Census - finding enumeration district

davidm_uk · Post by **davidm_uk** » 25 Feb 2008 12:29

In a city like London, what's the quickest/easiest way to find the census enumeration district (or Piece/Folio reference) if I just have a street address and registration district (say from a marriage certificate)?
From a marriage cert in 1882 I'm trying to find who lived at the given address in the 1881 census, but there must be a more methodical way of doing this than my present 'blundering' around in Ancestry census searches!
Thanks, David.

ID:2771

ADC65 · Post by **ADC65** » 25 Feb 2008 13:50

The street indexes used to be held by the FHC but I don't know if these have been made available online. Most of the work had been done by volunteers so it may be.

You could look at the description of the enumeration district. When you click on the census you want to search in Ancestry, a list of counties should appear towards the bottom of the screen. Clicking the county allows you to click on a town. Selecting a town will bring up a list of the enumeration districts in that town (example here: http://content.ancestry.co.uk/Browse/li ... ire.Bedwas ). You can then just browse the documents which show the streets and boundaries.

I don't know how complicated this would be for London, but it works OK for other places for me.

There may be easier ways!

ChrisBowyer · Post by **ChrisBowyer** » 25 Feb 2008 13:58

If anyone finds the answer, please let us all know. We have several addresses in London that we can't find on some censuses. Apart from the problem that street names change of course. One trick that helps occasionally is to search for the neighbours in the hope that some at least of them haven't moved in the intervening 10 years.

ADC65 · Post by **ADC65** » 25 Feb 2008 14:29

Digging round on Google it seems that the PRO Indexes are available on CD, you could try the Parish Chest.

There are a number of links half way down this thread: http://www.british-genealogy.com/forums ... php?t=6918

Lastly, I would take good note of this caveat:

'In 1888 the General Post Office and London County Council conducted a renaming and renumbering scheme to eliminate duplicate road names throughout the LCC and to renumber houses consistently with the lowest number being closest to the local post office. This means that a house located in 1851 need not be the same house today, or even in subsequent censuses.'

(From http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hitch/gendocs/lon-str.html )

margarita · Post by **margarita** » 25 Feb 2008 15:22

On http://www.findmypast.com you can search by address or person.

The address search is available for the 1841, 1861, 1871 and 1891 censuses.

It doesn't, of course, help if the street has been renamed.

margarita

P.S. Just realised that you want 1881 census so this doesn't help - but it may help others.

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 25 Feb 2008 20:24

When doing any census work, I highly recommend having a good modern map of any area you plan to study extensively, learning what you can about the area as it is now, and trying to pin down when things changed.

It's much easier to see changes between the historical map and the modern one if you have one on the screen and one physical map, rather than having to switch back and forth between the two. A paper map is likely to cover a much larger area than a map you print out from Google, etc. which will help when looking for cross-streets and other nearby streets in the neighborhood. And if the enumerator's handwriting is wretched, the physical map can be a huge help in simply reading what the street name is.

With that knowledge as a baseline, it is easier to apply all the strategies above at once -- locating the district boundaries, looking for neighbors who are around a corner from the address you want, and so on. Using a combination of these techniques -- comparing the addresses of neighbors between 1871 and 1891 censuses, to look for address changes -- may work.

Some cities allow you to pull up tax information about properties by street address, which includes data about the buildings on site, so you can see if the actual building was standing at the time of the census you want.

I've also been alerted to address changes by using the web-based address checkers -- if an address comes up as 'undeliverable' then the street name may not be the same, the building may not be there any more (or it may be a multi-family dwelling and the address-checker wants a unit number).

If there is a large building in the neighborhood like a hospital, finding that in the census and on the modern map might give you an idea of how the street address may have changed.

If you run into this problem with a US address, try the One-Step Webpages at http://www.stevemorse.org -- one of which lets you search for street name changes.

Good luck!

Jan

treefrog · Post by **treefrog** » 27 Feb 2008 09:20

I've used Charles Booth's poverty map of London successfully to locate streets - it's 1898/9, and you can compare it with a modern map.

Wish he'd done the whole country!

http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?su ... ,6,large,5

Jocelyn

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 13 Mar 2008 18:14

How about this (if you have broadband) for comparing the pre-1888 map with the current one?

The UCLA Department of Epidemiology / School of Public Health has
Dr. John Snow's map of London in 1859 here:

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/1859map/map1859.html

There are two indices for the map, one presenting historical sites and reference areas relevant to Dr. John Snow and the other showing historical sites for London.

Also presented are links to Greenwood's Map of London, 1827, to Charles Booth's 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty , and to the current UK Street Map.

This geographic information system (GIS) is a broadband site requiring fast internet connections.

Jan

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