This evening I have been filling in my 2011 Census Form.
I used my computer, did the process online using the high speed broadband, in my central heated comfortable apartment, lit by electric light whilst listening to some nice music recorded digitally after a rather pleasant dinner.
Almost to this very day in 1851 my great, great grandparents were also doing their census, answering questions to the Census Enumerator, under candlelight, in a cold draughty cottage in Gloucestershire after a long day as general labourers and servants.
In 1881 my great, great uncle was serving a punishment of hard labour for stealing a small quantity of oats because he was starving – his census was at Exeter Gaol, he died 3 years later destitute.
In 1901 a few months after Queen Victoria died, my 7 year old Granny was left deserted by her parents living as ‘visitor’ with another family in Rugby.
I know this and a lot more because I have done my family history and I have copies of the census relating to many members of my family from 1841 – 1911.
(Below: in 1911 my Grandfather (Albert) was an ‘Office Boy’ working for a firm of Solicitors. His two infant brothers had died a few years earlier in the flu epidemic. Grandpa was living at home with his mother, father and his mother’s 89 year father, John Lear, who was born in Teignmouth in 1822 when George IV was King, when the future Queen Victoria was three years old. Grandpa’s father was Clement Waugh who started the Devon branch of the family when he moved to Newton Abbot between 1871 – 1881 (on the 1871 census he was still in Gloucestershire, by 1881 he was in Devon). Clement was a Coppersmith for the new prosperous Great Western Railway Company which my Grandfather joined as an Office Manager after spending the First World War in India.)
I wonder if anyone will research the 2011 census in decades to come.
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