Family Historian User Group

Having found family names can be terribly distorted in transcription from census returns (e.g, Piper found as Pipes and Peper) I wondered if anyone knows how to search Ancestry.co.uk for an address rather than a name in the hope that family members still lived there or lived there at earlier date?
Many thanks
Dagwood

ID:4760

Go into the Census you want to look at on the right hand side you can drill down by location.

Many thanks Jane, without your assistance I doubt I would have found that method
Dagwood [smile]

Unless I'm missing something this only allows navigating down to enumeration district, you then have to read through all the street names for each district to find which enumeration district includes the street you are interested in (unless you happen to know it somehow). Then having found the right enumeration district you can browse through all the images (maybe 100's of them) for that district to find the street you are interested in!

A useful facility nevertheless.

I'm sure I remember in the past that I have been able to include street name in the search criteria, but maybe I'm getting confused with the 1911 census where you can do that (I think).

I have had similar problems with one of the surnames in my family, Stonyer, variously mistranscribed as Stanyer, Stonger, Stanger, Monyer, Stonier, Stranger, and others too numerous to mention.

There are various wildcards you can use on Ancestry in most of the search fields. Sto* will find all names starting with the letters Sto. Ston?er will find all Stonier, Stonyer, Stonger, etc. I tend to use the old search pages rather than the new ones as this seems better to confine results to just the areas you're searching.

Using just a first name or part of a first name is useful if you think the surname has been horrendously corrupted, but you would need to reduce the number of matches by specifying some dates and places. Sometimes, using just a year and birthplace will get results.

I had one family living under an assumed name on the 1871 census, but found them using these techniques.

Using details of the enumeration district and then trawling through the images page by page has to be a last resort[frown]

Hope that helps.

David Dewick said:
Using details of the enumeration district and then trawling through the images page by page has to be a last resort

... but well worthwhile in small villages as it can throw up other family members not been previously identified.

However, in large towns and cities I agree that it would be a long and possibly fruitless exercise.

Gerry

Again ,my thanks to all who replied and I take the points made by the two Davids. I was not aware you could still use the old forms and will try to do so as I find the changes made by Ancestry do sometimes make searches more difficult.
The point made by Gerry I can vouch for - on a number of occasions we have found other family members who obviously did not move far from Mum or from the place of work they ,as a family, went to e.g wire works and fustian mills in Warrington. We now troll both sides of any census result for up to 5 pages either side of the address, one problem being the enumerator almost always stayed on the same side of the road!
Dagwood

It wasn't many years ago that the ONLY way to look for someone in a census was to trawl through the pages, either on a disc or at the archives. It took hours and hours.

No wonder we didn't find half our people [grin]

Anne

I like Stephen P. Morse's One-Step Web Pages:

http://stevemorse.org/

If you have an Ancestry sub, try his search forms:

1841-1901 British Census: Searching the 1841 to 1901 British Censuses in One Step
1901 British Census: Searching the 1901 British Census in One Step

Although the FreeCEN database is far from complete, the search routine does allow you to search by street, so it may be worthwhile if the area you need is covered.

For what it is worth Findmypast allows street name search

The 1911 census does not give neighbours and nearby family members so I was delighted to see that Ancestry.co.uk have recently added the 1911 Census Summary Sheets to their data bank. Looking for a family ancestor we found not only the family's entry on the summary sheet we also found two other related groups sharing the same property. I don't know if this is the extent of 1911 information that Ancestry will have but it certainly is useful for searching through shared and nerby properties.
Dagwood

Ancestry newsletter says they will have full 1911 census by end of 2011

The 1911 census from FindmyPast has 8 pages for each entry. There are three pages for the individual, the main page, the address and the cover. There are then five pages for the area.
The page with the neighbours (this is the one Ancestry has), the cover, the district details, the district totals and the district description. These are accessed via tabs at the top of the web page.