Author: sophiemichell2155

The census is an invaluable resource, provided you can read it, and forms the backbone of any family research. This is a brief overview of each census taken in England and Wales, between 1841 and 1911, and its uses and comparitive limitations.

1841: taken 6th June

Includes: Street names, householder names, genders, ages (see limitations), occupations, whether born in England.

Limitations: Ages over 18 are rounded up to the nearest five, which can throw your age calculations right out. Street names are only given for large settlements. Generally difficult to read. No relationships between householders. No disability information. No place of birth information, although whether they were born in the county they lived in is included. Foreign births restricted to Scotland, Ireland or ‘Foreign Parts’.

1851 – taken 30th March, and 1861 – taken 7th April.

Includes: Street names, householder names, gender, marital status, relationship to Head of Household, ages, occupations, town of birth, limited disability classification.

Limitations: Street names are only given for large settlements. Pub names not always included on the 1851. Disabilities limited to ‘Blind’ or ‘Deaf/Dumb’.

1871 – taken 2nd April, and 1881 – taken 3rd April

Includes: Street names, householder names, gender, marital status, relationship to Head of Household, ages, occupations, town of birth, disability classification.

Limitations: Disabilities limited to ‘Blind’, ‘Deaf/Dumb’, ‘Imbecile or Idiot’ and ‘Lunatic’!

1891 – taken 5th April

Includes: Street names, householder names, gender, marital status, relationship to Head of Household, ages, occupations, town of birth, limited disability classification, employment status (employer, employed, neither), number of rooms occupied if less than five.

Limitations: Disabilities limited to ‘Blind’, ‘Deaf/Dumb’, and ‘Lunatic, Imbecile or Idiot’. No clarification of employment status if neither employed or employer, no indication of how many rooms occupied five or more.

1901 – taken 31st March

Includes: Street names, householder names, genders, relationship to Head of Household, marital status, ages, occupations, town of birth, limited disability classification, number of rooms occupied if less than five, employment status (either Employer/Worker/Own Account or Working From Home).

Limitations: Disabilities limited to ‘Deaf/Dumb’, ‘Blind’, ‘Lunatic’ or ‘Imbecile, Feeble Minded’. No indication of how many rooms occupied if five or more.

1911 – taken 2nd April

Includes: Street names, householder names, genders, relationship to Head of Household, marital status, ages. Employment status, occupation and within which industry. Town of birth, nationality. Limited disability classification and age when afflicted. Length of marriage, number of children born within that marriage, number of childen living/dead. Number of rooms occupied.

Limitations: Difficult to see surrounding neighbours without checking more census returns. Sometimes difficult to work out number of children born to parents who have remarried, or married after having children. Disabilities classified as ‘Deaf/Dumb’, ‘Blind’, ‘Lunatic’, or ‘Imbecile/Feeble Minded’.

And looking forward to the 1921 – taken 19th June

(to be released January 2022, I can’t wait)

Includes: Addresses, householder names, genders, relationship to Head of Household, marital status (including divorce for the first time), ages in years and months. Whether a child is orphaned or partly-orphaned. Employment status, occupation, within which industry and employer name. Place of education for children. Town of birth, and nationality. Number and ages of all living childen and stepchildren under 16.

Limitations: No disability information. No information on dead children. No information on housing type. This census was taken during holiday season, meaning that families may not be where you expect them to be!

There is also the 1939 war census. This was taken on 29th September 1939, for the purpose of issuing ration books. It holds name, sex, marital status, address, date of birth and occupation for every household member. I tend to find the 1939 is pretty poorly transcribed, and the addresses are vague, but it’s an invaluable stopgap between the 1911 and the present day.

Get in touch with me about your own family research questions on the Contact page above.

It’s an ongoing joke among those who know my work that if there’s a prostitute in the family, I will find them. Sex work is the world’s oldest profession, so it’s no surprise to discover someone in the hundreds of members of any given family tree made a bit of money that way, but how does the family historian identify them?

First, you need to know something of sexual culture in the Victorian era. There was a long-held idea (of both contemporary men and some historians) that an unmarried woman who became pregnant MUST have been a prostitute, which is patently rubbish. Women in cohabiting relationships were also considered prostitutes. The evidence shows that many working-class couples did not marry until their first child was expected, suggesting that sex was an accepted part of courtship patterns once a couple were engaged. Engagements could last for years, while a man found steady work, so perhaps sometimes a baby sped things up a bit. Other historians think it was a way to check fertility before committing to marriage. There was very little privacy in any Victorian neighbourhood. People lived, as Emily Cockayne put it in her book on neighbours, cheek by jowl. In towns, you might have ten or eleven families living in one courtyard, making it an unlikely place for a young couple to get much privacy. In villages, even open fields were likely to be in view of someone. And then there was the matter of TIME: young people were in full-time work before they hit sexual maturity. Men worked twelve hour days minimum, and women were either working all day in domestic service placements, all day in a textile mill, or all day at a home-based job. In short, opportunities for sexual behaviour before marriage were limited, and tended not to be wasted.

