Castle Hedingham Parish Records

Notes relating to 1841 Census records

The layout of the census may look a rather strange way to display the information but this is the format being used to enter records for the FreeCEN project at Rootsweb. It works like this:

Each new household starts with a '0' in the Schd (Schedule) field. If you 'unhide' all the columns, some will be blank and others marked with an X. Those marked with X will refer to comments in the final column. Those left blank are unused on the 1841 census but were used in subsequent years.

Some words of warning:

Aaron NEWMAN, the enumerator for Enumeration District 5 (Enumeration Districts 1-4 were in Sible Hedingham), did not indicate clearly where one household ended and another began. He did place a bracket next to names of family members within a household, but for families with in-laws or other relatives present, or servants with a different surname, it is difficult to tell if they were all living in the same house or were neighbours. Some families appear to have been entered late and appear on the bottom line of subsequent pages, so in the middle of what appears to be one household, there will be a single name which doesn't fit, then return to the original household at the top of the following page.

For example:

At the bottom of Page 2 we find:

HARRINGTON, James, Male, 40, Tailor, born Essex

At the bottom of Page 3 is:

HARRINGTON, Ann, Female, 40, born Essex

At the bottom of Page 4 is:

HARRINGTON, James, Male, 12, Tailor, born Essex

At the bottom of Page 6 (no Harringtons on Page 5) is:

HARRINGTON, Ann, Female, 10, born Essex

At the bottom of Page 7 is:

HARRINGTON, Margaret, Female, 8, born Essex

At the bottom of Page 9 is:

HARRINGTON, Elizabeth, Female, 4, born Essex

You can check against the baptismal records to find this is all one family, but it is very difficult to find them on the census unless you check the bottom of each page. This only happens in Enumeration District 5; Enumeration District 6 is more straightforward. Both enumerators (Samuel NOTT did Enumeration District 6) wrote the street name at the top of each page only when it changed from the previous page, except for specific house names, so it is sometimes difficult to tell where a family was actually living. In the case of those split up at the bottom of each page, I cannot say where they were actually living as the tops of some pages show all the people below live on River Lane while other family members are on a page showing only St James's Street.

The 1841 census was written in pencil and thus some records are very faint. I have tried to read them as best I could but in some cases there weren't even marks visible. I haven't re-checked the 1841 census yet -- it's on my list of things to do.

Holly Adams

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Notes relating to 1851, 61, 71, 91, 1901 and 1911 Census records

I am very grateful to Peter Ward for all of his hard work transcribing these records, and for allowing me to publish them here. Peter points out that in the earlier transcriptions he did not include addresses and occupation , but that he has for the later ones. He has not provided a transcription for 1881 as this (albeit with errors) is available on the Mormon website.

He also points out that there may be some errors on his part, and some debatable interpretations of writing. Looking at them myself I can see that this is likely; "Bailiff Street" is likely to be Bailey Street, for instance. I haven't made any "corrections" before publishing the documents here, for fear of changing something which is actually correct.

Each census transcript is on a separate sheet within the one file. If you are not used to using xls files (MS Excel), please look carefully at the data before emailing me to tel me that various census returns are not there! They are - look at the tabs at the bottom of the screen. The codes relate to the piece numbers, andare as follow: HO107 1784 = 1851, RG09 1112 = 1861, RG10 1699 = 1871, RG12 1420 = 1891, RG13 1721 = 1901 and RG14 10381 = 1911).

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