Electonic resources for local population studies: a vision of Britain through time: making sense of 200 years of census reports

Conventionally assembling a time-series of population statistics for a particular parish from published census reports to compile a graph such as Figure 1 can be a tedious business. Complete runs of census and vital registration reports are rare, and most local population researchers will have long journeys to the copyright and academic libraries which hold such sets. Once located the volumes are vast, and simply finding the relevant tables in each of a series of reports can take hours. Statistical reporting units have changed greatly over time, so which nineteenth-century Registration District or sub-District, or which post-1911 Local Government District, covered the parish of interest has to be worked out, which can be very difficult when the necessary maps are even harder to find than the statistical reports. When eventually located, the data then have to be entered into a spreadsheet in order to create the desired graph or graphs. Mapping the data is probably impossible without boundary information.