The new street indexes for the census

[alanb]

Hi,

yesterday I received an email from ScotlandsPeople that said:

Census Street Lists

The Census Street Lists for the main towns and cities have now been added to the site for all census years. These free-to-view books are an excellent research tool and can be used to locate streets and find which enumeration books cover a particular area. In most instances the registration district is also provided. This is an excellent resource for finding who lived at a particular address without searching on a name.

Has anyone succeeded in accessing these and using them "without searching on a name"? I have tried but end up with an alphabetical list of the whole enumeration district - or at least 1200 people. If you have, can you please post here how you managed to do it?

Thanks!

alanb

[SarahND]

Hi alanb and
I had the same experience... and was wondering how to use the numbers I was finding in some sort of useful way. Maybe someone will come along with a brilliant idea that we wish we had thought of

All the best,
Sarah

[Ina]

Hi Alamb,

Welcome to

I also couldn't access them.

Ina

[AndrewP]

The way to narrow it down as far as an enumeration district is done using the advanced search. As an example from the 1911 census advanced search to find the list of inhabitants of Registration District 685/4, Enumeration District 80 (found using Edinburgh street index for the 1911 census http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/Conte ... nburgh.pdf page 88 in this example) :

Input the search criteria: rdno:685 && rdsuffix:4 && enumdist:080

This will return 135 results for the 'institution' St Catherine's Convent in Lauriston Gardens, Edinburgh.

I accept that for household enumeration districts rather than institutions this can return a list of over 1000 names in urban districts.

If you have a surname to seek in that area, you can add the surname to the search criteria, such as:
rdno:685 && rdsuffix:4 && enumdist:080 && surname:Smith
In this case that returns 1 result. For household enumeration districts, such a search could produce a number of family groups or individuals.

The search fields can be found at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/Conte ... r=551&2037 .
Instructions regarding advanced searching start at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/conte ... spx?r=2042 .

All the best,

AndrewP

[alanb]

If you have a surname to seek in that area, you can add the surname to the search criteria, such as:
rdno:685 && rdsuffix:4 && enumdist:080 && surname:Smith
In this case that returns 1 result. For household enumeration districts, such a search could produce a number of family groups or individuals.

The search fields can be found at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/Conte ... r=551&2037 .
Instructions regarding advanced searching start at http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/conte ... spx?r=2042 .

Thanks,Andrew, for your reply. What I was trying to do as a test of the new indexes was the equivalent of:

rdno:685 && rdsuffix:4 && enumdist:080 && houseno:36

but there is no search field giving house number. Thus we always have to go through the surname, as far as I can see. For this reason I can't see much use in having the new indexes computerised, I'm afraid.

Can somebody prove me wrong?

Cheers
Alanb

[AndrewP]

Thanks,Andrew, for your reply. What I was trying to do as a test of the new indexes was the equivalent of:

rdno:685 && rdsuffix:4 && enumdist:080 && houseno:36

but there is no search field giving house number. Thus we always have to go through the surname, as far as I can see. For this reason I can't see much use in having the new indexes computerised, I'm afraid.

Can somebody prove me wrong?

Hi Alan,

You are absolutley correct, the street names and the house numbers are not part of the ScotlandsPeople index. The advanced search using the RD number and ED number is only likely to be helpful to a small number of people. That would be those who are confident they know where a particular person or family was living, but that person or family has a surname which there are many of in the town or city. This way the number of search results could be reduced so that they should appear on one page of search results. Or it can also help if the name has been very badly transcribed into the index, it can be used to reduce the number of results to a small geographic area.

All the best,

AndrewP

[Russell]

Having wasted time and a few credits on this I fail to see why they even bothered to make it available in-line. Less experienced researchers will possibly end up paying for searches which produce no useable results and SP will be accused of trying to con a few more credits from the gullible.

Russell

[LesleyB]

I've found street indexes (in book form) really useful in the past when dealing with the census on microfilm and trying to find someone in a large town or city -saves you wastign hours trawling through loads of films which are irrelevant to your search.

I've not tried the new SP indexes yet, so can't really comment on their usefulness or otherwise...