Information missing
Using the UK 1881 & 1891 censuses, when I access the information from the View Record panel, the information regarding the persons occupation is missing. This information is visible in the 1871, 1901 & 1911 versions and was definitely visible previously for 1881 & 1891, is there a reason for its removal or can it be reinstated please as it is a most useful resource?
Robert Palmer
Answers
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So far as I can see, it's a bit all over the place with the provision of Occupation in those censuses. I found some in the 1871 with Occupation and some (adults) without.
In the absence of any specific statement in the Wiki or similar, I would suggest that if the Index and Images have been supplied by an external company, then it is quite likely that they don't wish to reduce their own revenue stream, so the version that FS is allowed to present for free, will have reduced capabilities. In my opinion, unfortunate though it is for FS researchers, this is a reasonable viewpoint - the company paid for it so…
This still leaves a couple of unanswered questions. Did FS originally have their own collections with Occupations across the board? And if so, why did they apparently swap providers? (I don't suppose we'll get an answer to that one for commercial reasons). But the other aspect is - what can we see if we were to go to a Family History Centre? Abbreviated or full versions of the index? Or would it be a moot point because we'd be able to see the image?
That's just intended to be some general points in the (current) absence of a definitive response from FS.
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My general finding has been that occupations now appear only in 1871, 1901 & 1911 versions. However, for some counties, even the 1871 sources do not have an occupation added. I will do some more testing, but have noticed those with a 1871 Durham residence do not show an occupation.
These records appear on FamilySearch courtesy of Find My Past and there have always been inconsistencies in the detail displayed from county to county, and general problems seem to arise when Find My Past passes over a revised version. From https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list?ec=region%3AEngland%2CplaceId%3A1986340%2Cregion%3AUnited+Kingdom+and+Ireland&fcs=placeId%3A1986340&count=20 you will note that, apart from those for 1901 and 1911, all E&W census collections were updated this June.
Unfortunately, your specific issue might take at least until the next updates before being resolved. Or perhaps FMP are now purposely restricting the amount of detail they are permitting FamilySearch to display. As pointed out in another discussion, the 1871 collection suddenly "shrunk" by millions of records a few years back, but this issue was finally addressed - I believe in the update before last - and those records have now been restored. Find My Past claimed it was not their doing, but the reasons for the problem (as will probably be the case with this Occupation issue) were never properly explained.
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Have been testing the 1871 sources / records for a "John Wright" born 1830-1839. Have not checked every example, but of those I have I discovered the following:
Occupation shown (search on county of Residence): Durham - No, Essex - Yes, Surrey - Yes and No!
This would indicate Find My Past are not restricting this field from being shown in FS records, so why there is this inconsistency between counties (as is the case with other issues) is a mystery.
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Thank you for your comments, probably what I didn't make clear is that the occupation information is there in the Filtered Results view but not in the View Record panel so for families with elder offspring or dwellings with multiple occupants, to find out their occupations I would need to do a search on each individual, very time consuming. The 1901 and 1911 censuses and also the 1871 records I have searched all have the information in the View Record panel, and as stated, it was previously available in the 1881 and 1891 censuses, so has it been removed 'in error' during one of the updates?
Robert
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This thread
covers similar ground, the problem there also appeared on investigation to be entirely with the way the data was displayed rather than with the underlying data.
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