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Re: What if...

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On 05/05/2020 20:22, J. Hugh Sullivan wrote:
> ...a man appears on consecutive censuses in the same county, but not
> on a third, do you normally record that he died during the period or
> not if you can't locate him? 

No, I wouldn't recording him as having died.  Unless the man is very 
old, there are lots of other very plausible explanations.  I'm guessing 
you haven't personally looked at every entry in the following census, so 
perhaps he is there but has been indexed incorrectly by whichever site 
you use to access the census.  Or perhaps he is present but his details 
have been written down incorrectly.  Maybe the census taker misheard the 
surname or simply got distracted and wrote down entirely the wrong word. 
  I once encountered a census entry where I'm fairly sure the man's 
occupation got written down as his surname.  (It was something like 
'baker', so at least plausible.)

Maybe the man was out of the county visiting friends or relatives, or 
travelling for employment.  That's particularly likely with certain jobs 
such as mariners, but itinerant labourers with no financial tie to an 
area often travelled surprising distances for work too.  It's also 
possible the man was in the county but not at home.  Certainly in the 
UK, he should be listed wherever he spent the night, but if it was a 
warm night and the man had not made it to his intended destination or 
was short on funds, he may have slept rough, perhaps in a barn, with or 
without the owner's permission.  I wouldn't then expect him to be 
recorded.  Or if he were caught out in a remote area, perhaps in bad 
weather, a local resident may have taken pity on him and allowed him to 
stay the night.  They may well not have known more than just his given 
name and have made something up for the census taker, or just ignored him.

Finally, it may be that he actively didn't want to be recorded.  Perhaps 
he was somewhere he shouldn't have been.  Maybe he was with a prostitute 
or another man's wife.  Maybe he was out committing a crime, or trying 
to evade detection for a previous crime.  Maybe he was trying to stay 
out of sight of some aspect of the government, perhaps because he owed 
money.  Maybe he has paranoid about what the government were going to do 
with the information.

Obviously some of these are more likely than others, but in my 
experience it's not uncommon for someone to go missing from a census for 
a decade or two and then reappear, with no clear explanation for their 
absence.  I can't find one set of my great grandparents on the 1891 or 
1901 census for example.  I now know that he was in the army stationed 
in the Bengal Presidency in 1891 and was fighting in the Boer War in 
1901, but I have no idea where his wife-to-be was.

Richard

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What if... Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan) - 2020-05-05 19:22 +0000
  Re: What if... Dennis <nobody@nowhere.invalid> - 2020-05-05 15:57 -0400
  Re: What if... Denis Beauregard <denis.b-at-francogene.com@fr.invalid> - 2020-05-05 18:55 -0400
  Re: What if... Ian Goddard <ianng@austonley.org.uk> - 2020-05-06 12:41 +0100
  Re: What if... Richard Smith <richard@ex-parrot.com> - 2020-05-06 13:21 +0100
  Re: What if... dangnearhere@juno.com - 2020-07-12 19:55 -0700

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