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The United Kingdom Census of 1851 recorded the people residing in every household on the night of March 30, 1851, and was the second of the UK censuses to include details of household members. However, this census added considerably to the fields recorded in the earlier 1841 census, providing additional details of ages, relationships and origins, making the 1851 census a rich source of information for both demographers and genealogists.
The 1851 census for England and Wales was opened to public inspection in 1912 (the 100-year retainer rule was not in effect at the time), and has since been available from The National Archives as part of class HO107. The 1851 census for Scotland is available at the General Register Office for Scotland. An 1851 census was taken in Ireland but most of the records have been destroyed: those that remain are held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (for those counties of Ireland which remain in the UK) or the National Archives of Ireland (for those counties now in the Republic of Ireland).
The 1851 census is seen as one of the key sources for British genealogical research of the nineteenth century. The information about the relationship of individuals to the head of household enables relationships between people to be established accurately. Furthermore, the inclusion of exact ages and details of each person's place of birth, provides the researcher with a pointer to the location of birth or baptism records. In many cases, this allows the researcher to pin-down the parish of birth with relative ease: in other cases, the situation is not so simple.
An example of the problems encountered is that the census may accurately record a person's place of birth, although their baptism (which may be the only record relating to their birth) may be in a different place. Conversely, a person may have been born and baptised in one place, but brought up in a different place, which is the one they remember as their place of origin and duly record it as such in the census. A further problem is that the information about a household was normally provided to the census enumerator by the head of household—and heads of household varied in the conscientiousness with which they elicited information from each person in the household. In cases where a person was born outside the country, only the country of origin is given (not the location within the country). Hence, for example, there many people in the English census whose place of birth is given simply as "Scotland".
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