On 19 June 1921, the British Government carried out its 13th national decennial census since 1801. Across England, Scotland and Wales, enumerators dropped off census schedules to heads of households across the three countries, and, once filled in, collected them again shortly after census night. The information from these schedules was extracted by civil servants over many months and years after, to help inform government policy on several fronts, until the point where the exercise was carried out again in 1931. However, for privacy reasons, the schedules and enumerators extracts were kept from public access for 100 years, following the 1920 Census
Act. On January 6th 2022, FindMyPast (www.findmypast. co.uk) released digitised versions of the 1921 Census for England, Wales, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. However, the returns from two UK countries were missing from this release. The first was Ireland, for which no census was recorded due to become the Irish Free State in 1922). The second was Scotland.
Although part of the UK, the recording of the Scottish census north of the border has been delegated to the General Register Office for Scotland since 1861, as a consequence of the Registration (Scotland) Act, 1854. Now part of the National Records of Scotland (www. the War of Independence raging in the land, and its partition that year into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland (later to nrscotland.gov.uk), its task of recording the Scottish records, and making them available to the public subsequently, is independent of that for the rest of the UK. On the one hand, this
