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WHITEPARISH DATA FROM THE 1841 CENSUS
We hope that the information accessible from this page may be useful to villagers and others interested in the people living in our village in 1841. The source data came from the North Wiltshire Online Census Project (NWOCP)—1841, who transcribed the census results into computer-displayable form. (If you want to do any cross-checking, their work for Whiteparish and some other villages can be seen at this link.) NWOCP are part of the thoroughly worthwhile nationwide Free Census project (FreeCEN).
We have rearranged NWOCP's Whiteparish work into a small database which you can view in a convenient format. This rearrangement was fairly straightforward and hopefully won't have introduced any errors—but if you find any, please let us know.
Use the following menu to view the census information in several different (hopefully self-explanatory) ways.
Census Data Menu
- List heads of household alphabetically
- List all people then living in Whiteparish, alphabetically
- List all people then living in Whiteparish, in the same order as on the source material
Some Abbreviations
The following list doesn't cover all the abbreviations used in the 1841 Whiteparish census, but it should help. It's not difficult to work out (or at least guess at) what most of the others stand for.
- Ag. Lab.
- Agricultural Labourer
- Ap.
- Apprentice
- Army
- Members of HM land forces of whatever rank
- Cl.
- Clerk
- F.S.
- Female Servant
- H.P.
- Members of HM armed forces on half-pay
- Ind.
- Independent - people living on their own means
- J.
- Journeyman
- M.
- Manufacturer
- m.
- Maker - as in ‘Shoe m.’
- M.S.
- Male Servant
- Navy
- Members of HM naval forces, including marines, of whatever rank
- P.
- Pensioner in HM armed forces
- Rail. Lab.
- Railway Labourer
- Serv.
- Servant
- Sh.
- Shopman
One or Two Facts
Total population at the time of the census: 1277
Oldest resident: Elizabeth Heath, who apparently lived alone at the age of 104
Youngest resident: Miss Mary Chalk, at just two weeks (rounded up to one month in the database)
Average age: 24.39
Most numerous surname: Chalk (59 of 'em).
Relationship of 1841 Census and 1842 Tithe Map
Many of the same names occur in both the original census data and the original 1842 tithe map data. Hardly surprising when they were produced within such a short time of each other. So when we were adapting the data it was tempting to try to cross-link names in the census to names in the tithe map data. However, we decided against this, because it would have involved making assumptions about those links, and we didn't want to take the risk of any wrong assumptions resulting in wrong or misleading information. Readers will have to make connections between the two sets of data for themselves!