This is a local and family history project where you are invited to write stories about localities, properties, institutions, and businesses etc.  The National Archives is in the process of converting about 300 binders of street indexes to the censuses of England and Wales for 1841-1891 to create an online finding aid and local history resource.

Currently the street indexes to the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1891 censuses are uploaded onto Your Archives.

• Historically the only way to find people in the censuses was by knowing an address where someone lived. If they lived in a small village it wasn’t too difficult to browse all the pages for that village to find the people you were interested in. However, in larger towns especially as populations moved into urban areas many parishes grew rapidly in size making browsing difficult, also populations in urban areas moved quite regularly as their situtation changed with better or worse jobs or change in family sizes. Some towns grew rapidly in size meaning that streets were lengthened, changed, abolished, renamed etc. To help researchers street indexes were produced for towns and areas with populations of more than 40,000 people.
• Although, all of the English and Welsh censuses are now digitised and indexed by person’s name, it is not possible to search some censuses by address. At the moment only the 1881, 1901 and 1911 censuses allow address searches.
• Why would people want to find addresses? They may be wanting to make a study of a property or area. They may be looking for a family known to be at a particular address but can’t find them in searches.
• By uploading into ‘Your Archives’ rather than producing online wordprocessed or pdf documents we are making the street indexes fully searchable and using the flexibility and functionality of Your Archives to enable you to write stories of places, streets, buildings, businesses and institutions and to create cross-references and links to articles in Your Archives and to external resources.

http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=Your_Archives:Historical_Streets_Project

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