Censuses taken before 1841 will be of little value to you because they were numbers only jobs. Sometimes you may make a rare find where a local vicar made an unofficial list in a register in order to complete the required return but 1801 -1831 censuses generally do not contain information that identifies individuals. Dave -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: 21 August 2012 01:27 To: [email protected] Subject: [B&S] Bristol Census Prior to 1841 Hi everyone, I'm reading a book on St Phillips & Jacob area at present and it mentions the censuses taken in Bristol starting in 1801 and every ten years thereafter. So what happened to these early pre-1841 censuses? Do they exist still somewhere? is the information in them too crude to be useful perhaps? Maybe they are available through mormon Family history libraries on film. Any information would be great! Amanda Kerby NZ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

From: "Dave Napier" <[email protected]> > Censuses taken before 1841 will be of little value to you because > they were numbers only jobs. Sometimes you may make a rare find where a local > vicar made an unofficial list in a register in order to complete the > required return but 1801 -1831 censuses generally do not contain information > that identifies individuals.> That is not strictly speaking an entirely accurate reply, although it depends on what you mean by "rare"! "Local Census Listings 1522-1930: Holdings in the British Isles" by Jeremy Gibson and Mervyn Medlycott (one of the near-legendary - at least to we older family historians who have been at it since long before the Internet was invented - series called Gibson Guides) lists more than 750 parishes in which names are given for the censuses of 1801-1831. They are mostly householders only with numbers in each house, sometimes divided into numbers of males and females and sometimes into age groupings. My edition of this valuable little book is dated 1997, so probably more have been discovered since then. The Gibson Guides were originally published by the Federation of Family History Societies. What happened, as Dave says, is that the enumerator - who was often either the vicar or village schoolmaster - was conscientious enough to make a list of householders (in a few rare cases even all the inhabitants) and kept them after sending the mathematical returns to London. Sometimes this was done for points of reference, to make sure no-one was missed or that someone wasn't counted twice. Some of these unofficial lists found their way into record offices and survive. There are other lists such as ecclesiastical censuses, Easter Books, Communicants Lists and Incumbents' Visiting Books, some dating back to the 16th century. These were taken because the Church wanted to "keep tabs" on its flocks of parishioners. These lists and those unofficial ones from the censuses of 1801-31 were sometimes useful to the local Poor Law officers as well. The Gibson-Medlycott book I mention at the start of this message lists all known local census listings throughout the British Isles including England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man, alphabetically county by county. Under Gloucestershire and Bristol it lists a whole page of these unofficial censuses and where they can be found. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Famous family trees blog: http://blog.findmypast.co.uk/tag/roy-stockdill/ "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE