Census Research
I’ll not fill these pages with precise details about the Censuses of the world, they are available elsewhere on the internet if you need them.
The focus of my research was the Maliphant name within the UK, however I found information about other related names during that exploration and they are included here. I also found some records from U.S.A. and Australia (just one!) and have added them in as well.
Unfortunately Argentinian records are not yet available online but fingers crossed the future.
Our presence in Canada and New Zealand did not start until much later in the 20th century, so sadly there is nothing to record for those countries (yet!).
Typically Census results are released in full 100 years after the event, so the 1921 U.K. Census details were released (on FindMyPast.com) on January 6th 2022.
I have included the basic information available (which excludes details such as street address and profession) on our website on January 13th 2022 for all those listed with the Maliphant surname and a few others – 100 names in total.
Each record costs £3.50 so I decided that it would cost too much to extract all the digitised copies of the Census returns at this time. At some stage in the future it will become better value for money (i.e. cheaper/free!), and I’ll fill in the gaps at that time.
The early Census returns are written by an appointed official, so there are often spelling issues. To complicate matters more, the online index is done by individuals interpreting those handwritten records, with further misspelling occurring at that stage as well ….
However, once armed with the census returns, I then set about identifying the people in our records so that we could accurately record the results. Having established that I knew who they were, the next task was to identify where they were. Sometimes the road/address still exists today, but often the area had been redeveloped (or roads renamed) – the joys of historical research!
The research was considerably helped by scouring historical maps – the U.K. in particular being well covered by records from the Ordnance Survey collection housed in the National Library of Scotland, for which I will be eternally grateful!