Monthly Archives: April 2018

1911 Census – the unknown Millingtons

The 1911 census is the most recent census that is available for the UK. Inevitably it has the most detail for family historians including for wives, the number of years that they have been married and the number of children both alive and dead. It is worth paying close attention to the census forms because a number of husbands and widows also provide this information even though it is not required.

By 1911 the range of forenames had vastly increased making the identification of children much easier and similarly there are more individuals with middle names (which may only be given as an initial).

By 1911 too, civil registration had been running for 74 years (though birth registration had only been compulsory since 1874) and so only the elderly should be without a birth certificate and even they should have a death certificate at some point in the future.

Lastly the recent release by the General Register Office of the results of their indexing program means that mothers maiden names of children born before 1911 can be more readily identified.

Given all of these changes, I thought it was a worthwhile exercise  to see how many of the 6925 Millington entries that I have located in the 1911 census could be linked to at least one of a Birth, Marriage or Death entry.  After a number of years work on this, I am left with 478 entries (just under 7%) that at present are still in my difficult pile.

The list as it currently stands can be found here. If you have any evidence linking these entries to birth, marriage or death registration I would be delighted to hear from you. I doubt whether I can match all of the outstanding entries, but a few more would be good.

Update (02.05.2018) The list is now down to 454 entries – hopefully in a future post, I will talk about some of the more complex identfications I have made.