1921 Census now on Ancestry

[Another2Cats]

I have a separate email address that I use just to see what offers Ancestry are currently offering to try and get people to come back.

I just received this message about the 1921 Census.

So, that's the good news. The bad news is that if anything was not transcribed correctly on FindMyPast then it's still not transcribed correctly.

But, on the other hand, it is possible to update almost all of the information.

Yes, I've been looking up people in 1921 on Ancestry. It's not in people's hints yet so you have to do a search on each person.

Oooh - my late mum would have been a few weeks old at the time of that census, I might try and find her on it.

I don’t trust these things because people have lied about who the father is for a long time and you could have recorded relatives on it from a hundred years ago who aren’t actually related to you

@Lovelybitofsquirrel3 The censuses are transcripts of official documents, and leaving aside mistranscriptions, poor spelling and missing pages/people, they are a whole lot more reliable than family trees that people have uploaded. The best thing is to always double-check whatever you find by other means, such as parish registers, birth, marriage & death certificates, wills and so on. Yes, there will always be skeletons in the family closet and people did lie about paternity, age etc on censuses, but as long as you are using it in combination with other official records, it is a useful source of information.

i have "myheritage.com" and it works very well in my home country (loads of free digitalised records going back to 1700s there, with loads of family history on each act - eg names of parents, gdparents, place and date of birth, etc) but i have been strugglibg with my DH UK family tree (no living relatives, so noone to ask) - are the freely available online registers very limited in terms of both availability and details?

Yes but people would marry another man and put him down as the father or cheat and it was assumed it belonged to the man she was married to. It even happens today. So I can’t really trust it

Yes, I find the DNA part useful as well to triangulate against. No system is foolproof, but if you have multiple pieces of evidence pointing towards something you can 90% rely on it.
My personal favourite is finding a photo who is the absolute image of your relative.

Do you actually do genealogy?

You do seem to be blaming all the cheating on women, by the way. In any case, unless they were a widow and the head of the household, it was always her husband, father or employer who filled in the census return.

If you have a paid subscription to myheritage then you should have the UK records available on there.

If they are not available then there is a free site called:

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/

Where you can get births marriages and deaths going back to 1837 for free. This doesn't give you all the details though.

Apart from that, you would need a subscription with either Ancestry or FindMyPast to have access to things like the census or christenings, marriages and burials before 1837.

yes i have the paid sub, but finding the UK data level of detail frustrating - and the amount of inconsistencies really annoying (e.g. ancestor who was "adopted" by canadian family tree builders despite name of spouse on their acts being totally different)

maybe i m not looking in the correct places

"e.g. ancestor who was "adopted" by canadian family tree builders"

Always, always, treat any trees you come across on any site with a huge pinch of salt. Basically, do not trust them unless there is documentary evidence to back them up.

If you cannot find the information on MyHeritage then you are likely going to have to invest in an Ancestry or FindMyPast subscription (I would suggest Ancestry over FindMyPast, although I do have both subscriptions).

If you really do want to trace ancestors who lived in the UK then these are the two main resources.
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"e.g. ancestor who was "adopted" by canadian family tree builders"

Having said all of the above about other peoples trees, it depends when this happened. This may well be true.

Between 1869 and 1932 over 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada to work as indentured servants. These were children that were in orphanages or children's homes and it was thought that they would have a better life in Canada (also Australia and New Zealand) rather than in the slums of the UK.

Boys were trained in basic farming practice and girls were taught basic needlework and cookery. They were then shipped out at around the age of 12 or 13 to work as indentured servants for families in rural Canada.

It may well be that this ancestor was one of those "Home Children".

Attached is a photo of a group of children from one of the Barnado's Homes on their way to Canada in 1907.

Think of it as something like "Anne of Green Gables" but they didn't get to go to school.

very interesting thank you

i think that in this case it s a mistake - the ancestor has a more plausible birth record in the UK and appears on census in the vicinity, consistent with the rest of the family history. The canadian man he has been recorded has actually has a death cert, with a different wife mentioned on it and a more plausible timeline.

All i seem to find on myheritage are scans of index tables referring to fuller records at page x in volume x, but never the full thing. Frustrating when you ve experienced the joys of belgian and french lengthy records!

onwards and upwards!

Oh my @Another2Cats that picture is heartbreaking.
All those children, many unwanted, many wanted but parents have died or can't look after them, off to their new life in Canada.
What fate befell them.........

Other people's family trees are often wrong. Or after a while are obviously taken from yours in the first place. I messaged a tree owner who had my father married to someone who wasn't my mum, but she didn't reply, and others have copied her info.

Am tempted to sign up for a month now having seen a glimpse of the 1921 census for my granny. Way more names on there than I expected to see.

Looking forward to having another wander round the 1921 census. Certainly got some good information.

It is a shame they only record the number of children under 16 that people had on it though, the 1911 was very useful for finding numbers of children who died between censuses with their number of children and number of children still alive boxes.

@RelocatingtoFrance If any of your UK searches relate to Scotland then Scotland's People's listings are free to search. You have to pay for seeing images, but sometimes can be really handy for birth searches as the mother's maiden name is usually listed

I kind of get your point. We had traced our family tree going back an awful long way and then I took a dna test and a load of half cousins popped up who shouldn’t have existed. Turns out my grandad wasn’t my biological grandad! So I now have two different family trees!

The transcripts of the 1921 census on Ancestry aren't as reliable as those of 1911. I looked up an ancestor who had a large family and only found a couple of the children listed. I looked at the original, and they were at the bottom of a page. The following page had the rest of the children with the 12 year old girl at the top of the list transcribed as being the mother of her siblings. I agree that the information is less comprehensive. The 1911 that gives the length of the marriage and the number of children living and who have died is very useful.

Because of the War of Independence 1919-1921 there was no census in Ireland in 1921.
Previously, as Ireland had been under British rule, the Irish had a census in the same years as the rest of Britain.

The 1921 Scottish census is not on ancestry. Only the English one and I think the Welsh one.