The census is basically a massive headcount of everyone in the country on one specific day. England and Wales have been doing this every ten years since 1801 (Scotland does its own separate count), though they had to skip 1941 for obvious wartime reasons.
The whole point wasn’t really about gathering detailed info on individuals – it was about counting the population as a whole. But the most practical way to make sure everyone got counted once (and only once) was to literally list everyone by name, wherever they happened to be sleeping on that particular night.
Here’s how it worked: an enumerator would drop off a form at every household in the country. The head of each household had to fill it out with details about everyone who slept there on census night – which was always a Sunday. A few days later, the enumerator would come back and collect these forms, called schedules. From 1841 to 1901, all that information was then copied into enumeration books. After that was done, they usually destroyed the original household schedules, though a few have survived here and there. These enumeration books are what we look at today, either online or on microfilm.
The 1841 census is particularly important for family historians because it was the first one to actually list everyone’s names, making it the earliest really useful census. Though it’s worth noting they collected less detail in 1841 than they did in later years.
As for when these censuses happened:
- 1841 was on June 6th
- 1851 was March 30th
- 1861 was April 7th
- 1871 was April 2nd
- 1881 was April 3rd
- 1891 was April 5th
- 1901 was March 31st
- 1911 was April 2nd
- 1921 was June 19th
That last one’s interesting – they’d originally planned to do the 1921 census on April 24th, but had to postpone it because of industrial strikes and unrest.
The census information is closed for 100 years, so 1921 is the last we can see. The 1931 census for England & Wales was destroyed by a building fire in 1942.
The returns for Brandon have been transcribed by our member Darren and he has kindly made these transcripts available for us to share.
The data for each year is on a separate page, so follow these links to view the 1901 Census, the 1911 Census, the 1921 Census and the 1939 Registration returns.
The original images can be seen on a number of commercial websites, such as Find My Past, Ancestry and The Genealogist.