Abstract
The release of national, individual-level census data for Scotland, via the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project undertaken at the University of Essex, makes it possible to identify the number of Scotland’s residents by their county and parish of birth on each census night from 1851 to 1901. This chapter uses the anonymous I-CeM data for 1871, alongside individual, nominal census data from the 1881 census of Scotland, and details from the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths on the Isle of Skye to ‘follow’ all individuals born on the island during the 1860s and 1870s to their entries in the 1881 census. This allows the number of migrants to be gauged, and those moving within their home country to be distinguished from those who emigrated. During the linkage process a number of biases became evident, and the implications of these for record linkage and demographic history are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
This work has been funded by a number of research awards: ‘Determining the demography of Victorian Scotland through record linkage’ ESRC award RES-000-23-0128; ‘Doctors, Deaths, Diagnoses and Data: a comparative study of the medical certification of cause of death in nineteenth century Scotland’ Wellcome Trust award (Ref 082200/Z/07/Z); Scottish Health Informatics Programme (SHIP) grant (Ref WT086113).
- 2.
Special permission to access the civil register data was granted by the General Register Office for Scotland (now National Records of Scotland) with conditions attached.
- 3.
The parish of Portree included the population of Raasay, a neighbouring island.
- 4.
The I-CeM data can be accessed via the UK Data Archive at http://icem.data-archive.ac.uk http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/icem. Documentation detailing the dataset and the access arrangements can be found at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/research/ICeM/documentation.html. Other census years and censuses for England and Wales are also available.
- 5.
This was done using the online Nesstar system (see http://icem-nesstar.data-archive.ac.uk/). Had we downloaded the individual records from I-CeM, it might have been possible to identify the names of the individuals from the images held by FindMyPast , I-CeM’s commercial partner, but this was deemed too expensive and time consuming for an exploratory project.
- 6.
This dataset is available to the research community via the UK Data Archive (dataset SN 4178). We also made use of the CD Rom version created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (1999).
- 7.
Some Scottish-born individuals in England and Wales nevertheless gave more detailed birthplaces. We have not used these in the current study as they are too few and are probably unrepresentative.
- 8.
The great majority of illegitimate children took their father’s surname if their parents subsequently married, but some seem to have adopted their father’s surname without a marriage taking place.
- 9.
There were 624 individuals aged 0–19 on Skye in 1881 who reported that they had not been born on the island. Of these 167 had been born elsewhere in Inverness-shire, and 90 in neighbouring Ross-shire. A further 112 had been born in Lanarkshire, the vast majority in Glasgow.
- 10.
Those both born and enumerated on Skye were corrected for errors in age and birthplace. It is likely that similar errors occurred among those enumerated elsewhere, but the tables show that these errors largely cancelled out so are unlikely to lead to significant bias. There were, of course, children enumerated on Skye who were ‘not Skye born’. These do not form part of the analysis although they are shown in the tables for completeness.
- 11.
Further work is required before the degree of overestimation of mortality amongst migrants which arises from our assumption of parity with ‘stayers’ can be gauged.
- 12.
Almost all of these children died very young, and although they could be linked to a death certificate, no name or sex was given there either.
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Garrett, E., Reid, A. (2015). Introducing ‘Movers’ into Community Reconstructions: Linking Civil Registers of Vital Events to Local and National Census Data: A Scottish Experiment. In: Bloothooft, G., Christen, P., Mandemakers, K., Schraagen, M. (eds) Population Reconstruction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19884-2_13
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