a tribute to our recent update to the 1841 census in which many of the schedules from Cumberland and north Lancashire have been added, it is interesting to consider the oddities of the first national census in which every individual was named, and therefore the first to be really useful to family historians nationwide.

Censuses had been taken time out of mind of course for particular towns and parishes, but these were adhoc affairs often connected to tax raising or army business and many have not survived. The state sanctioned nationwide censuses had been taking place since 1801 – parliament had sanctioned them against some opposition, but as the age old parish and church bureaucracies began to creak, the state needed to assess its rapidly multiplying population.

The shaping of the 1841 census was heavily influenced by two men, Thomas Henry Lister, the Registrar General and John Rickman, statistician. It was Lister for example, who insisted that the whole census be taken over only a day or so, that the GRO registration districts should be the basis of the census and that a lot of, not particularly well educated, men would be needed to enumerate it. Lister was brought in after the death of Rickman, who had pushed for and got the first national census in 1801 and later for full enumeration-though he never lived to see it.

1841 is not the easiest census to search what with ages of individuals varying by up to five years , no relationships provided between members of the household and no place of birth, except whether a person was born in or out of county (with squiggles indicating Scots, Irish or other foreign origin). Ages and relationships can be guessed at but the lack of a precise parish of birth is particularly frustrating if you trying to trace the origins of your ancestor. Fortunately, by the time you get that far back in the nineteenth century, people are generally close to where their families were from historically anyway; the impact of the railways had not quite been fully felt. If your family had left and was newly arrived in Manchester or Birmingham though, it would really help to know precisely where they were from, especially if they had died by the time of the 1851 census.

It is also not widely known that many very young children are missing from it, following the widespread belief that the unbaptised children or even those under seven, didn’t really count (literally) or that a family would be penalised if there were too many resident in one place. Then again many enumerators were themselves semi literate and were filling in the forms for the actually illiterate, interpretating badly what they had been told orally. This can lead to some very strange names being recorded, as I am sure many of users can testify to! Have you found any strange names?

The census informed the Victorian government in its military, taxation and medical decisions and continues to be a great boon to statisticians and academics in their discussions about the impact of such things as the Industrial Revolution but it is only recently that it has come into its own as a family history tool. Such a use was totally unconsidered when it was constructed but it is this interest in roots which has really democratised its use and brought its peculiarities and joys to a wide audience, even though the mysteries surrounding many of its entries may never be fully resolved.

For this year’s Census Day on Sunday the 27th March, we’re making census indexes from England, Wales and Scotland, free to search. Click here for further details.

Anyone who has spent long periods of time with the family over Christmas will find that as the food and drink flow, the old family stories are wheeled out and retold again. In my case, my dad’s experiences as an evacuee and accounts of which relative disappeared to South Africa or Canada after some particularly pointless family quarrel, not to mention my Russian nihilist great grandfather and his sewing machine factory in Brooklyn.  As a child these tales were tantalising, some details so specific and others so vague -names, places and times lost over the century.

Until the advent of online genealogy, finding out the truth in these stories involved a lot time visiting archives, writing letters and wading through graveyards if you were lucky. Oftentimes, one had no idea whether there even was a verifying document, let alone where it might be. Nowadays, we are blessed with a wealth of ways to connect and research without leaving the house. Even so, unless these old stories are recorded in some way, they will eventually be lost to our children and grandchildren, whose interest in them often does not ignite until years later. While memories are still fresh, New Year is a good time to finally commit the stories to print, reach out to distant relatives and separate the truth from myth.

Happy Hunting to you all!

A few days ago, I went to Paris and the trip was bounded at each end by visits to two places of the dead, the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise  and the Paris Catacombs under the city. Here the bones of many ancient cemeteries were deposited after being dug up from their pits in church graveyards, the ancient population of Paris rehoused in picturesque arrangements. Femurs are tightly piled on top of each other to form walls, (a macabre dry bone walling) and the skulls lined up on top or set in patterns. A tablet fixed on each section declares the church from which they came. The skulls gave off a brown sheen; look closely and on each could be seen the pattern of the cranium plates; many were broken, many were small, most indistinguishable from each other. Once the beginning of the ossuary was reached, the bone barriers snaked around for hundreds of metres; only the churches changed. The initial pathos of seeing them wore off after a while, another path, another wall of the dead. Sometimes an appropriate aphorism in Latin or French would add some interest to the journey.

