INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRANSCRIBING CENSUS

We transcribe as is, except:-

We don't use 'do' [ditto] we need the information in each line. I don’t put tables on site for large amounts of data as they take a long time to load so most are transferred to a text format, when you do this they go out of line and the ditto may be under the wrong word.

We don't put 'Dorset' in place of birth, just name the county if it is not Dorset.

We use the following columns:-

Parish  [you only need this if doing more than one parish]
Year [fill this in afterwards by dragging downwards]
Schedule No.
Location. [if given]
Forename
SURNAME [in upper case]
Relationship to head of house
Condition [marital]
Age
Occupation
Place of birth
Disability
Reference [Folio and page number]
Transcriber [fill this in afterwards by dragging downwards]

If you don’t understand folio and page numbers see below.

If we have an uninhabited house we just put 'uninhabited building' after location, same for ‘being built’.

Note we separate forename and surname.

We only indicate gender in the rare case where you cannot guess it from the name or relationship e.g.

23, The Vicarage, Mallin [female], BENNETT, Serv, Un, 17, Domestic servant, Bridport, F27p8,

With the 1841 you will find there are no schedule numbers, but it is best to put in your own to indicate each household [as there is no relationship to help you] - your final number for households should then tie up with number of inhabited houses in the summary. When I put them on-site I indicate that they are the transcribers own reference.

If you add anything to the transcript, a note, a query, schedule numbers for the 1841 put it between[squared brackets] to denote it is your insert.

If you cannot make out some letter use *  e.g. H****th 
If you are not 100% certain you have transcribed a word correctly put one ? after it.
If a word is completely illegible, put [illegible]

It is a great help to me if you can include at the top:-
District No. 
Enumerators name
No of schedules, houses, males, females
Description of area.

With the 1891 & 1901 census there are more details included such as whether employer/employee/on own account or whether at home worker. Also if there are less than 5 rooms in a dwelling this is indicated. This is very useful sociological information so by all means add a column for this.

USING FILTERS IN EXCEL
You can put all your census on one sheet, makes it much easier for searching! I search for names using Data- Filter-Autofilter. For example if you have a name Harriet H***** you can check all the Harriet’s in your other census to see if there is one that has a surname beginning with H.  The only thing you have to watch with Autofilter is that if you have blank cells it sometimes does not list the names beyond that. You can get round that by put a  small symbol or x in those cells. The other way to search is to use ‘Find’.

Warning. With Excel, it thinks for you! If you put a John Henry, you may find that all your subsequent John’s are John Henry!

Hope that is clear, if not feel free to ask as many questions as you want!

CENSUS REFERENCES
References are obviously very important so that people can go directly to the right page to check entries or order photocopies.

Year Reference.
HO107 for 1841 & 1851, RG9 for 1861, RG10 for 1871, RG11 etc thereafter

Piece numbers
HO107/1334 or RG/1336
Each ‘piece’ covers a district or sub-district and as far as we are concerned tells you which film [or file] you want. In each piece you will find all the parishes in one area in no particular order.

Now folio number should come next but I am doing them the wrong way round as it makes explanation easier:-

Page No.
Each enumerator had their own book to put their entries in and on this are the printed page numbers on every page which will start with No. 1. Sometimes when the parishes are very small they will have more than one parish in a book.

Folio Numbers
Now when all the enumerators books for a district were bundled together there had to be another form of identification. So starting with the first book a number was stamped on the top right hand corner of every open page (i.e. every other page) These numbers went from 1 to as many as 200 or more if it was a large district. 

So if you went to the Public Record Office to check an entry RG9/1333/F34p5 , you would first look for the right year RG9 i.e. 1861. Then you would find the film with the right piece number – in this case 1333. You would then wind through your film until you found Folio 34 and you would then check the page number [it could be p5 or p6] and then if you have the schedule number you would find the exact entry!

Putting F34p5 is adequate on your transcriptions, as long as I have the year and piece number somewhere.

Thanks very much for offering to help make this information freely available to everyone.

With the 1841 census taken from the CD there is something like 294-12. 292 is the piece number, the 12 is the book number, for the 1841 census (only) each piece was further separated into ‘books’.