1841 Householders' Schedules

The first census enumerator's books (CEBs) on which we all depend for researching our family and local histories were discovered by chance in a roof at Westminster in the early twentieth-century and made available to researchers in 1912 following successful lobbying by the Society of Genealogists. The householders' schedules (HSs) from which these CEBs were created have been said to have been destroyed. Recently I discovered the HSs for all thirteen enumeration districts comprising one registration district. These records shed light on what enumerators did in the process of transcription and answer key questions about the enumeration process itself. It was a remarkable risk taken by the first Registrar General to issue HSs at a time when the citizens were only halfway on the road to literacy. It is fascinating to see how they went about filling up thier forms. Most importantly these first HSs permit us to approach the CEBs with a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. For those who are interested in how the CEBs we use came to be the way they are, there is an extensive article about the 1841 HSs appearing this month in The Local Historian, the quarterly Journal of the British Association for Local History.