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1881 United Kingdom census

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Census 1881

← 1871 3 April 1881 1891 →

General information
CountryUnited Kingdom

The United Kingdom Census of 1881 recorded the people residing in every household on the night of Sunday 3 April 1881,[1] and was the fifth of the UK censuses to include details of household members.

Data recorded

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Details collected include: address, name, relationship to the head of the family, marital status, age at last birthday, gender, occupation, and place of birth. As with earlier censuses, the form asked whether any "lunatics", "imbeciles" or "idiots" lived in the household, causing the Registrar General to observe that: "It is against human nature to expect a mother to admit her young child to be an idiot, however much she may fear this to be true. To acknowledge the fact is to abandon all hope."[2]

The total population of England, Wales and Scotland was recorded as 29,707,207.[3]

Notables named in the census included Winston Churchill, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin.[4]

Indexing

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The 1881 census was the first UK census to be indexed in its entirety. In the 1980s, in a project that has been characterised as "the largest collection of historical source material to be made available in computerised form",[5] and "the first major 'crowd-sourced' exercise in the world",[6] the Genealogical Society of Utah began collaborating with the Federation of Family History Societies and the Scottish Association of Family History Societies to produce an index to the 1881 census for England, Wales, Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

In 1994 and 1995 the resulting index was published, county by county, on microfiche, and made available to institutions.[7] In 1999 the index was published on a set of 24 CD-ROMs and made available to the general public.[8]

In August 2001 the index for Scotland was made available online on Scots Origins, then the official data site of the General Register Office for Scotland, and is now available on its successor ScotlandsPeople. In February 2003, the remaining material was made available free of charge on the FamilySearch website.[9] Free access to the online index is now available from several other sites, though the Scottish data remains exclusive to ScotlandsPeople.

Results

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Scotland

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The 1881 census in Scotland was the first census to count the numbers of Gaelic speakers.[10]

Registration county Population Number of
Gaelic speakers
% Gaelic
speakers
Lanark 942,193 11,500 1.2%
Edinburgh 388,836 2,145 0.6%
Aberdeen 269,047 604 0.2%
Forfar 268,653 590 0.2%
Renfrew 225,611 4,199 1.9%
Ayr 217,630 649 0.3%
Fife 172,131 126 0.1%
Perth 130,282 14,537 11.2%
Stirling 106,883 441 0.4%
Inverness 86,389 60,447 70.0%
Argyll 80,761 50,113 62.1%
Ross and Cromarty 79,467 56,767 71.4%
Dumbarton 78,182 1,423 1.8%
Dumfries 76,167 17 0.0%
Banff 59,783 330 0.6%
Roxburgh 52,592 25 0.0%
Elgin (or Moray) 45,084 1,273 2.8%
Linlithgow 44,005 47 0.1%
Kirkcudbright 42,290 11 0.0%
Caithness 39,859 4,246 10.7%
Haddington 38,510 294 0.8%
Wigtown 38,448 28 0.1%
Kincardine 35,465 18 0.1%
Berwick 35,273 43 0.1%
Orkney 32,044 36 0.1%
Shetland 29,705 12 0.0%
Selkirk 26,346 8 0.0%
Clackmannan 24,025 86 0.4%
Sutherland 22,376 16,776 75.0%
Bute 17,634 3,725 21.1%
Peebles 13,688 3 0.0%
Nairn 8,847 1,068 12.1%
Kinross 7,330 15 0.2%
Total 3,735,536 231,602 6.2%

Table above according to Return of numbers of gaelic-speaking people of Scotland, under census of 1881.[11]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Census records". The National Archives. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
  2. ^ 1801-1901. Office for National Statistics. Archived by The National Archives 28 January 2016. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  3. ^ "1881 England, Wales & Scotland Census". FindMyPast. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  4. ^ "Pages from 1881 census go online". BBC News. 3 December 2004. Retrieved 24 November 2012.
  5. ^ Woollard, M; Schurer, K (9 Nov 2000). "1881 Census for England and Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man (Enhanced Version)". UK Data Service. doi:10.5255/UKDA-SN-4177-1. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
  6. ^ "Federation Wiki". Federation of Family History Societies. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
  7. ^ Young, Stephen; Lumas, Susan (1995). "History Of The British 1881 Census Project". The Federation of Family History Societies. Archived from the original on 2005-01-01. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
  8. ^ "National index to 1881 British census". FamilySearch. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
  9. ^ Christian, Peter; Annal, David (2014). Census. The Family Historian's Guide. London: Bloomsbury. p. 116. ISBN 978-1-4729-0293-1.
  10. ^ "1881 Census". National Records of Scotland. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
  11. ^ "Return of numbers of gaelic-speaking people of Scotland, under census of 1881". histpop. Retrieved 11 July 2023.
Preceded by UK census
1881
Succeeded by