Ask the Expert - Too Many Cooks

Our expert Stephen Rigden answers your questions:

‘Is it possible for a person to appear in more than one census return? In other words, does a census recorder check that all the people named on a census are actually present in the house?

My problem is that I have just recently obtained a copy of a marriage certificate for Norton Dryden Hutchinson showing that he married Maria Cook aged 20 in Southwark in 1870, and her father was Edward Cook, a stationer. Fine, there is a Maria Jane Cook born in 1850, father Edward who in the 1861 census is shown to be a stationer. I cannot find any other Maria Cook with father Edward who is a stationer. The trouble is that the 1871 census has a Maria Cook living with Norton Hutchinson but also a Maria Cook living with her father Edward the stationer.

The situation is not helped by Norton Hutchinson claiming to be a widower in 1881, but I cannot find any death of Maria Hutchinson, nor any 1881 census for father Edward and his wife.’ Mike

Steve says:”Yes! Many family historians come across the situation during their research. As alluded to in your question, each census is a snapshot in time intended to record not who was customarily resident in a given property, but who was actually resident overnight on census night. However, this objective will not have been entirely achieved in any census.

There are many reasons for this. The first is simply that people are not very good at filling in forms. If you are familiar with the 1911 census for England and Wales, you will have seen for the first time the household schedules completed by householders themselves (these were destroyed for the earlier censuses). And you will almost certainly have seen mistakes in filling out the form – for example, the so-called fertility information entered against the man and not the woman, or Nationality completed by English and Welsh natives even though it clearly says that this is to be filled in only by persons born overseas. I have also seen several 1911 census returns where the householder has dutifully but erroneously entered the names and details of all their deceased children: usually, struck out in angry red ink by a Census Office clerk.

So we can expect householders to have made many errors of other types on the household schedules for earlier census years from 1841 to 1901 and for many of these to have been copied across by enumerators into the census returns we see today.

Secondly, the form may have been completed a day or two before the actual census night and then a person usually resident turns out to be away temporarily on census night and is recorded elsewhere as well.

In short, I believe there are reasonable grounds for you to accept that both 1871 census returns refer to the same Maria Cook. The fact that she is recorded under her maiden name Cook rather than her married name Hutchinson in the parental home is not unprecedented and may simply be householder or enumerator error. However, before proceeding further, I would strongly recommend that you conduct further searches and obtain supporting documents, especially the 1850 birth certificate of Maria (to check the name of her mother). Bear in mind that the surname Cook is of course common, London is a populous city, and the occupation of stationer may be expressed in other ways, or may change over time (for instance, between 1871 and 1881), so you do need to proceed with caution so as not to accidentally attach an incorrect but coincidentally similar-looking branch to your family tree.

Finally, although it is premature to leap to any conclusions, it would not have been unheard of for a man to claim to be widowed, and to re-marry, after separation from his first wife. In the mid- and late 19th century, divorce was an expensive and intimidating process and there are many known instances of men, and women, dispensing with the formality of divorce and re-marrying bigamously.”

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