Liverpool & South West Lancashire FHS - Forum

the above ref info, i see this a lot but dont know what it means or how to use it if it can be used, can someon help please.

RG11; Piece: 3612; Folio: 33; Page: 14 - this is to do with my family, its Piece: and Folio i dont understand.

Hi, these are the refs for you to get into 1881 census in Anc@@
You can find your family without this if you go to familysearch census, free for 1881.
The refs have been given probably to help other members of the forum to continue their search for your family tree.

Tina

thank you Tina, so does each FH company have their own ref system? how would you use the ref's?

Brian

Hello Brian,
The reference RG11; Piece: 3612; Folio: 33; Page: 14 is the official Government Home Office reference to the page in the 1881 Census on which your relatives were enumerated (counted) on the night of the census. It has nothing to do with any of the FH sites. The 1871 Census is RG10 and the 1861 is RG9. The 1841 and 1851 censuses both had the Home Office prefix HO107. I believe the RG stands for Registrar General who was responsible for the census count from 1861 on.

When you make entries into your own PAF program from a census you should always include the census page reference in case you, or a relative with access to your tree, wants to review data on the family in that census. Saves doing a search for an individual by name and age etc.

Most if not all sites will have a facility for you to do a Reference Search. On that Search page you will see 'boxes' for entering RG #, Piece #, Folio # and Page #. By entering your 1881 reference into my search program I got 4 Evans as follows, sharing a house with several other families at 30 Plumbe Street.

JONES, John - Lodger - Married - M - 66 - 1815 - Warehouseman - Bangor, Caernarvonshire.
JONES, Sarah - Lodger - Married - F - 50 - 1831 - Bangor, Caernarvonshire.
EVANS, John - Lodger - Married - M - 30 - 1851 - Seaman - Bangor, Caernarvonshire.
EVANS, Ellen - Lodger - Married - F - 28 - 1853 - Bangor, Caernarvonshire.
Address 30/2 Plumbe St, Liverpool.

Cheers,
Dickiesam

Thank you so much for that, very helpful. I have just discovered the importance of the ref info, been looking for my family in the 1871 census, on the site I use they had miss translated the census and put EVENS and not Evans. Today I have learnt something new

You are very welcome. Re Evens for Evans and all the rest... often it isn't a transcriber's fault, its the way the enumerator heard the name and wrote it down. There was a strong probability that well over 50% of households did not have a Head of household who could read let alone write. So there was no way for a such a person to tell the man-at-the-door how his or her name was spelled. Think of the number of times one comes across the phrase on birth and marriage certs... X His/Her mark.

So wild card searches such as Ev*ns and *vans etc are useful in finding an elusive ancestor. Most, if not all the folk here have found an elusive person with a wild card, even several.
Cheers,
Dickiesam

My help posting has also been updated http://liverpool-genealogy.org.uk/phpBB ... php?t=4630

To confirm the reference is already compiled by the original census pages, this is used by the National Archives and consistently by other sites, eg Ancestry, GR or FMP.