Hi Everyone, I spotted this on a list thought I would pass it on. 1841. Was taken on the night of the 7th of June. This census will only give you surname, forename, age rounded in fives for anyone over the age of 14. i.e. John 35, Mary 30, when their real ages may have been 33 and 28. And, whether born in the county (where the census is taken), yes or no. Take care when copying children of the household down, as in this census some of them may not be the children of the householder - may be relatives, or just visitors, or even children of one of the parents by a former marriage. The \ or backward slash or mark by the enumerator indicates the end of that particular family or household. 7mo in the age column will mean a child 7 months old, as is 7w = 7 weeks. Some 1841 records are very light on the page, due to the fact that the enumerators used pencils, but most are fairly good. Birthplaces outside of England and Wales are listed as F, for foreign, unless it be Scotland - S, or Ireland - I (or Ire). 1851. Taken on the night of 8th of April. This census now gives the head of the family and the relationship of everyone in the household to the head -- the condition, i.e. whether married, single (sometimes U for unmarried instead of S) W for widow or widower -- age not rounded in fives, but usually suspect anyway, and divided into a column for males and one for females, very useful with difficult forenames! -- Where born? Also a column for whether blind, deaf & dumb! Care ought to be taken when checking children's ages, as the father may have put the child's age up so as to extract more money from the child's employer. The relationship of children to the head of the family can be son S, daughter D, niece or nephew N, but usually spelt out. Then there are others not so easy to decipher according to the bad writing. FIL - Father-in-law, MIL - mother-in-law, DIL - daughter-in-law! C- cousin, but normally spelt out. Uncles and aunts are a bit of a problem, U and A sometimes look like the same letter, but check the sex column. V, of course, for visitor, possibly related, but not necessarily so. Most enumerators spelt everything out -- others couldn't be bothered. A profession of A.Lab, or Ag.Lab is always Agricultural Labourer. Teenagers were often shown as farm-hands or servants in their own household. A number of booklets/microfiche surname indexes of the 1851 exist, mainly collated by family history societies and other record agencies. Check out the FHS for your county, or the county record office. The PRO holds a number of census indexes. In general you will not find listers with access to census indexes, unless, a) they live close to a library that holds them, b) they have bought a certain district (booklet or microfiche) for their own use. Indexes are usually surname only. The index may contain a few thousand people, and possibly JONES may be shown on numerous folio pages of the microfilm, for instance 3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 27, all the way up to several hundred folios. Once in a while you may be lucky enough to find an index that not only has the surname, but the forename as well, and even the street or area listed. This certainly cuts down your work. I have been known to scroll completely through numerous microfilms checking every ROBERTS, JONES, etc.simply because there was no index available. 1841 & 1851 census piece numbers, as they are called, commence with HO. The censuses after 1851 then commenced with the letters RG. You can sometimes check these out, simply by accessing the family history library catalog on www.familysearch.org For the 1891 census for Whittington, at least, the piece number will be RG 12/2118, on four microfiche. That's all for now. Tomorrow - 1861 to 1901. Pam