With all its faults, fibs, flaws, omissions and occasionally eye-watering insensitivity, censuses have arguably been the family historian’s greatest friend. I still remember the long-ago frisson of finding 3x great-grandparents in the 1851 Census, recorded as local carriers. I’m pretty sure I squealed. I was at college doing English and Social History, and it felt just as if two Thomas Hardy characters had jumped off a page and into my own story. Being then a townie
