Ages on 19th century UK censuses
I am finding a very consistent pattern that the age listed on census values is almost always one year after the baptismal record. I know depending on the date of the census, all ages are typically +/- a year, but this seems to be far too consistent of a pattern. Did these censuses round up? Or did UK ever have a different age system (like Korea or something) where you are 1 at birth?
Answers
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Age was not nearly so important, for many reasons, as it often is today. No one had to prove age to get a driving license. Many people didn't know their exact age or even date of birth, in a time before births were registered and a high percentage of the population was not literate.
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People were also liable to subtract their year of birth from the current year and put that down as their age, even though that will be incorrect 50% of the time, as they hadn't had their birthday yet. And since UK censuses are (almost all) about March or April whereas 3/4 of the birthdates will be in the part of the year that hasn't come around yet, I suspect 3/4 of the people will overstate their age by a year, if they are even close, that is.
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Anyone have the actual instructions for those particular census? The instructions for the enumerators for the Norwegian 1865 census specifically stated that they were to record the person's age on their next birthday, not their current age. (Whether that age was ever accurate is a different story. Statistically, far too many people in one of the Norwegian census, I don't remember which, have ages that end in 0 or 5 than there should have been.)
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Many UK censuses were not handled by enumerators but by the householder. The census was dropped off by the census staff and then collected after completion.
1841 (enumerators) - round age to the nearest 5
1861 - age last birthday, etc.
See: https://bespokegenealogy.com/british-census/ for more
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I must have checked through many thousands of census records for England and, personally, have found no consistent pattern whatsoever. There was certainly no "rule" that should have affected the age often being a year different from what it actually should have been.
In my experience, inaccuracy has been due to a number of factors, including:
- Individuals genuinely not knowing / remembering their ages, or those of their spouse / children.
- A couple falsifying there ages when there was a large age gap between them.
- Enumerators calculating ages on behalf of the head of household, or simply recording them incorrectly.
A better assessment of the situation can be seen when comparing records of the same individuals from one census to the next. One set of my ancestors are shown (both) aged 30 in two sets of records - apparently not ageing by a single year in the ten years that had passed! Others only "aged" between 5 and 7 years in a 10 year period. Children seem particularly likely to have their ages confused, especially in large families: even the order of births can vary - with one child suddenly becoming the elder (of two) in the next census, instead of the younger!
I have found both England & Wales and US census records to be a notoriously unreliable means of establishing correct ages, so - unless there are birth certificates or baptism entries (that appear certain to relate to an event that took soon after the birth) - I would read very little into your personal experience, other than the problem whereby indexed dates (years) of birth are given (i.e., giving an actual year - say 1847). If a child was aged (and recorded as) 4 years old in the 1851 census they were highly likely to have been born in 1846, becoming 5 later in the census year (the 1851 census relating to ages as at the 30th of March).
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In the case of the US census, we don't know who gave the names and ages until 1940, when the informant is marked. It could have been a child, a servant, or even a neighbor if the enumerator found no one at home.
In my own paternal family, Irish in origin, most embraced the Blarney Stone legend and told the biggest fibs possible when it came to ages in the census.
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For England & Wales censuses: I have found the instructions for the completion of "Age" on the Householder's Schedule on the HistPop site. There is further stuff on the rear of that page, but that's it as far as Age does.
As I hope you can see, it says "Age (Last Birthday)" (with clarification for "Infants under One Year"). So - no weird rules. (The earlier 1841 was different, rounding down to a multiple of 5, once over 15y old as @Áine Ní Donnghaile indicates.)
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Thanks, maybe its just the early year census data. Most of what I've been looking at is from lancashire. I just went through at least 3 different families, and after adding in the baptism records, I had to go through and subtract 1 from the age of just about every kid. Definitely over 75%, but maybe I was just "lucky".
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