Genealogy Forum UK

This is a follow-on, My Great Grandad William Oakes (the boot maker)entry number 108 in the 1891 census as far as I can make the handwriting out lived at Gaston House Cupernham Road Camberwell. Can anyone confirm that there is or was a place in Camberwell of such a spelling?

I have tried various ideas on the 'mighty computer' but coming up blank.

Cheers, Tony.

What is the 108 The 1891 Census should start RG12. Do you have Ancestry, if so if you right click on the Enumerator's Districts it will give you his route and the name of the streets. HTH Linell.

Here's a link for the Camberwell Reg Districts:-

http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.go ... reet_Index

Linell.

I think you must be mis-reading the page. The family in question are living in "Gosport", Cupernham Road, Romsey, Hampshire (which does exist), not Camberwell (although William is marked as being born in Camberwell.

I seem to be tripping up over myself at every turn.

Cheers, Tony.

It's more easy for us with a bit more experience as we are used to looking at the pages on the various website. Because there can be so much more on the photos of the pages than in the transcriptions (let alone the mistranscriptions that occur) I tend to only use the search results and transcriptions as a guide.

Photo's / transcriptions ? Please tell me more. Cheers, Tony.

Sites like Ancestry have photographs of the relevant pages of the census from which they take their information (called transcribing the record, hence transcriptions). These photos can be viewed if you have a subscription to the site or from many local libraries in the UK. But sometimes the transcriptions can be of poor quality, for instance I have several Hillmans that are transcribed as Willman. This can make searching for the records a pain.

Thanks for the reply SRD.

So am I correct in thinking someone has to copy out by hand onto a similar sheet all he or she reads on a photograph of a census page? Cheers, Tony.

I'm still of the opinion that some sites use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that 'reads' pictures of words and converts them into text which is then edited by humans, but, as some of the members here will testify, some sites do actually use people to read the pictures and copy them out. Not too bad if the copyists are very familar with the language and circumstances of the country's info but when it's sent abroad to be done by those who are neither fully bi-lingual or understand the manner in which info is collected errors frequently occur.

Thank you. I'm learning a bit more every time. Cheers, Tony.