Mistake on the census?

[Alyosha]

I looked up my mother's family this morning. My grandmother and her 6 siblings don't appear to be on the census (confirmed their birthdates with the same website, Findmypast). Also missing my great-grandmother & great-grandfather.

Other alternative, that my mother disagrees with is that they were there but their birth dates have been recorded incorrectly because they were living with relations. I thought this was more likely but then checked the birth records and it does appear they are different people, just with the same names.

How does one go about checking that the indexers haven't missed off a whole street somewhere?

You can all ignore me. Surname transcribed wrongly!!!

Ha. I've found all sorts of errors. My 6x great grandad is called John. Or J. Or Jack. Or Jnho. Or Jhon. He was born in April and May.

The transcribing errors are easily fixed. The deliberate lies which reveal some startling and sad stories are much harder to resolve.

Did you know there isn't another one until the 1951 is published in 2051?

The 1931 census was destroyed in a fire, and there wasn't one in 1941 because of the war.

I'm really glad to have known by Grandma (born 1925) and my granny (born 1889), both of whom filled in many, many gaps and provided reams of letters and correspondence, official documents and war records so that researching the gap between 1921 and 1951 was made much easier. I also have/had a lot of aunts and uncles who lived to over 100 and never threw anything away. Which is both a good and a bad thing!

Transcription errors are quite common, I've learnt to search quite broadly at first.
For filling in gaps, I highly recommend the British Newspaper Archive. It's also on Findmypast, but the quality of search isn't great. I've found so many stories of ancestors including wedding notices and photos that have added a lot of info and colour to my tree. I found my Grandparents marriage from 1933 and it had a list of guests (which was useful) and details of what my Grandma wore.

It’s disgusting to have to pay to view the transcripts and images on a per item basis. I paid for a subscription purely to access the census but I can’t without further payments 😡