1901 CENSUS

There are many sites that allow you to view the 1901 census - findmypast and ancestry.com are very good. However we wanted a tailored view of just the residents of the Luddenden Valley in 1901.

There are two views of the same data:

The mobile view which works well on a mobile:

Mobile Link: 1901 CENSUS

The desktop view allow more combinations of searches - such as all cotton workers that lived on Solomon Hill.

Detail Link: 1901 CENSUS Detail

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How was the 1901 census taking organised?

• Enumerators were chosen with local knowledge of the area and needed to be both literate and numerate. They were always men.
• The enumerators were given a particular area or district to cover.
• The walk given to the enumerator for district 5 for example:

• Being that of the Parish of Midgley. Bounded on the North by a line from Luddenden Booth, at Peel House Mill by footpath to Dean ??? by  Oats Royd and to Delph Hill Lane Top, and on the East by Luddenden Brook to Lane House, by Kershaw House, along footpath by way of Greave House, over Turn Lee, to Lane Ends, and by Pineal Lane, to Delph Hill Lane

• One census day, March 31^st, the enumerator posted a pre-printed form to each house in their patch.
• Shortly afterwards, the enumerator would collect the printed sheet from each household.
• Carefully, the enumerator would copy all his printed sheets into a ledger.  He would also produce totals of houses and families in his patch.
• The completed ledgers were dispatched to the London Census Office. Where clerks manually sorted and counted entries by hand and totals were compiled using tally sheets and simple adding machines.
• Categories (such as occupation and age groups) were classified manually—this was labour-intensive and slow.
• Final statistical tables took several years to produce, and reports continued into the mid-1900s.

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The 1911 Census

For the 1911 UK Census, punched cards were introduced as a mechanised aid to counting and reporting data.

The UK didn’t go “fully automated,” but this was a major step beyond the hand-processing used in 1901.

How punched cards were actually used:

1. Data transcription onto cards

·        Information from each person’s census return (age, sex, occupation, marital status, birthplace, etc.) was encoded onto a punched card.

·        Each card represented one individual.

·        Holes were punched in specific positions corresponding to categories (e.g., male/female, age band, occupation class).

2. Coding system

·        Before punching, clerks assigned standardised codes (especially for occupations and industries).

·        This was still a manual intellectual task—machines didn’t interpret handwriting.

3. Card punching

·        Operators used keypunch machines to punch holes in cards according to the coded data.

·        Accuracy checks were often done by re-punching or verifying samples.

4. Mechanical tabulation

·        Cards were fed into Hollerith tabulating machines:

·        The machines could rapidly produce totals (e.g., number of males aged 20–25 in a county).

5. Sorting for complex tables

·        Cards could be sorted mechanically by specific characteristics (e.g., all cards for a particular occupation).

·        By running the same cards through different sorts and tabulations, statisticians could build increasingly complex tables.