Three Pots of Gold: When census & property records coincide

It was not long after I began to learn who occupied my family tree that I became curious to know more about where they lived. Family and local historians now have increasingly easy access to property surveys which coincide closely in time with surveys of people. These temporal coincidences lay before us three proverbial pots of gold. Three Acts passed at Westminster over a 100-year period caused the creation of records that map ancestral dwellings on the one hand and describe who lived in them on the other.

Mid-19th century

Tithe survey

The tithe survey was carried out between 1836 and 1850. The maps and schedules (apportionments) documented the owners and occupiers of farms and the size and uses of their fields. These farms were mapped with their houses and outbuildings. This mapping was conducted when the first two modern census enumerations were carried out in 1841 and 1851.

The old system of paying one tenth of what you produce ‘in kind’, that is in paying church taxes by turning over a portion of the annual crop or animal yield to the church, was modernised. Henceforth monetary payments were made. The apportionment documents record the owners and occupiers of properties. Every home, garden, orchard, and plot of land, large or small, is numbered for easy reference to the corresponding tithe map. The nature of each plot is described, whether arable, covered in timber, pasture, plantation or even waste. The 1841