Back in the days before digitisation of censuses, it was often a great achievement to find the person or family you were searching for within a parish or district. Now, this can be accomplished at the touch of a few buttons and the days of laborious and painstaking investigation through reels and reels of microfilm are over – well, when it comes to census searching in any case.
Recently, whilst working on family research cases for two particular clients, I have discovered some strange occurrences of individuals being enumerated twice. Searching the Internet to find other documented examples of this in the UK censuses, I seemed to find none…. though I am certain other researchers must also have located similar cases.
The first is the case of Thirza Comer born in 1843 in North Molton. In the 1861 census, her mother, Ellen, records her at home in East Street, South Molton, her occupation noted as ‘servant girl’. This would perhaps explain the fact that she is also enumerated in Warkleigh as the ‘farm servt’ (servant) of Richard and Maria Ball of Newland.
And in the same year, John Frederick Wieland appears to travel enormous distances to be doubly enumerated. The family home was in Marsh Lane, Litherland, Seaforth where John, his wife Jane Clothilde and their two children, Thomas and Frederick are recorded along with two servants. But at 7 Portland Place, Lambeth – where Frederick Goddard is the head of the household – John Wieland was recorded as a visitor along with Catherine Thatcher (Thatcher being Jane Clothilde’s maiden name)!
I would love to hear of other examples of this and indeed, the reasons why this might have occurred!
