It sounds like a pub quiz question! I’m sure someone told me one of them was.

English Census data is bread and butter to the genealogist. It shows family groupings at 10 year intervals.

So off to Google and here are the census dates from Wiki:

1801 – Tuesday, 10 March
1811 – Monday, 27 May
1821 – Monday, 28 May
1831 – Monday, 30 May
1841 – Sunday, 6 June
1851 – Sunday, 30 March
1861 – Sunday, 7 April
1871 – Sunday, 2 April
1881 – Sunday, 3 April
1891 – Sunday, 5 April
1901 – Sunday, 31 March
1911 – Sunday, 2 April

Of course the censuses before 1841 have very limited usefulness and availability although I did find one for Ossett in 1821 and it helped enormously with by Hetherington ancestors.

So back to Google for Easter dates

1801 – April 5th
1811 – April 14th
1821 – April 22nd
1831 – April 3rd
1841 – April 11th
1851 – April 20th
1861 – March 31st
1871 – April 9th
1881 – April 17th
1891 – March 29th
1901 – April 7th
1911 – April 16th

So – none of them. Now who gave me that duff information…

I’ve just created a macro to do some statistics on the size of my One Name Study – here’s the results – I must learn how to do tables for the next lot!

As of 03/02/2012  there are:

3990  birth/baptism records

2519  marriages

2233  deaths/burials

342  1841 census records

371  1851

416  1861

375  1871

464  1881

484  1891

588  1901

595  1911

Total number of entries      12377

Number of individuals with this number of entries:

Entries    0              1              2              3              4              5              6              7              8              9              10            11

Num.:      283          3180        1343        421          371          211          140          85            74            49            23            1

Total individuals:  6181  of which  3499  are members of a branch.

I found 2 things of great interest – there is only one individual with all 11 entries (this is William born 1835, Wakefield, who became a Methodist minister. Another (Anthony Micklewhite) misses out because I haven’t yet found a marriage for his first “wife” but he did marry his 3rd wife but that gets missed by the simple collection macro.

Secondly, the number of 1871 entries is smaller than 1861 or 1881 – that implies I’ve missed quite a few families. I’ll have to have a better look for odd mistranscriptions – add it the round tuit list!

Wow! 2 posts in one day!

As I was looking at some statistics for my study (more on this later), I noticed that I had a census entry for someone after they had died – obviously an error somewhere. In this case it was complicated as it was Ann wife of Vincent – but which?

There aren’t many Vincents – but in the timeframe for Ann, there are just 2, born a couple of years apart and first cousins. However, both married wives called Ann. In fact one wife died and that Vincent remarried, yes that’s right, another Ann.

In fact I had got most of it sorted except I hadn’t transferred the later census entries from wife 1 to wife 2 – my error was not copying the death date correctly – I feel a macro to check these dates is about to get written.