cencus,s

[Deleted]

looking a the cencus starting at 1911 ,and working backwards to 1871, The name of the Garratt family change from GARRETT back to GARRATT. This is looking at Arther Garrett, hopefully wondering if the the gent that had coped them had made a miss take.

[Chris]

The censuses before 1911 were filled in by appointed enumerators.

A lot of names seem to have been filled in phonetically, the enumerator guessing the spelling just from the sound, many family names in the records change slightly from one census to another (the Jordan family has about 5 or 6 variants, and you would have thought that was a reasonably simple name).

But ................................

I've just done a quick search on the Garrett/Garratt name in the census records and the Parish Registers for Arthur and his ancesters - it seems the Garrett spelling only occurs in the census records for 1891, 1901 and 1911 - before that date, in the 1841 - 1881, censuses it seem to be always spelt Garratt. Arthur's birth is just after the Parish Registers dates that we have online, but his father (William) does seem to be listed in the baptisms for 1825 - under the name Garratt.

EDIT - just had another look at the original handwritten 1911 census - the name probably is Garratt. The family details page (filled in by Arthur) seems to show Garratt, but the summary entry filled in by the enumerator shows Garrett.

The handwritten 1901 census returns shows Arthur Garratt, son of William Garrett (?). In 1901 the family entry is spread across two pages, everyone on the first page is Garrett, everyone on the second page Garratt.

The original 1891 census returns are a bit of a mess, the head of house entry shows Garret (single t) William, i.e. with surname and Christian names reversed, his wife and children are then listed with the family name shown as Garrett. Although Ancestry.co.uk has transcribed the family name as William, as the head of house entry was incorrectly entered (so making it virtually impossible to find with a standard search).

So it look like the enumerators were having problems in 1891 and 1901, with a transcription error in 1911.

p.s. I have submitted the necessary updates to Ancestry.co.uk

[Deleted]

Thank you Chris, only having just this site and somee of the free ones at the moment,this is the only tracing for my family tree, Its a great site hope to visit Appleby in the summer,to see were some of the relastions lived,again thank you