How To Use The Census

How do I use the Census?

The Census can be quite tricky to use until you've worked out what it actually tells you. It's a head count and it's a snapshot, it's based on property, so you need to know where your ancestor was living and roughly what age they would have been in one of these given years. The other thing is that it's only available up to 1901, because the data it contains is very confidential. It involves a lot of information about private individuals, and so they are closed for one hundred years to make sure that most people who would have been taken in the last Census are no longer alive. To go about using the Census you need to have found someone who was alive in 1901, know a little about them and where they were living, and then start searching either the online records or at the Family Record Center.