Looking beyond the census returns to explore the lives and personalities of the people who created them

A History of the Census Takers: Recording the Nations by Mish J Holman (Pen & Sword, 2026)

A History of the Census Takers explores a fascinating aspect of census history that has received surprisingly little attention: the enumerators themselves. We are familiar with the census as one of the most useful sources for family historians, and there are plenty of books examining these records. This book, however, gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse, exploring how those records were created and the individual lives and personalities of the people responsible for them.

I particularly enjoyed the way Holman breaks up the text with contemporary quotations, newspaper reports and examples of social history. It makes the book easy to read and adds colour and context, making the book accessible to all – not just committed genealogists. The detailed research into individual enumerators is especially interesting.

This is a remarkably thorough piece of work and a valuable addition to the literature on the records we use in family history. It offers a different perspective on a familiar source and will give family historians (and others) a greater appreciation of the people behind the census returns we spend so much time searching.

Interview with Mish J Holman

What was your background before writing this book?
I originally wanted to be a make-up artist for film and TV, but I didn’t make the grade when I was interviewed at art college. By this time (A-levels), I had already begun working on my family tree and had taken a part-time job as a Saturday assistant at the local library. Without anything better on the horizon I was able to get a full-time job for the same library after A-levels and stayed a number of years trying to decide if I wanted a career in libraries. I gained a lot of preparatory experience for my current profession; after all, there was always a book about genealogy on the return trolley or a question asked about the discipline while I was on duty as a reference librarian. I later took on a role as music cataloguer, a position that required meticulous attention to detail and provided another set of skills that I could transition to my current occupation.

It was while working in the library stacks, a behind the scenes world of wonder the public rarely sees, that I stumbled across an enormous volume of material belonging to the Merchant Taylors’ Company. By this time I recognised the genealogical value of such material, and for an instant I imagined myself swanning around libraries and record offices as a profession. This vision, together with chronic illness, made me decide to cut my library employment to part-time, so I could spend time on developing myself as a professional genealogist. When I look back on it, I was quite poor in those days. We think we know a lot, but in fact we know very little. I’m glad I took steps to educate myself and I later completed the University of Strathclyde’s post-graduate certificate.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of my genealogy business, Family History Gifts. I eventually gave up library work to concentrate on it and being a professional genealogist. It’s not been easy, it’s now a very competitive market. One needs to know what genealogists need in the digital age – it’s very different from thirty years ago. One-to-one coaching has helped in that respect; clients used to hitting the Hints link now require methodology help, and other clients don’t want dull reports; they want stories. In my opinion, the way genealogists are taught to write reports is very poor.

Your book explores an area of family history that hasn’t received much attention. What inspired you to move beyond the more familiar or popular themes and focus on this subject?
After having researched hundreds of families and chased them across censuses, I started to ponder the details of the process. What really intrigued me was what did the householder think when the enumerator knocked on their door to explain the purpose of the census? How did they perceive government officials? Was it as a threat? Or as someone trying to help them? Were they indifferent? When they realised they had to give up information about themselves, how did they feel about the intrusion? Intrusion came up quite a bit in discussions at parliamentary level for Potter’s Bill etc., and later with census refusals. So it must have been a big deal. We know that 18th century ideas of personal liberty bled into the 19th century, and by the end of the century notions of health visitors were met with resentment and accusations of a nannying state. With the census, it seemed that people could only be assuaged with the assurance of confidentiality. With that in mind and with such a penetrating focus on their backgrounds and private life, the question was were their answers determined by how much they wanted to give away about themselves. How truthful were they or were they just confused by the whole process? The book reveals that domestic servants and labourers were often reluctant to give information that might threaten their employment.

Of course the book is also about the enumerators themselves and what they endured for the sake of their duty. I thought it was time to see them as human beings and not grey faceless officials, who across the decades have often been accused of incompetence and ignorance. I wanted to know who they were and what were their motives for taking on the role. Did they bring with them their own biases (of course they did) and what did they think of the job when it was all over? In the end, I came to the conclusion the public saw them as both a threat and someone who was trying to help them. Some householders were glad the government took notice of them.

During your research, did you come across a particularly memorable story or discovery—something that surprised or even shocked you?
Yes many. The highlights of which were householders not knowing the official names of their nearest and dearest. Husbands not knowing wives’ names and vice versa arose a number of times in the reports. There was the odd case of parents not remembering their children’s names – which I suppose suggests nicknames were widely used – and having to refer to the family bible for help. But how widespread this was, we can only guess.

