1911 Scottish census released

The 1911 Scottish census has now been released into the public domain, providing a picture of the country before the seismic shift of the First World War.

Peter Scrimgeour, the 2011 Census director, describes how the century-old records show a very different country: “Many people would have been born, lived and died in the same locality. Nowadays, when we ask people where they were 10 years ago, we find a lot of people have moved.”

In 1911 the majority of men carried out physical jobs, such as metal manufacturing, agriculture and coal mining. Women in employment mostly worked as domestic servants, textile manufacturers or dressmakers.

The Scottish population had increased since 1901 by six per cent to 4.76 million in 1911, compared to an estimated 5.15 million today. In contrast, the population of England and Wales, recorded as being around 36 million a hundred years ago, had shot up to just over 52 million in the 2001 Census.

Records show that Russians constituted the largest number of foreign nationals, followed by Poles, Italians, Germans and Americans. Jo Graham, genealogist and owner of the Edinburgh-based Our Scots Genealogy Research, told The Journal how several new questions had been added in 1911:  "Whether people were working at home was a new category, as was the question about which industry they worked in. This gives us more details about our ancestors’ working lives.

“This Census additionally requested information from women about how long they had been married, how many children they had given birth to, and how many of those children were alive on 2 April 1911, and so has been dubbed the ‘Fertility Census’.

“It’s very exciting for genealogists to have access to this new ‘old’ information which can tell us so much about how our ancestors lived.”

She also described how a party had been held at the Scotland's People Centre on 5 April, with staff dressed in period costume and a celebratory cake, shaped as a Census Enumeration book.

The findings from the 1911 English and Welsh Census were published online on the National Archive in 2009, but privacy laws demanded that the Scottish data be kept under wraps for a full century. Information can now be obtained on a pay-per-view basis by visiting the Scotland's People website.