You also have to consider your personal definition of prostitution. I have found a great many rape cases reported where the man was acquitted because he paid his victim afterwards, which tells you a lot about Victorian courts. I have read bastardy court reports where putative fathers got other men who had slept with the mother of an illegitimate baby to give evidence, and relieve them of paying maintenance. A woman who had slept with more than one man did not fit the Victorian idea of an innocent led astray into pregnancy, and would have been considered a prostitute according to the morals of the time. And can you really blame a woman in dire poverty for selling sex rather than starve?

Prostitution was tolerated, and indeed licensed until 1885. It is rare to find a woman prosecuted for prostitution in Victorian newspaper columns, although sex workers arrested for other offences (being drunk or theft, most commonly) were usually identified as ‘notorious’, ‘wanton’ or ‘loose’. Some prostitutes were widows, stuck with a family to feed and no childcare to work around. Others were women who may have been coerced into sex work, or simply decided it was better to sell sex than get married or stay in an abusive relationship. In towns, women were more likely to work the streets than from home.

Things began to change as women began to be idealised in Victorian culture as a calm and angelic mother figure, deifiying the domestic sphere. The Contagious Diseases Act (1864-1869) was introduced to forcibly send prostitutes for treatment of venereal disease for two months, effectively imprisoning them without arresting them. The age of consent was raised from twelve to sixteen in 1885, which helped stop the trade in child prostitutes. Evangelical movements developed to ‘save’ women. If you find a female relative living in a non-workhouse institution in the late Victorian period, make sure you google the institutions: a great many charitable homes for child prostitutes and street workers opened in this era, some for only a short amount of time.

There is an old trope that ‘laundresses’ and ‘seamstresses’ on the census were just euphemisms for sex workers. This is not the case: a great deal of widowed and unmarried women made their money doing laundry and mending clothes. It is difficult to imagine the sheer amount of TIME it took to get your washing done when you had to boil the water by the bucket, scrub all the washing by hand, rinse it by hand, mangle it and then try and get it dry. It took all damn day, and women who could afford to pay someone else to do it for them did, even if they couldn’t afford a servant. As for sewing, when ALL your clothes were made by hand, and expensive, you couldn’t throw a shirt or dress away when it tore. Seamstresses were always in demand. However, a fair amount of laundresses and seamstresss may have sold sex on the side.

So, how do you know if your great great great grandmother was a prostitute? The truth is, unless you can find them living in a home for ‘fallen women’, or arrested for a sex-work offence, you can’t know for sure. Unmarried pregnancy alone is not enough evidence, since many women gave birth before marrying or were pregnant on their wedding day.

However, a woman who had several children outside marriage warrants extra investigation, as does a young woman living completely independently without any apparent job. The Poor Law would not give relief to an able-bodied woman without children; she was expected to work for a living.

Get in touch with me about your own family research questions on the Contact page above.

Everyone is related to everyone, if you go back far enough. The thing that people miss is that this also means everyone is inbred. Everyone. Somewhere, probably not too deeply in the mists of time, one of your family branches split, only to reunite several generations later.

Now, there were strict laws in place until the early twentieth century to prevent people marrying (and thus reproducing) with family that were too close in blood. You were allowed to marry a first cousin, and people did IN DROVES, but anything closer than that was forbidden. Unless you were Spanish royalty, in which case you might have ended up like Charles II of Spain:

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Yikes. Poor Charles was a Habsburg, a family so resolutely devoted to marrying other Habsburgs that their fertility diminished to nothing – Charles was the only child to see adulthood of his father’s fourteen liveborn children. Charles’ parents were uncle and niece (ew), his paternal grandparents were cousins (and one set of his great-grandparents were also uncle and niece), and his maternal grandparents were also cousins. This was not a gene pool likely to produce healthy children. Charles probably had acromegaly, and various other genetic disorders, and died without issue. This plunged the Spanish into a succession crisis, but was…perhaps for the best?

The common people were protected from this sort of thing by consanguinity laws. Some of these laws seem a bit daft now – you weren’t allowed to marry your dead husband’s brother until 1931, although people did. However, pedigree collapse, when your family pedigree stops dividing because everyone’s related, still occurs from time to time. Here’s an example which is based on a real family tree I did:

This is completely fictional, despite Ancestry thinking these are real people. Anyway, James Smith has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. It’s the fifth generation where the problem creeps in – he only has eleven great-great grandparents instead of the expected sixteen. If you go a further generation back, and assume Jane and Mary Woodley are sisters, and Samuel and Francis Rogers are brothers, then he has just eighteen greatx3 grandparents instead of thirty two.

None of James Smith’s family is ostensibly inbred. Nobody’s marrying siblings, or nieces or nephews. The closest familial intermarriage is between cousins, and both lawful and standard in the nineteenth century. But the cumulative effect is to decrease the gene pool across time. If James Smith had also married a cousin, perhaps a child of Penelope’s sister, the pedigree would have continued to collapse, but there may have been no obvious effect on their descendants.

This is pedigree collapse as you are most likely to find it, and you’ll most often find it in small villages without much economic migration. You may notice a decreasing fertility across time in families like this, although you should also bear in mind that fertility did drop across the nineteenth century due to increased use of contraception. You may also notice an increased number of infant deaths.

Get in touch with me about your own family research questions on the Contact page above.

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Going live on 6th April 2019!