Towards the end of last year I was contacted by a Professor from Utah’s Brigham Young University. She told me about the Early British and Irish Census Project at the university, which is being carried out by students on the Family History bachelor’s programme.

Although we tend to think of the first UK and Irish census as 1841, this is not strictly true. It is the first name rich census, with increasing amounts of information being collected about household members with every passing decade. However, before 1841, there were four additional censuses, in 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831. The precise questions asked varied over the four censuses, but essentially, each parish was required to return numbers of inhabited/ uninhabited houses, numbers of families occupying them, numbers of people (male/female) with a very basic breakdown of their occupations, and information about numbers of baptisms, marriages and burials.  Initially, some parishes declined to participate, and there were therefore always gaps in the data collected. However, over time there was a better understanding of the benefits to the nation of having this information and support, along with completion rates, grew.

Unfortunately, it is believed that only 791 returns for individual parishes have survived. These are listed in a publication published by University of Essex Department of History, which is available free of charge online:
Authors: Richard Wall, Matthew Woollard and Beatrice Moring
Title: Census schedules and listings, 1801-1831: an introduction and guide
The document includes the whereabouts of all known surviving returns.

At Brigham Young University, the Family History students have started to extract the data from the surviving returns from these four censuses. They are using this to create a free, searchable database of all the pre-1841 census returns that contain named individuals: the Early British and Irish Census Project.

It’s still early days for this project, and this is why I postponed writing about it for a few months. However, there’s enough information on there now for us to be able to see how we will be able to make use of it. There are presently two different websites. The original is https://ebc.byu.edu/ . Reflecting the inclusion of Irish data, this will become https://ebic.byu.edu/ . However, at the time of writing both websites are online, and actually there is currently more information on the original version.

As I write this, the following records have been transcribed:
Number of Parish Extractions: 425
Number of Parish Verifications: 384
Number of Households Today: 172,129
Number of Individuals Today: 271,623

This is across all four censuses, so there is a long way to go. However, you can try your own searches and see if any of your parishes have been included.

You can search by First name; Surname; Census Year; Parish/Town; County; and Household Occupation, which is Trade, Agriculture, Neither or Not Given. The name you will search for is the head of household: that is the only name included.

You don’t need to complete all fields. Given the gaps in coverage I’ve found it works well for me simply by searching by County and then scrolling through to see if any of my parishes of interest are included. You can click on the parish to find out more about it, the route taken by the enumerator, and about the condition of the documentation.

Search terms must be exact, so you may need to try several different spellings.

For example, I searched for “Middlesex”, leaving everything else blank. Since I wasn’t sure if my family of interest remained within one parish, I then narrowed down the county level returns not by parish but by surname. The surname in question was “Groves” but I’ve seen it as “Graves” and also without the final “s”, so I needed to do four separate surname searches: “Groves”; “Graves”; “Grove”; “Grave”. I didn’t find my family. It’s possible that the students on this project haven’t yet got around to the relevant parishes, but it’s equally possible that the data for the parishes where this family lived didn’t survive.

Another of my searches was for “Yorkshire”. I then simply scrolled down the parishes (there are a lot more on the earlier version of the website) and looked at all the ones where I have known ancestry. In Huntington, in 1821, I found the family of my 4x great grandfather Thomas Cass.

As you can see, there is very little information, but I can see there is one family in the household, and this comprises 2 males (not all ‘men’) and 4 females (not all ‘women’). The only name given is Thomas Cass, the head of household. Comparing this to my tree, I see this is Thomas and his wife Ann, plus four of their children: Thomas, Hannah, Ann, Sarah. The children are aged 1 to 6 years, so definitely not adults. Two more children are yet to be born, and these include my own 3x great grandmother. Armed with this small amount of information, I can confirm that this is the household of my 4x great grandfather rather than my 5x great grandfather of the same name. However, there is one discrepancy. In 1823 Thomas is listed in the Baines Directory as the victualler of the White Horse inn in Huntington, yet here his occupation is given as ‘Farm’. Did Thomas farm land alongside running the White Horse? Or had he not yet taken on the inn? That’s something to explore if I get the opportunity. Which just goes to show that even a sparse document might have a tiny piece of information that, together with everything else you know, might develop your knowledge.

I hope you find this useful – both now, and certainly into the future. The University of Essex online book (Wall et.al., linked above) is of course an excellent resource, but for the many of us who live some distance from our ancestral places of interest, popping in to the relevant archives or library takes a lot of time and advance planning, so Brigham Young University’s Early British and Irish Census Project will be a welcome addition. Fingers crossed we will all have at least one parish whose 1801-1831 census listings have survived!