It took some effort to remind myself that each of these skulls once sat atop a fleshy body and walked in the world. That this broken head half hidden at the back in the gloom of a shadowed alcove once laughed, spoke, coughed, thought, ate, belched and held opinions. All identity had been lost in this great democracy of the dead. Never was an idea made more real than here, that we are levelled and equal in death; was this the riposte to the vanity at the other end of Paris, in the great cemetery of Père-Lachaise with its monumental shrines, and family tombs, and painted glass and sorrowing statues? After all, the dead in their houses were just as much devoid of any sniff of the person who had lived as the jumble of ribs and heads and legs and arms in their humid tunnels.

What the city of the dead at Père-Lachaise had was memory. The name of each family is carved above each little house, those beautiful and ornate and maybe slightly ridiculous sepulchres, like lovely lines of toilet cubicles or beach huts. Their plaques and flowers and mementos are explanations of who the people were who lie beneath. The peoples collected together in the catacombs may not have been buried originally with much ceremony but it is unlikely that that would have thought this would one day be their fate. They would have hoped their names would survive, perhaps ready for their descendents’ descendents to come seek them out. If they had remained where they were buried, then their future families could at least wave a hand over a specific sod and say, “this is where my great, great, great, great grandmother Mathilde was buried”.  Now Mathilde’s head could be anywhere in the darkness of the catacombs, as it once was lost in the ditches of the graveyard, undignified in death for hundreds of years.

Family history is in part about remembrance and part about connection. We identify, we connect and then we remember those who came before us. Are the lines in a parish register or a law suit or in a newspaper enough for this purpose? Should all our genealogical journeys eventually lead to the grave where we can sigh over the story we have resurrected. Does it matter that the actual remains of our dear departed ancestors might be forming a decorative motif, cheek by joint with some unrelated human? Bones are not holy relics and we should not engage in ancestor worship. Still, there was a joy in the individuality of the mouldering mausoleums of Père-Lachaise and an awful poignancy in the underground mass graves of six million Parisians. As family historians, we remember the person and distinguish them, raising them from the generality into which they have been commonly placed and then forgotten. No individual is remembered in the catacombs, just the building of its walls and there is a lesson there-that we need all the help we can, to do the dead the honour of remembrance.

All hail the arrival of the indexes to the early London parish registers in our LMA collections. Now all those who claim their ancestors were proper Londoners can check this out and see whether they can push their tree back all the way to the era of Henry VIII, or even earlier.

From Edmonton to Battersea and Richmond to Camden, nearly 500 years of Londoners being hatched, matched and dispatched are now fully searchable by name, parents or spouses’ names, parish and county.

Given the tendency of Londoners to move across the numerous tiny parishes of the city and from the inner to the outer suburbs, the indexes will be a great help in tracking the movements of your families. But it’s the extra details that add the spice – and the registers provide these in their droves. Scattered liberally through the records, you’ll find mentions of what people actually did for a living and what street they lived on, plus occasionally what they died of and whether they were legitimate or not.

As well as your own family, it’s always fun to find some famous Londoners: not just figures like Samuel Pepys (buried at St Olave) and John Keats (baptized at St Botolph’s), but characters like James Summersett – the slave whose legal case signaled the beginning of the end of slavery in Britain – baptized at the age of 30 in St Andrews, Holborn.

You’ll find criminals such as John ‘Sixteen String Jack’ Rann, a notorious London highwayman, who was hanged in 1774 at Tyburn and buried at St Marlebone, near the spot of his execution. The ghosts of the Elizabethan age are also here – check out playwright Christopher Marlowe, friend of William Shakespeare, buried in St Nicholas church, Debtford, after being stabbed in a local pub, supposedly in an argument over the bar bill.

A word of warning though. London has historically been a population sink, sucking in the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside but failing until the middle of the eighteenth century to grow its own populace. Plenty of people were born in the capital, especially with lots of young marriages from the 1700s, but smallpox epidemics, infanticide and the gin craze carried plenty of babies and children off.

It’s a genuine challenge to find a Tudor or Restoration ancestor when so many of their descendents never carried a line into the 21st century, or left the city or indeed the shores of England.

Have you got engineering ancestors?  If so, then the engineers’ records at the mechanical, electrical and civil engineering institutes in London are well worth a visit.

Engineering professions expanded massively in the 19th century and people applied for membership and then took examinations, which were set by the Institutes.  The directories and ledgers held at the Institutes show the professional careers of engineers both before and after they joined up, who they worked for and what they did, both within the UK and overseas.  The records have also helped memorialize Institute members who fought in the World Wars and tragically lost their lives.

I would definitely recommend to anyone who has an engineering ancestor to pay a visit to the Institutes and look through their directories and ledgers.  And even if you don’t find an ancestor, they are tremendously rich records, which provide a real insight into what life was like for engineers during the golden age of Victorian engineering and beyond.