Information requested
- Name of street, avenue road, etc
- House number or name
- Whether or not the house was inhabited
- Number of rooms occupied if less than five
- Name of each person that had spent the night in that household
- Relationship of person enumerated to the head of the family
- Each person's marital status
- Age at last birthday (sex is indicated by which column the age is recorded in)
- Each person's occupation
- Person's place of birth
- Whether deaf and dumb, blind, imbecile or idiot, or lunatic
Enumeration forms were distributed to all households a couple of days before census night and the complete forms were collected the next day. All responses were to reflect the individual's status as of 3 April 1881 for all individuals who had spent the night in the house. People who were travelling or living abroad were enumerated at the location where they spent the night on census night. All of the details from the individual forms were later sorted and copied into enumerators' books, which are the records available today. The original householders schedules from 1841 to 1901 were destroyed.
Organisation
Census returns were collected according to registration district. These returns were divided into sub-districts and assigned consecutive piece numbers for reference purposes. The piece numbers begin in London with number one and work roughly south to north, followed by the Welsh districts and then the Isle of Man and Channel Islands. You will find the piece number on a paper strip at the bottom of every image, following the PRO class number.
The clerks who compiled and reviewed the census data made a variety of marks on the returns. Unfortunately, many of these tally marks were written over personal information and some fields, such as ages, can be difficult to read as a result. More useful marks include a single slash between households within a building and a double slash separating households in separate buildings.