Elsewhere, and I believe this was more common, there were families who sent a child or children to another family member because they thought the schedule was too small. Now for those of us who have seen the size of the original schedules, there seems to be plenty of room even for large families. The householder could also ask for an extra schedule too if the family unit was massive. So it wasn’t until I read reports of how householders filled in the schedule that the penny dropped that something else was happening. Enumerators reported they were given schedules either filled in with massive handwriting written across all columns paying no attention to the column/row format, or in tiny writing filling the entire page giving the life stories of all the household. It seems many householders thought they should provide as much information as possible, often for fear of not providing the required information. Therefore my theory is they appraised the schedule as being too small for their family information and sent their child off to auntie or granddad. It’s such a shame that enumerators had to filter out so much useful information for genealogists, but that wasn’t the purpose of the census.

What are your future plans? Can we expect more books from you?
It got to a point while writing the book that the word count grew to 120,000 and it was way above the limit, so it was agreed with the publisher that I should chop Ireland. Sorry Ireland. The good news is I have a quarter of a book written about the Ireland censuses and its processes. Judging by what I’ve written and researched so far it will be a different book; this is mainly due to the fact that the Irish enumerators left few accounts, so my sources will be different.

I also have a contract for a book of dates for genealogists. I so wanted a handy guide to the most important dates for practical research when I started my research in the 1980s and it’s been on my mind since. I started the project many years ago in a spreadsheet, so it’s there, burgeoning in my consciousness. I need it because I still can’t remember the date of the 1881 Census.

The other ideas I have are a theatrical biography and a book about genealogical methodology. There are a number of very good books on the subject, but none seem to cover the aspects and angles of advanced problem solving. I’ve had to develop so many strategies over the years, they’re worth sharing.

Mish J. Holman has been a professional genealogist for more than thirty years. She is the founder and Principal Genealogist of Family History Gifts. She trained as a reference librarian and music cataloguer, and has a particular interest in theatrical personalities and British social history.

Ancestoring: Understanding Records, Family, and Ourselves by Darcie Hind Posz (Genealogical Publishing Company, 2026)

In 1926, Carl Jung concluded a lecture to a literary society in Augsburg with the claim that the archetypes buried in our collective unconscious carry ‘the deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience,’ which genealogist Hank Jones later interpreted in Psychic Roots as meaning that ‘we inherit the wisdom of the experience of our ancestors without ourselves having personal experience.’ This is one of many thought-provoking influences and references that appear in this exciting new book from accomplished US genealogist and writer Darcie Hind Posz. Its eighteen chapters are alive with ideas and inspiration. I found it fascinating and have found myself returning repeatedly, pondering how I can apply the thoughts and examples to my own family history. Completely different from many of the genealogy books out there, Ancestoring brings influences from the current memoir or ancestral self-discovery vein, which has prevailed in publishing in recent years. 

In her preface, Hind Posz defines Ancestoring as, ‘The observation and collection of methodologies, theories, and solutions to everyday items as related to genealogy.’ The entire book involves fresh ideas and inspires the reader to look anew at their own family tree and the assumptions they’ve made about their ancestors. From its title to the use of examples (the section on source analysis, in particular, is revelatory) and quotations from a wide range of genealogical papers, this is something original and illuminating. 

The book’s dedication quotes from William B Saxbe, Jr., who refers to ‘thoughtful genealogists’. That appears to be the target audience here. If you consider yourself a ‘thoughtful genealogist’, then, without doubt, this is the book for you.

Interview with Darcie Hind Posz, CG®, FASG

What was your background before writing this book? 

I have been working in libraries and as a genealogist for twenty years. I have been a verifying genealogist for several lineage societies. I have worked as an editor for a publication. I have volunteered. When I was not doing that, I was finding time to write, which I enjoy. 

I hadn’t heard the term “Ancestoring” before this. How did you come up with the title of the book? 

At first, I wanted a field guide or something like a field guide for all of these methods that I had used over the years that worked for me. I liked ancestoring to describe it because it was not strict, but a bit whimsical and in that grey area. I had the idea in 2017 originally to use pictures to describe how I visualized solving genealogical problems I carried with me, and I had begun to collect notebooks full of doodles. During the pandemic, I came back to the notebooks because I was running out of projects. It kept getting bigger, so I made myself commit to finding a publisher open to a book that is hard to describe. 

This is your fourth book. How does it differ from your previous titles? 

This book is different because I feel like I got to keep my voice in it. When you write a genealogy, you are an observer of a family; your tone is kept in check with the documents formulating the narrative. When you write about a region, again, you are kept in check by the resources you are discussing. Both are pointing the reader to resources and then a family narrative to evaluate and observe. But getting to the part where you have a final family narrative to publish or distribute is not that simple. There are rabbit holes, diatribes, blind alleys, and other things (like losing an entire line in the pedigree), where they have no room in the final product. I wanted to show that and work in progress because what didn’t work for my genealogical problem may work for someone else’s. 

