It was over 10 years ago that I first discovered that I had the good fortune to have a HAWORTH ancestor who was born in Oswaldtwistle, and it was while trying to research him that I also discovered just how many other people in the area were also called HAWORTH and how easy it was to get them all confused. Especially as the pool of Christian names was so small at the time!
In those days, searching the censuses was a lengthy process; few indexes meant reading page after page until a possible relation was found. Also the films of the census had to be hired in for a few weeks to my local LDS Family Centre, so I decided that as I could not easily return to the data, I would just write down every instance of the name just in case I needed the data later.
That census data was the starting point of the website and when I started looking and transcribing church records as well, I felt that it was a shame to keep it all to myself. I gradually began to build up a picture of who all these people were and just who was related to who. I was then able to group all the HAWORTHs into families. The advent of online resources speeded up the process considerably.
I gave everyone called HAWORTH who lived in Church or Oswaldtwistle on a census night a unique code number to enable me to track them across the censuses. Their family also has a unique number. The raw census data is held on an Microsoft ACCESS database and the family trees are held in FAMILY HISTORIAN (previously I used GENERATIONS)
As well as census films and microfiche, resources used include the LDS 1881 census disks, The LDS BVRI, the 'old' LDS IGI and the 'new' Familysearch site, Ancestry, Findmypast, BMDregisters, FreeBMD, LancsBMD, LAN-OPC and 19th Century newspapers. I have used Church and Chapel Registers from Oswaldtwistle, Knuzden, Green Haworth and Accrington held at the LRO at Preston, Accrington Library and , in the case of Mount Pleasant, at the Church itself.
Personal assistance has come from all sides - many contacts have come through the LANCSGEN mailling list, but they include those who have seen the website and contributed additional information, those who have done lookups and also, of course, members of my own extended family - known and previously unknown. And that includes someone who turned out to be connected not only to me but to my husband as well! Such are the coincidences of Family History.
These extracts contains transcription of the census data for any person called HAWORTH(or variants). Naturally, other surnames have crept in by being in the same household and also because I was looking up data for others.
All the original data is Crown Copyright.
- 1841 PRO Reference HO107/507/14 and HO107/509/19-22
- 1851: PRO Reference HO 107/2260
- 1861: PRO Reference RG9/3106-7
- 1871: PRO Reference RG10/4184-6
- 1881: PRO Reference RG11/4200-2
- 1891: PRO Reference RG12/3409-11
- 1901: PRO Reference RG13/3917-19
- 1911: PRO Reference RG14 PN25121-25137
- 1921: Data to be released by PRO in 2022
- 1939: PRO Reference RG101 4719E-4719J (Church) and RG101 4851E-4853B (Oswaldtwistle)
Using the census data
Once a person has been located on a census extract they can be tracked across all their census appearances by clicking on their reference number. This may also give further factual information about them.
My Family
Members of my own particular branch of the HAWORTH clan have led quite interesting lives and their story can be found at 'My Family'. In the census extracts they are Family 18
Disclaimers
Where I claim to have included every reference to a certain surname please consider that I may be in error. As anyone who has 'done' a census will know, it's easy to miss people out and also to be unable to read the ennumerator's handwriting! It must also be remembered that some people avoided the ennumerator, that the ennumerators misunderstood what they were told or were even deliberately misled and that some of their spellings were very quirky indeed!
In the case of the 1841 census ages of those over 20 were supposed to be rounded down to the nearest 5 years. However, many ennumerators didn't bother or rounded up instead.
As for birthplace data - that can vary. Sometimes the question may not have been "Where were you born?" but "Where do you come from?" which can lead to an incorrect answer.
So it should come as no surprise that ages are not consistent, Christian and Surnames change and even birthplaces vary from census to census!
If you have a problem with the site or any comments please email me at family.history@bathgatehall.co.uk or if you would like to make contact with other people researching in Oswaldtwistle or Church then please do make an entry in the guestbook.