Genealogy Chat

Can the place of birth vary slightly on the census i.e. the places are all in the same area but vary from census to census?

If you look on this page you will find "the 13 commandments". This should give you a bit of a giggle whilst you read about what some of our ancestors managed to do.

Very easily. I have some unbelievable ones in my tree.

It can be that, say an ancestor was born in Wheldrake, Yorkshire (as some of mine were), if they move to another place and the enumerator gets the response "I was born in Wheldrake, near York", he may not have heard of Wheldrake so will just put down "York" or "Yorkshire".

Or perhaps - assuming the schedule was left in the house for a householder to fill in - these people from Wheldrake are living somewhere completely else like Anglesey - the householder might have thought, "They won't know where Wheldrake is, I'll put York - it's the nearest big place".

That's great, I now know the solution to my confusion. It was very frustrating. Thank you.

The 13 commandments is very funny and so true, it definitely made me smile :0).

Then there are those who were born in one parish (perhaps mother's old home one) but actually lived in another some distance away. When they filled in the census they assumed they were born in the place where the family lived.

I think in large families the parents sometimes lost count of who was born where.

It all adds to the confusion.

Sue

One of mine says - as an adult - that he was born in Sevenoaks, Kent. Eventually - I found out that he was born in Lewes, Sussex. The family moved to Sevenoaks by the time he was two and I think he assumed he was born there.

I've got one of those, Jill. He was born in Anglesey in 1857, lived there with his parents in 1861, then the family moved to Newark in Notts.

Dad died and whoever gave the census info in 1871 thought the little boy was born in Thorney, near Newark. By 1881 he was married, living in Shropshire and said he was born in Thorney, near Newark.

In 1891 he was still in Shropshire and saying he was born in York. By 1901 he said he was born in Nottingham.

Had it not been for the fact that he followed his dad's profession and became a gamekeeper, I'd never have found him.

Sue
I have a family like that.

A son Edward Henry was born in 1890( have cert. ) in Glamorgan, named after his father Edward / Edwin Henry.... ( that's another story !)
In 1901, young Edward is shown as Henry ...born in Herefordshire....but later married as Edward Henry.

They certainly keep us guessing.

Gwyn

Melanie, believe me, if you get someone saying the same birth village/town every census, then its most unusual. It depends on who gives the information, who knows where who were actually born - in the case of servants/employees living on the premises an employer may often give the place where the person was hired rather than their birth place, ditto landlords, theyd say not known or make a guess. In London in the earliest census it must have been bedlam, all those country boys coming up to London with accents the enumerators couldnt understand - I have my GGFx2 born in a Norfolk village just down as Norwich because no doubt he couldnt write the village name and no doubt the enumerator couldnt understand how to spell it. So your bloke can end up with a big city as his birth place when he was in fact born in a rural area.

Have you got your ancestry sub yet?

BTW, the 13 commandments are all genuine incidents we have found in our research - honest.

Heather, you must have seen my Smiths! A whole load of Smiths born in various parishes in Worcester. The father of the family was a butcher - most of his sons went into the trade and they are a nightmare. Half of my time is spent trying to establish if this James Smith who is married to Mary Ann is the same one as on the last census.

I had a chain of three James Smiths (grandad, dad and son) who all worked as butchers, all married Mary Anns and all (I think) had daughters called Ursula. I could kill them! And all the birthplaces seem to say is "Worcester".

One of my favourite mistranslations came when a line who turned out to be wrong moved from Ormskirk to Staffs. Dad Henry was down as having been born in "Armskerk". And that's not to mention the people who probably said they were born in Leicestershire (for instance) so the enumerator just wrote "Leicester" down.

True Michael.
Anthony Adolph the research expert on genes mentioned he proved for a client a family living in Middlesbrough and giving place of birth as Middlesbrough were really from Ireland.

He made the same comment fear of being sent back made them lie

Of course, none of this helps us decide if they are ours or not though :(

Then of course there are the transcription errors!

I was hunting for 2x great grandmother Sophia and the 1881 census record said she was born in Hilton, Somerset. That wasn't too difficult to sort out because I knew there was no such place and it didn't take great detective work to realise it was actually Kilton. But in areas of the country I don't know as well that wouldn't have been easy at all.
That particular ancestor had lied about her age to make herself the same as her younger husband so I still had trouble finding her until I noticed that.

Then you get real confusions like when a distant "cousin" and I shared a relation called Lilian Parfitt who had a daughter Hilda.
We chatted by e-mail for weeks and got really friendly. Then we noticed we couldn't make some facts about Lilian's life fit. Either the woman had led a double life or there was some error.

There were two women with exactly the same name born within a few streets of each other in the same year but no obvious relation to each other! They even had named both of their daughters Hilda and those were similar ages.

It all keeps us on our toes!

Sue
x

Thanks for informing me on all this, I thought perhaps people would lie about their age but I never realised they'd lie about their birth place for fear of being sent back. I also thought some people perhaps didn't know where they were born exactly, also with when they were born in some cases they didn't know.

My reason for enquiring was because my great grandmother had put Carlton, Lincs on the census for when she was an adult, so I tried to look for an earlier record when she was a child but couldn't find one because she was actually born in Marshchapel, Lincs and had lived there when she was very little. So I guess that would be down to not knowing where she was born exactly.

Heather - I've got the trial at Ancestry, but have yet to look at it properly, I used it earlier for the census and like that it shows you households when you click on only one name, it saves you trying to read what the census says with all the close and loopy illegible writing they use on the census, lol.

Melanie remember someone has tried to read that loopy writing when inputting the information so there are more than 1 or 2 mistakes!!!!!!!!

Well of course I check it, I know there will probably be mistakes, but I'm bad at making out what words say on the censuses :P.

You can feel 99.9% certain you have the right person cant you, everything fits, the kids names etc. then you send for the cert and its just a huge coincidence. Thats why its is SO important to buy the certs to verify facts or you could end up totally on the wrong line.

I still fume about the person I contacted on here who had a line of my ancestors. I was really excited - then I found he had copied all my work from the net and had squeezed in his ancestor who - as I pointed out to him - would have been 6 months old at the date he gave for his ancestors marriage! He answered "Oh census birth dates are often wrong" LOL, no I dont think a 6 month old would be a wife mister! I asked if he had bought his ancestors cert to confirm this relationship and he said he had better things to spend his money on!

So I sent him a copy of my ancestors birth cert to prove she was born only 6 months before the marriage. Dreadful how people dont bother to do this as best as they can.

What's the point of finding a load of lies. I recently thought I could be connected to the Royals, as you know from another thread, after having no luck finding whether this was valid or not, I appealed to the community here, Robin found that I wasn't, so I'm glad that I know the truth.

I'm afraid I'm new to genealogy so my knowledge is thin on the subject, but I've found many ideas from GR, so I'm glad for everyone's help.