In Part Two (Understanding Families), you write: “Rather than judging our subjects, which will likely flatline the part of our brain we use to understand them, observe and evaluate their actions.” This approach strongly resonates with my own work in personal family history research, as well as what I encourage in my clients. Do you think genealogists are shifting in how they approach their ancestors (e.g. those considered “black sheep”) compared to how family history was typically handled in the recent past? 

I hope they are. It is hard. It would be nice to have deeper conversations about topics like this. It is easy to judge swiftly when an ancestor does something and to label it. But we need to think of those we study not as something like a document. As their lifetime progressed, they shifted and changed. Think about how you have done things during your life. Maybe you did something that seemed like a good idea at the time, and now you regret it. We all do it. Those we study in genealogy did the same. That is why I liked to frame it as withholding judgment, so that you do not know yet if they are the good or bad person in the story. Just watch longer. 

In Part Three (Understanding Ourselves), you touch on genetic genealogy, writing that, “DNA will overturn many previously proven or established pedigrees.” What is the most powerful discovery you have made through DNA research? 

I was sure of my lineage until DNA overturned it, and although DNA is this wonderful evidence available now, just like documentation, we will have to wait as more of it becomes available by waiting for more people to take DNA tests and providing a larger pool for those of certain ethnicities. I will spend the rest of my life combing through match lists to see if there is a hint of that line! Since it will be a lifelong process, I will need to keep up-to-date on the technology and methods for it. 

What are your future plans? Can we expect more books from you?  

More books, of course! 🙂

Darcie Hind Posz, CG®, FASG, is an author, genealogist, and researcher, and has been a board-certified genealogist since 2013. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. Darcie Hind Posz is an author, genealogist and researcher. Posz authored three other books: Chicago Stones: A Genealogy of Acquisition, Influence & Scandal; Recast: Vital Events Published in Variety in 1918 and 1919; and Research in Hawaii, part of the National Genealogical Society’s Research in the State series, was published in 2024. Her extensive bibliography can be found at her website, darciehindposz.com. 

Genealogy Methods and Techniques: A Practical Guide to Research by Dr Karen Cummings (Crowood Press, 2026)

At the turn of the millennium, I regularly trekked to the Family Records Centre in Islington to pore over census microfilms and wrestle hefty GRO index books from awkward shelves. This Christmas, at a party in Scotland, a conversation about family history led me to pull up the same information on my smartphone in seconds.

That contrast says it all. Genealogy has changed dramatically, and this book reflects that shift. It offers a clear guide to modern research methods for both beginners and more experienced family historians.

While fully aware of technological advancements, Karen is careful to emphasise the importance of offline methodology. She encourages readers to think critically about which sources might answer their research questions before “jumping onto the internet.”

The chapters cover a comprehensive range of topics, including: laying and checking the foundations; getting organised; evaluating evidence; writing effectively; developing good search techniques; research planning; pulling it all together; genealogy standards and problem-solving; DNA testing; and reflections on where the field stands today.

Overall, this book deserves a place on every beginner’s shelf and is strongly recommended for serious or professional genealogists aiming to work at a high level, particularly when it comes to organisation and methodological rigour.

Interview with Dr Karen Cummings

What was your background before writing this book?

What inspired you to write Genealogy Methods and Techniques?

Who did you write this book for?

What do you hope readers will do differently in their research after reading the book?

What are your future plans? 

Dr Karen Cummings is a qualified and accredited professional genealogist and tutor, with many years of family history research experience. She is the owner of Pharos Tutors, the UK’s leading provider of online family history courses, and is a long-standing Member of the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA), where she has served on both the Council and the Board of Assessors. Formerly a registered pharmacist, Karen brings a scientific background to her specialist areas of genealogical research methodology and the use of DNA testing in family history.

Too Tall Tilly by Melissa Beardall (Hazy May Books, 2025)

Melissa Beardall has produced her latest children’s book, Too Tall Tilly, with her mother, Rebecca Nichols and illustrator Emma Valenghi. The story focuses on a young girl nicknamed Tilly who feels self-conscious about being the tallest in her class. She daydreams of becoming someone else entirely, until her parents share a treasured book of old family photographs that helps her see the beauty in her own identity and heritage. 

I have long enjoyed children’s books, and I found this to be an engaging, detailed story with lovely illustrations. I liked the way the parents and community were always so accepting of Tilly, whatever she wanted to do (or be). With its overall message of self-acceptance, the book gently encourages the idea that exploring family history—through photos and stories of ancestors—can help children feel more connected and confident (a topic of great interest to me and something I’ve spoken on previously). For parents, grandparents, or other relatives keen on family history, it offers a subtle, enjoyable way to spark a child’s curiosity about their roots, perhaps over a festive read-together at Christmas. This charming tale would suit any family hoping to gently introduce young ones to the joys of genealogy.