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Recording the Census

The 1841 and 1851 Censuses were undertaken under the authority of the Home Office in London and they were assisted by local sheriffs. Census officials were mainly local school teachers.

From 1861 onwards it became the job of the Registrar General under the terms of the 1854 Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act. This used the network of local registrars who were set up to record births, deaths and marriages to carry out the Census.

Parishes and cities were divided up into registration districts which contained up to 200 houses. Each district had a Census official called an enumerator who distributed a form called a schedule to every household in that area before Census night. They assisted the head of the household to fill in the form as accurately and as truthfully as possible. The form asked questions about the inhabitants of the house such as their age, occupation and relation to the head of the household. In large institutions such as hospitals and prisons the governor of that institution usually acted as the enumerator.

The forms were collected the following day after they had been filled in, the details checked and then the information copied into a transcript book. The enumerators returned the book and the schedules to the local registrar who in turn checked them and sent them to the Census Office. The Census information that we see derives from the transcript books. The original schedules were destroyed.