Census

[altariel]

Spurred on by yesterday's look at surname distribution, and because I was looking at the National Statistics site for work, I had a poke around the 1901 Census for family members. My mother had sent me some good handwritten notes about my grandparents on both sides, so I started some confident searches on my dad's family.



And drew a complete blank on McCormacks in St Helens. This is complete madness, since they were both local councillors there, active in the fledgling Independent Labour Party. I knew for a fact they were there in 1905, when Michael Davitt (a cousin or second cousin of my grandmother) spoke at a local election meeting they had organized in St Helens. And I knew that they had two baby sons who should have been showing up on the records. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing. This was really disconcerting: like all the oral family history had somehow been completely disproven. Identityquake!

Anyway, I gave up, and started looking for information on my mother's family. Since her father didn't come over till the 1920s, he wasn't going to be on the 1901 Census, but her mother should be. And there she was - two years old. And her older sister (aged 4). When I brought up the whole record for the household, I was a bit confused again: there was a woman with the name of my great-grandmother, Mary Ann McGurk, aged 29, head of the house (she was a widow by this time), but the household had four other people listed. One of whom, a Martin Marron, was listed as the father of the head of the house...? But my great-grandmother had been born Mary Ann Murray... So I got the image of the Census entry itself (as a PDF), and there was my great-great-grandfather's name, entered wrongly and then written over - and definitely Murray.

I rang my mother to tell her what I was looking at. We were excited to learn that my great-grandmother's birthplace was Durham (she hadn't known that), and were also intrigued by the other members of the household - two boarders (probably father and son), and a 16 year old servant girl. So Mary Ann McGurk, despite being widowed so young, was doing well enough to pay for a servant.

I told her about the odd mistake about my great-great-grandfather's name and then I had a flash of inspiration. There is a family joke about my paternal grandfather's name being misspelled on the board above his insurance broker's shop (-ick, not -ack). I should have remembered that much sooner. Enter in the new search term... There were Francis and Ellen, and two of their sons (not my dad yet), and his younger brother, James, about whom I'd known nothing. (Sadly, I couldn't find any relatives of Ellen, whose brother Edward married the famous Auntie Ada, she who once said to my mother (concerning my father): "Gerald Never Married." But I'll keep looking.)



Moral: trust oral history, it's loads better.

Comments

[kathyh]

I actually did a course on family history and one of the things we were told was that the census was often filled in by the person who was in the house at the time, who might have been someone like a lodger who didn't know all the correct details (or spellings). My maiden name is continuously mispelled (one of the reasons I changed it), but fortunately my ancestors were so unadventurous that they never moved anywhere so I always knew it was them however cunningly disguised!

Have you been watching Who Do You Think You Are? It's been like a whole window opening on the past.

[(Anonymous)]

My OH's illiterate great-grandfather came over from Wexford as Byrne and was registered in Durham as Burns by the official who misheard him.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I don't think the presence of a servant proves much--I suspect the "hired girl" got a roof over her head and her bread and tea and not much more. (I read a comparison not only of the price of the first edition of Jane Eyre to governess' actual salaries, but to the 4 pounds a year deducted from the 20 pound per annum salary, with the net described as "four times the cost of laundering a governess' not very extensive wardrobe."

Family legend has it that the reason I have a bunch of relatives named Gordon because there was an Gordon advertisement painted on a brick wall visible in Ellis Island, so it was a default value when the immigration Babel fish was taking a lunch break. I have *no* idea what the name was originally.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Quite apart from errors in the original census, the scanning/transcription of the entries introduced further bloopers. (Personal experience with this.)