Last time I told you about how I used birth and marriage certificates to find out who my great grandparents were. Sometimes I had trouble deciding which birth certificate to order as some of them had common names and there were several possible matches – William Jenkins and William Wheeler in particular gave me a lot of trouble. So my next step was to look at census information to see if that could help me pinpoint where they lived and where they were born.

A census has been compiled every 10 years since 1801 (except 1941 due to World War II). The earlier returns 1801, 1811, 1821, and 1831 did not record names of individuals but from 1841 names of individuals were recorded. The census returns from 1851 onwards are particularly useful as they give an age and a place of birth whereas the 1841 census doesn’t have a place of birth and the ages of persons over 16 rounded down to the nearest 5 years.

The easiest to use, and the ones I’ve used extensively are the 1881 and 1901 censuses as these are both available online (1881 at www.familysearch.org and 1901 at www.1901censusonline.com) and are both indexed by name so that I could search for my grand parents and great grandparents my name. The 1881 census online is free to use but with the 1901 census having done a search you have to pay to get the information you want.

It was the 1901 census that gave me the information I needed to sort out my William Wheeler problem. I couldn’t look for my grandfather himself as he wasn’t born until 1904 but I knew he had a brother with the slightly unusual name of Ashley Wheeler. So I did a search for him and found him straight away. By paying to see the household details I then got information about all the family including Dad William’s place of birth which then helped to pin point which birth certificate to order.

Using census information has also meant that I have been able to flesh out information from birth and marriage certificates, identifying some of my great grandparents’ brothers and sisters. Because censuses only give a snap shot of a particular time in their lives, I can’t always be sure if all the family group are together in the one house at the time of the census – elder brothers and sister may have married or been apprenticed and moved away. Younger brothers and sisters may yet to be born. Other siblings may have been born and died between censuses. My family of Dewfalls are a good example of this, only 7 children appear on the 1901 census but I have subsequently found out that there were 6 more children, 4 died in infancy and 2 were born after 1901.