Hello. My name is Jessamy Carlson, and I’m a 20th century record specialist here at the National Archives. So, today we are going to look at documents from our Registrar General collection. The documents in this collection are all records which represent instances in which people’s lives are documented in official records. So what kind of material can we find in this collection?
Until 1970, the Registrar General, who also oversees the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales, was in charge of enumerating the population every ten years through the census. This is why this series records is listed under RG. Since 1996, this function of government has been undertaken by the office for National Statistics. The census has recorded identifiable personal information about people since 1841. The most recent census was taken in 2021, and since the 1920 Census Act just passed, the census must remain closed until 100 years has gone by before information which could identify individuals can be released to the public.
The documents held for the 1841 census, up to and including the 1901 census, are the enumerators copy books, and from 1911, we hold the individual census forms for each household, institution or vessel within England and Wales. We do not hold the records here for Scotland or Ireland, who oversee their own census records in their national archives.
In addition to the census schedules or copy books that we hold here, we also hold some of the records which show us how the census is undertaken. The census is arranged by enumeration districts, specific predetermined geographical areas which are carefully mapped out during preparation. The National Archives holds the enumerators maps for most of the censuses which show the areas each enumeration district covered with colourful annotations.
There are also extensive reports about what the census tells us about life at that point in time. These are issued on a national and local basis and can provide a fascinating insight into the lives our ancestors led.
This example shows the census schedule for the Smith household, who lived in Cardiff in 1921, and we will look at this in more detail later.
This volume, RG twenty-seven slash nine is one of the prefatory files for the administration of the 1921 census and amongst this volume, we have examples of the 27 different types of form which were issued as census schedules, plus all the reporting mechanisms, including samples of all the different postcards the enumerators had to return to the Registrar General to say that they have completed the different stages of administering the census at a local level.
Before we look at our example from this collection, notice that our document here has a unique reference so that we can use our catalog to find it. So now let’s take a closer look at our document and work out what it is about.
So this is a single household W census schedule for the 1921 census, which means that it is issued to a single residence in Wales and issued in English where only ten or fewer people were expected to be residents. This document is a double sided form made of paper and pre-printed information about the individuals, residents at the property are filled in by hand by the head of household, and in this instance also includes the details of the families’ ferrets as well as the children.
The 1921 census was taken over the weekend of June 19th and June 20th, 1921, and you can see here this is the notification that the census has been postponed from the original date in April. This form was printed by His Majesty’s Stationery Office and was distributed by local census enumerators acting under the control of the Registrar General.
The 1921 census form asks for a variety of information, including name, age, what type of work someone did, whether children were at school and how many rooms a family lived in. The census was taken to acquire data about ordinary people’s lives, and in order to inform decision making for the country based on that information. The purpose of the document is to draw together information about the population in a central location and analyze it.
The 1921 census is a unique snapshot of this period of life, and gives us a glimpse of a moment in our predecessors lives. It also gives us hard data about employment, overcrowding and how children were able to access education. We can also get a sense of how close to work people lived, and the variety of ways in which families and households were constructed in terms of their relationship to each other.
The National Archives collects records which are created by government, and as the census is centrally administered on behalf of the government by the Registrar General, it has come to us for permanent preservation. This is just one of many entries which enables us to look back at life in the early 1920s to see what can be learned about it.
The census is a really useful source for telling us about life in Britain in a given period. We can draw conclusions from the information it provides at national, local and individual levels. But it is really important to remember that the census is only a record of one night every ten years. These postcards were sent back by individual enumerators to the Registrar General at Somerset House. And the return of each of these postcards meant that that particular enumerator for those particular districts had completed the task that the colour of the postcard related to. So they were an awful lot of postcards being sent back simultaneously to some poor person at the Somerset House who had to sort all of these, make sure they had the right number, and then they could determine that they had completed every aspect of every step of the census for every individual enumeration district.
This document is a large size version of the individual household schedules that were sent to every house in England and Wales in 1921. And the reason it’s so big is that this is an example of the poster that was sent to every school in England, Wales, because in this period. There is absolutely no guarantee that parents are going to be able to read and write so one of the measures that the Registrar General’s team took was to send these example forms out to every school, so that all the children could become familiar with the census form, and then, if necessary, they could help their parents fill it in.
So you have the details of people’s names, you have the details of their age. You have the particulars of where they were born. You have the particulars of whether they are in education, if they are children. And then you have the details of where they might be working, and then down at the very bottom, you have information about how many rooms are in each household. And you also have information about sex and marital status and all sorts of other pieces of information.
Amongst the varied records that we have in this file, we also have the leaflet which was sent to every household in England and Wales called the Coming census, why it is taken, how it is taken, and how to fill up the census schedule. And this quite detailed document explains in great detail how the results will be computed using machines and how exactly you should fill up the details of your career and your work and all the information that it asks for and in the back, It also has an example of what the census form should look like.
So I will open this up very carefully here, and you can see that this is a front of the household schedule. And then it’s quite long, opens up to reveal this form. And this is an E form, which means it’s a single household with fewer than ten members in England in English.
I talked about the variety of census schedules that we have in this collection, that there are 27 in total of all the different types of places that were being enumerated as part of the census. So it’s not just England, it’s not just in English, and there’s a whole variety of schedules. We have some of the examples here. We have schedules for Wales in English and we have schedules for Wales in Welsh. And they all have different number codes just at the top here.
And in addition to England and Wales, which is the top title at the top of this sheet, we also have information about ships which is under S. We have information about slightly larger ships which is under SS. And we also have examples in this folder for the armed forces. So for the Army, for the Navy, for the Royal Air Force at this point in time, and we have census examples for really big units. You can see here just how thick this example is, say how many names might potentially be on here for, say, an Army base or a Royal Naval ship.
So there’s a whole variety of people, places and circumstances in which you might have yourself enumerated as part of the census.