What makes the 1911 census different from previous censuses?
Mark Pearsall: The 1911 census is the first one where you get the actual household schedule filled in by the householder, listing wife, children, all the people present in the household on that day. So it’s actually in the handwriting of the actual householder themselves. And the schedules were not copied into an enumerator’s books. So they include mistakes and errors that the householder may have made while filling out the schedule. So, you can get details of people that were away from the house on the night of the census. The information may be crossed out, because it shouldn’t have been entered. But you can actually see that somebody else was a member of the household and is elsewhere. You can also get children that have died because one of the questions asked is how many children a married couple had, how many are alive and how many have died. And sometimes the householder will actually put down the names of children that have died; these will be crossed out, but it gives you that
