FreeCEN
Records Office Systems

Persons searching the FreeCEN DataBase may wish to examine the original images to confirm our interpretation of the data. They will therefore need to be able to "order" the appropriate film or file.

FOR ENGLAND AND WALES the indexing is straight-forward, if perhaps involved:-

The Records Office defines Census Records as belonging in a class, identified by the letters "HO" or "RG".
The year is identified by two or three digits; thus "107" covers 1841 and 1851, "12" identifies 1891.
A Piece Number of up to four digits identifies a specific District. Some large towns may involve several pieces.
Thus a specific Document might be identified as "HO107/789" or "RG12/1234". This identity forms the basis for unique naming of our FreeCEN Data Files.

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Within any document, each two-sided sheet is referred to as a Folio. These are numbered sequentially through a Piece, starting from "Folio 1" (which often contains introductory rather than household information). A given Folio normally comprises a right-hand page (of the booklet) and its reverse, and the Folio number is usually hand-stamped at the top-right corner of odd-numbered pages.

Each Enumerator worked a District Number and wrote the details into one or more booklets with preprinted page numbering.

Every household (normally comprising a family and any servants or visitors present on census night) was required to submit a schedule of persons. Some Schedules are missing from the returns (presumably lost) and enumerators did not always write up the schedules in strict sequence!

Thus the essential indexing to locate an England/Wales household image is made up of, for example:
RG12/1234 + Folio number + Schedule number.
(The Enumerator District Number and Page number may facilitate finding the image but are not essential!)

FreeCEN introduces an artificial household number which the Database will use to identify "neighbours", but we should realise that in rural districts such neighbours might be far away!

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THE SCOTTISH RECORDS OFFICE stores census papers in terms of "Original Parish Number", ordered by Census Year.
They do not use Folio or Schedule numbering, making the location of specific images rather more difficult, typically as "Parish Number + Census Year + Enumeration Number + Page".

To standardise computing procedures, FreeCEN uses artificial "Piece Numbers" for use with Scottish censuses. These are identified with leading letters "HS" or "RS" followed by two digits to code the year, and four digits which identify whether the "Piece" is "the whole" or "part of" the Original Parish.
FreeCEN numbering relates to the true Parish Number which always appears as the final three digits of the "piece number".

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See also "FreeCEN File Names" [7d]

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Feb2003