Hello On Apr 4, 2005 1:28 PM, Tom Perrett <tomp@st.net.au> wrote: > > Because what you are looking at are not the actual schedules > filled in by the Householder, but the returns made out from the > schedules by the Enumerator, so of course they are all in the > same writing. Therefore the second half of my message summed up the situation pretty well - namely that the ED schedules are transcriptions, prone to all the problems associated with transcriptions, with the added problem that many original forms will have been filled in on behalf of others, some perhaps by people who were not much better at reading and writing than the illiterates themselves or had not been given the full story.. All told, bearing in mind that many families, in cities, towns and rural areas, lived in very poor conditions, often with many to a room, with all the noise, discomfort and difficulty that accompanied those conditions, including even the necessary pen, ink or pencil, it is a wonder that anything worthwhile emerged . Furthermore, enumerators would themselves, in all probability, have never have heard of many of the names and places that were written on the forms (or even perhaps in some cases told to them?), so how we have such a wonderful resource as a useable, and apparently generally reliable census speaks volumes for the common sense and application of those involved. Jim Halsey