Why can I not find this entire family in the 1911 census?

[SomewhereOnlyWeKnew]

I know:

• The parents' names
• The names of their six children
• The birth months/years and birthplaces of their six children (all between 1895-1911)

None of them are coming up in the 1911 census. I'm searching the databases on Find My Past.

Why would this be?

@BarbaraofSeville

Intriguing. Are they all present and correct on the 1901 census? The parents and the DC who had been born by then, obviously.

Yes, the 1901 census is as expected.

And in 1912 they had another daughter, who was registered under the correct surname.

So what happened!?! I wonder if it was something like an in-joke in the family. Or maybe they had lost a good friend and so put his surname down in honour of him, something like that.

My mother however is constructing very elaborate explanations such as the wife had left her husband and taken the kids to stay with a landlord… (a landlord with the exact first name, age, job and birthplace as your husband, oh what a coincidence!).

The elaborate explanation might not be too far off the mark. I eventually found out that my great great granny's DH was abusive and kept piling up debts and drinking the family money away. He would end up in debtors prison and my granny and any number of her 6 children in the workhouse until he came back for her and then rinse and repeat. After years of this, he abandoned her and she took work in The Big House up the road. She fell in love with the unmarried youngest son who was disowned and set up home with her. He took her name and assumed some of the details of her husband for propriety's sake but she couldn't divorce and remarry and they lived in sin for 40yrs. They had two babies who died young and my great granny and her NotHusband are buried in the same grave. The names on the birth certificates of the babies, the death certificates and the gravestones make NO sense in isolation but they were concealing their shame.

Once I had the real social story, I pieced together all sorts of documents which 100% supported what I'd found out from descendents of the family. One woman was 102 and remembered being a teenager at the funeral of my great granny and her lover and how she was told to not use their real names in front of the vicar.