The records that our ancestors left behind often contain incorrect or conflicting information. Occasionally, if we are lucky, they might contain some additional information beyond what was officially required. However, the records themselves only tell us what happened, rarely do they tell us the reason something occured.
It’s our job as family historians to unpick the details and work out what the documents are telling us.
When we discover conflicting information, we have to consider all the possible reasons that the records appear to be incorrect. Were our ancestors intentionally attempting to cover up an indiscretion? Or was the information they gave unintentionally incorrect because they literally did not know the actual truth? Of course, we sometimes have to accept that some of our ancestors intentionally lied for deceitful reasons.
Every family will have a mixture of all of these and the difficulty for us, as family historians, is trying to work out the reasons our ancestors gave incorrect information. Here we have a few examples of the good, bad and the ugly from the census records, each proving that nothing is ever straightforward in the world of family history.
Home alone?
Hilary Jackson found an unusual entry in the 1901 Census for Roath in Glamorgan that certainly raised a few concerns. The top entry on page 20 for Roath was for the Williams family. What’s interesting about this entry is that the ‘head’ of the household was not named, just the words ‘absent’ and ‘head’ in the relationship column, and there is also no mention of a wife.
The remainder of the entries were for the children, Annie Williams, daughter, aged ten; Charlie, son, aged eight; Fred, son, aged six; Olive, daughter, aged three; and infant daughter Edris, aged seven months. The term ‘absent’ can sometimes refer to a soldier, but there is no mention of the head of household being a soldier on this census return, so what do we think has happened? One thing that we can say is that those children were almost certainly not ‘home alone’ on the night of Sunday 31 March. Most likely a neighbour or a relative would have been looking after them. There are so
