Family Historian User Group

Dear All
Does anyone know of a website, where one could put in a place name for a census, and get the civil parish and enumeration district.
For example I was trying to find the 1901 census returne for the village of Gawcott, Bucks.I looked in several Parishes that surrounded Gawcott with no success. Eventually I tried Buckingham and found it in enumeration district 13, but I must have spent an hour or more in my search.Any ideas how I could have got there quicker would be appreciated.

ID:3023

http://www.1901censusonline.com/

You can search by placename, I found Gawcott fairly easily.

The results included

Place (Town,
Village or Hamlet) Civil Parish Registration
Sub-District Registration
District Administrative
County Enumeration
District No. Image Selection View
Hamlets Of Gawcott & Lenborough

I am not sure if that's enough to get you close. If you have a surname from that parish you could search for it in ancestry and then just go backwards to the first page in the hamlet.

I went first to Steve Morse's One-Step Web pages.  This is the page for searching Ancestry:
http://stevemorse.org/census/uk.html

I chose 'England' 'Buckinghamshire' from the drop-down lists and entered 'Gawcott' in the box marked 'town'.  

Since I don't have a World membership there (I'm in the US), Ancestry returned a list of 400 names in alphabetical order.  I can see the county people were born in but not their residence or their parents / spouse names.

E.g.
Anne M S Abbotts        name        abt 1876        city, Buckinghamshire, England        relation        city, Buckinghamshire

'name' 'city' 'relation' are links which take the user to the 'don't you want to sign up for a subscription now' page.

However, had I been able to view an individual record, that would have given me some idea of what the ED might be.

For 1901censusonline, the link is:

http://stevemorse.org/census/uk1901a.html

I repeated the search, but for that site, you cannot search for the entire town.  You must search for at least part of a name (little boxes pop up to advise you which searches are possible and which are not).

Next I checked World Vital Records, which makes available some census data from FindMyPast.com (though not 1901).

It's possible there to simply search for 'Gawcott' in the place field and then see what happens.  I got 995 hits, many of which were people who were born in Gawcott, addresses of Gawcott Road, and so forth -- the search result pages show the Registration district rather than the town, so not much help there.

Searching the gazetteer on 'A Vision of Britain Through Time' got this result in the Gazeteer:

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

Associated administrative units:
Unit name      Type of unit
Buckingham AP/CP      Parish-level Unit
Buckinghamshire      Ancient County

I would say next time start at 'Vision' -- if the plain place search on the main page yields no results, try the gazetteers next. That would allow you to  get to the likely civil parish without guessing.  From there Genuki might be able to tell you what the equivalent CP was for the census you are searching.

(I can't say how long the search took, because I was writing the message as I was going along, which was more time-consuming than the search itself.)

Hope this helps.

Jan