Getting Help to deconfuse mangled UK Census Places

Re Searching

Some contributors will already have experienced problems with places in the UK Census Collection being mangled to the point where they are almost, but not quite, completely useless. Do not worry, there is a way to work it out, but as with all things these days, it's a bit awkward, but stick with it. A few years ago the UK National Archives had a project to index all the street names in the UK Censuses. This project is now defunct, but there is still an archive where the old pages can be accessed. If you are stuck with a census record showing for example, Yorkshire, England, then you can enjoy hours of fun trudging through the list of street names looking for the census piece and folio that match so you can find the actual place.

Here's a link to the 1851 archive:

https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20101001143015/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Category:1851_census_registration_districts

You can work from there to find other census years.

At one point I did a cut and paste grab of the pages and tried to build a spreadsheet that could be rearranged in numerical order, a bit like a census walk. but the number sorting routines and occasional errors in the source data meant that it didn't work very well so I fell back to manual. It was a lot of work just to overcome errors that shouldn't have been present in the first place. Anyway, if anyone feels like picking it up to do better, then I'm sure it will be appreciated for the 15 minutes it will be before the sources records get fixed. ha ha…

Rhonda Budvarson

@Re Searching thank you for the information. And your endeavor to improve the situation. Fingers crossed that this collection can be re-worked into a more user friendly database. Please keep us updated :)

Re Searching

It seems that the project web archive is undergoing some changes. It has become very difficult to access.