A week of wonderful websites – Day 2

3 December 2013

May I present to you, Histpop …. a website which provides online access to the complete British population reports for Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1937. This site does not contain original census enumerators’ books like the commercial sites of Ancestry and Findmypast, unless the schedules are being utilised for illustrative purposes.

Taking the family and local historian way beyond basic population statistics, this website provides a wealth of material on the economy and society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Comprising of some 200,000 pages of census material from the British Isles, the website also houses numerous ancillary documents from The National Archives, with all documents available online and searchable by date or geography.

A simple search for ‘Tetcott‘, which normally returns very few results in a search engine, supplies no less than 43 hits, with 34 hits noted for the nearby village of ‘Luffincott‘. Bearing in mind that the two parishes probably don’t reach a total of 150 current residents, that’s an amazing hoard!

Histpop is an AHDS History project, funded as part of the JISC Digitisation programme and is hosted by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. Unfortunately, by its own admission, the site has been relatively static since April 2007, which is a great shame. Nevertheless, this is an superb resource for family and local historians alike, though perhaps particularly those interested in undertaking one-place studies on a specific location/community.

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