Genealogy Chat

hi people is it normal for the birth year to be diffrent,on the census ???
im finding i have the right family link but in on census it gives on date then the next census will say its the same person but birth year is out....also the surnames change the futher back you go eg same name but diffrent spelling or the nme has been extended ?????confused :-S

Year of birth on a census is only approximate,
often it also depended on who gave the info, for census purposes i allow a 2 to 3 plus or minus differential to allow for this
but i have come across some that were out by 5 years

NOTE; The 1841 census all ages where rounded down to the nearest 5 so you could be age 29 but would be recorded as age 25, Children 15 or younger where recorded as actual age but on the census transcriptions it would still be an approximate age

as for variation in spelling the surname, remember not everyone could read and write plus the enumerator would simply spell the name as he heard/understood it also bear in mind someones accent would also make a difference

Roy

thank you roy x
it now makes sense to me x x

lisa x

your welcome

Roy

Tell me about it!

I've got many examples

1841 - 6
1851 - 15
1861 - 24
.....

1891 - 44
1901 - 53
1911 - 62
to quote but two

In some areas, if the wife was considerably older than the husband, there was a tendency to try and hide the size of the gap by bumping up his age and hers down a few years.

I also have several names where spellings varied. Some were clearly errors by the enumerator in transcribing what he had heard, others were evolution into the form we know today.

A word of warning though - don't go too far the other way and accept discrepancies too easily without exploring all other possibilities. Sometimes it is pretty obvious that it is the same family from one census to the next, but not always. If it doesn't sound right then it probably isn't.

Another cause of discrepancies is if the person's birthday is between 30 March and 7th April then for censuses between 1851 and 1911 the ages may show a jump of 9 or 11 rather than 10.

The 1841 census was on 6th June so apart from the rounding that is another point to consider.

Also sites estimate the birth year by subtracting the age from the year of the census, but since most censuses are at the start of April there is roughly a three to one chance that the birth year is one year earlier.
i.e. a person whose age is given as 1 on 2nd April 1871 will have an estimated birth year of 1870 but that will only be true if their birthday is between 1 Jan and 1 April. If later in the year their birth year will actually be 1869 (assuming the form has been completed accurately).

My gt/gt/grandmother's age varied from census to census by 11 years and it was not until her husband died that she finally started to give her correct age.

He was her toy boy!!!! She was about 7 years older than him (like me and OH). But this would have been frowned upon by the Victorians.

People lie about their ages for many reasons.

One of mine was 20 years older than her husband, and fibbed on every census after they had married.

Baptised 1828
37 on MC in 1879 (51)
37 on 1881 (53)
50 on 1891 (63)
55 on 1901 (73)

At least her husband came clean on her death in 1907 registering her as 78!

thank u hun x thats a lot of gd info it all falls into place now with diffrent members of family

lisa x x x :-D

Sometimes couples would have a child who would die as an infant and call their next child by the same name. So you may think you are dealing with the same child but in actual fact you are not.

My grandfather lied about his age on his marriage cert and next vensus. He was born in 1886, but when he married in 1908 he said was 28! I think he did this to get ajob where the minimum age was 25.

Andy

my gr gran done the same she added year on to her age ,we found out she was only 16 wen she wed x it was on her death cert she lied all them years lol she lived to nearly 100 x :-D

It is very normal :)

Two particular ancestors of mine were ten years younger in a census ten years later :)

Sometimes people didn't know their ages. And it may have not seemed important to them years ago.

hi,
need help ....ive hopefully now found a missing family member who ive serched for since 2006,
now ive been trying to ring the archives for dublin now ive tried every which way the number is but still not doin right now the number reads
+353 (0) 1 407 2300
now the code for britain is 44
do i drop the 353 and the 0 an just do 44
im confused which dont take a lot to do hahahahh :-S

lisax x

Code for Dublin from outside of Southern Ireland is 00 353 1 407 2300 or as you have it +353 1 407 2300. I phone Dublin from Cyprus it's the same from here or UK. :-)

thank u x :-D

Re ages changing on census.

In one instance in my tree, Mr. L's wife Sarah, seemed to get a lot younger between Census's.

Found out that it was because, his first wife Sarah, died shortly after one census. He then married for a second time, a younger lady, called Sarah!

Had that too, Tess - the different POBs pointed me in the right direction.