Census Address search on Ancestry

[cpdavis35]

Hi all,

Is there anyway to do a census search from an address on Ancestry?

Thanks.

[Night Owl]

Only in the 1881 and 1911 as far as I'm aware.

You can do on FMP. Also you can narrow things down by using the Street search facility in TNA's Your Archives here

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Your_Archives:Historical_Streets_Project

[Richard in Perth]

Only the 1881 and 1911 censuses have been indexed by address on Ancestry. For the 1881, you have to put the address in the "keyword" search box (and tick "Exact"). The 1911 search screen has a separate box for address search.

For the other censuses, you need to search through the enumeration district descriptions, which are located at the start of each district. To do this, click on the "Browse Individual Records" link on the left side of the census results screen, then select the required county and parish. You should then see several links under Enumeration District ("District 1", "District 2", etc). The first page of each of these links should be a description of the streets covered by that district. It can be very slow and cumbersome - much quicker to ask someone with a FMP sub to look it up for you

Richard

[keldon]

If you only have ancestry what I do sometimes is carry out a google search with the road name in quotation marks, town name, census year, and the word census. For example: "london road" brighton 1871 census.
Someone somewhere may have published a web page with their ancestors on and they may be in the same road that you're looking for. You can then search for their ancestor's name on ancestry.

It occasionally works.

[Richard in Perth]

Another way to find an address on an unindexed census is to first find it on the closest census that is indexed by address, then look up names of neighbours to that address on the required census. You will usually find someone who hasn't moved in the intervening years, and from there you can browse through adjacent images to find the house number that you are looking for. E.g. if you want an address in 1901, then first find it in 1911 using the address search facility, then see who was in the street and look them up in 1901 until you find someone who hadn't moved in the previous ten years.

[cpdavis35]

Thanks all for the information and suggestions. I'll have a go and see what happens.