1901 Census
Genealogy - not, perhaps, best known for its thrills and spills - has occasionally made the headlines over the years. Not so long ago, television news featured the story of how the General Register Office website was assaulted by twenty million hits per day when it was announced that the long-awaited 1901 census for England and Wales was available - at a price - online.
The Scottish equivalent is also online, but for those who do not wish to pay to use the service, or who do not have a computer, there is an alternative. The local studies section of the AK Bell Library has the 1901 census on microfilm for the whole of Perthshire and Kinross-shire and access is free to anyone living in the area. There is high demand for this however, so instead of taking a chance, phone the section on 01738 477062 and reserve a microfilm reader.
Everyone - or almost everyone - living in the two counties on the night of 31st March 1901, whether they were at home, in prison, or sleeping in the open air, was listed, a grand total for the two counties of 130,264 names. This figure isn't far away from the mid-year 1999 estimate of 134,030 for Perth and Kinross. "Perthshire" at that time, however, included places like Callander, Dunblane and Killin. Some notable people - or destined so to be - can be found, including the two-year old toddler
Willie Soutar, later to become one of the greatest of twentieth century Scottish poets, and John, Duke of Atholl, who boasted not only 15 servants but also a total of 94 windowed rooms at Blair Castle.
The actual statistics derived from the enumeration were published in 1902, and here you can read that the greatest number of imbeciles in proportion to the rest of the population were found in Shetland and - sorry, folks, - Kinross-shire. 0.37% of Kinross-shire residents in fact. There was a huge increase, between 1891 and 1901, in the number of foreigners living in Scotland, with Russians making up almost half the total figure, and Italians and Germans coming a poor second and third respectively. In Perthshire there were approximately 0.1% of foreigners, mostly Germans and Italians, with a few Americans.
Although censuses have been taken regularly every ten years since 1801 (with the exception of 1941) it was only in 1841 that individual names were recorded for the first time. The census returns from 1841 to 1901, for Perthshire and Kinross-shire, are all available for consultation in the local studies section. Together with them are the old parish registers for the same area, some going back to the sixteenth century, and various indexes, some computerised, which make the task of tracing a family tree much easier.
The library caters primarily for those with local ancestry, but it also holds other useful sources which cover a wider area. For example, the International Genealogical Index, commonly known as the IGI, is basically a county-by-county index to the old parish registers which provides basic information about births, christenings and marriages up to 1875. In its computerised form the whole of the UK and beyond can be searched for, say, an elusive marriage in a matter of minutes. The 1881 census on compact disc also covers the whole country.
Family history is far more than mere dates. The local studies section can help you to flesh out the bare bones by providing the researcher with old and new maps of particular areas of interest, with old photographs, with birth and death announcements from newspapers as far back as 1809, and with town, village and parish histories.
Staff are always happy to help people starting out on their genealogical quest, or to offer tips and advice to those who are a little more experienced. Be warned, though - family history is compulsive and patches for addicts haven't been invented yet!!
Any queries on this, or on any of the many other aspects of local history can be directed to the local studies section. Their phone number is 01738-477062. The section can be emailed on
localstudies@pkc.gov.uk. Alternatively you can visit the section, whose panoramic windows feature one of the best views of Perth!
