Census address search

Sometimes you may wish to find a specific address on a particular census. For example, if you have been unable to locate a person via a standard name search then you may wish to check their "last known address", which you may have obtained from a bmd certificate or from the previous or next census.

Online Address Indexes

Unfortunately, few online indexes to the censuses have been indexed by address which means that you cannot usually search them by street name. There are however several exceptions, and using one of these will certainly be the fastest and most reliable way of locating an address on any given census:

England & Wales

1841: FindMyPast (pay per view)
1851: no online address index currently available
1861: FindMyPast (pay per view)
1871: FindMyPast (pay per view - incomplete coverage as of May-2007)
1881: Ancestry (free index)
1891: FindMyPast (pay per view - Wales incomplete as of May-2007)
1901: National Archives 1901 Census Online (pay per view)

Scotland

1841-1901 Ancestry (subscription or pay per view)

Note that for Ancestry, the address search facility (where available) is given on the standard search page, in the box labelled "Address". For FindMyPast and the National Archives site, there are specific address search pages.

Search by Enumeration District

If you cannot locate an address from one of the indexes listed above, you may need to search through the entire district until you find it. This is easiest done on Ancestry. Select the required census from the main search page. Once the search page for that particular census has loaded, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the county that you require. This will give you a list of the civic parishes in that county. Select the parish and this will give you a list of each enumeration district (ED) in that parish.

You will then need to look at the description page for each ED - this describes the part of the parish that was included in that ED. Usually only the major roads are listed in this description, so you may need to refer to a contemporary street map of the area if your desired street is a minor road.

Once you have found the likely ED for the street, click on the "District No" link to the left and this will load the first image for that ED. You will then need to go through each image in turn, using the forward arrow at the top of the screen, until you locate the street. Needless to say, this method can be quite time consuming, and it would not be advisable if you were using pay-per-view rather than a subscription!

Find the neighbours!

If you have located the address on one census and wish to find the same place on the previous or the next census, then have a look up and down the street to see which families were there. Try searching for these families on the census in question and sooner or later you may find a family that stayed in the same place (i.e. in the street that you're trying to locate). You may need to try several different families until you find one that hadn't moved - but this method, whilst not guaranteed to work every time, is generally much faster than trawling through the entire district page by page.

Maybe it didn't exist?

Remember that many towns were expanding rapidly in the 19th century. Perhaps you're trying to find a street on an earlier census that hadn't in fact been built at that time. Also, many streets were re-named several times as towns expanded. A contemporary street map may help to ensure that the street you're looking for did actually exist at that time.