This computerised transcription of the census enumerators' books for the 1881 Census for England, Scotland and Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man is a by-product of a project to create a microfiche index of the population of Great Britain for genealogists. Covering the entire enumerated population of England, Scotland and Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man in 1881, it is the largest collection of historical source material to be made available in computerised form. The data consists of the name, address, relationship to the head of household, marital status, age, occupation and birthplace of some 26 million individuals, together with information about disabilities.
In 1999 the Genealogical Society of Utah published a version of this computerised transcription as a CD-ROM product suitable for genealogical research (Genealogical Society of Utah (1999) 1881 British census and national index. [25 CDs]. Salt Lake City, Utah: GSU). This study is an enriched version of these data. The sample is a 5 per cent random sample of the parishes of Great Britain. The sample was chosen in the simplest manner possible. A list of all the parishes in England, Wales, Scotland and the Islands in the British Seas was created; using a random number generator in Microsoft Excel, a random number between zero and one was allocated to each parish. All those less than or equal to 0.05 were selected for the sample. The records relating to the individuals in each of these parishes were then extracted from the data and combined in a database.

Tables B1 and B3 in Appendix B of the documentation list the 716 parishes in the sample.

This Special Licence access dataset contains names and addresses from the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) dataset of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911. These data are made available under Special Licence (SL) access conditions due to commercial sensitivity.

The anonymised main I-CeM database that complements these names and addresses is available under SN 7481. It comprises the Censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851-1911; data are available for England and Wales for 1851-1861 and 1881-1911 (1871 is not currently available for England and Wales) and for Scotland for 1851-1901 (1911 is not currently available for Scotland). The database contains over 180 million individual census records and was digitised and harmonised from the original census enumeration books. It details characteristics for all individuals resident in Great Britain at each of the included Censuses. The original digital data has been coded and standardised; the I-CeM database has consistent geography over time and standardised coding schemes for many census variables.

This dataset of names and addresses for individual census records is organised per country (England and Wales; Scotland) and per census year. Within each data file each census record contains first and last name, street address and an individual identification code (RecID) that allows linking with the corresponding anonymised I-CeM record. The data cannot be used for true linking of individual census records across census years for commercial genealogy purposes nor for any other commercial purposes. The SL arrangements are required to ensure that commercial sensitivity is protected. For information on making an application, see the Access section.

The data were updated in February 2020, with some files redeposited with longer field length limits. Users should note that some name and address fields are truncated due to the limits set by the LDS project that transcribed the original data. No more than 10,000 records out of some 210 million across the study should be affected. Examples include:

• England and Wales:
  • 1851 - truncated at the 24th character (maximum I-CeM field length 95 characters)
  • 1881 - truncated at the 16th character (maximum I-CeM field length 50 characters).
• Scotland: for 1851‐71, truncations affect less than 0.01% of all addresses and for 1851 around 1% at most
  • 1851 - truncated at the 70th character
  • 1861 - truncated at the 76th character
  • 1871 - truncated at the 82th character
  • 1881 - truncated at the 50th character.

Further information about I-CeM can be found on the I-CeM Integrated Microdata Project and I-CeM Guide webpages.

This database gives the coded directors and their companies as listed in the Directory of Directors for years 1882, 1892, 1902, 1912 (judged the most relevant for the census years) and also codes those linked to census records 1881-1911 for which their full census record is available in BBCE and linked to I-CeM. Record linkage match between DoD and censuses was 36% for 18,200 directors; but the database gives all DOD directors coded to business sectors, locations, and roles they played in each company.