Census
Part of the history of quarrying is the history of those who have worked in the industry. Unless you are particularly fortunate, you are unlikely to find many items relating to employees among surviving company records. By far the best source, and one of the most important for family history generally, is the census. It can be used to give the numbers of quarry workers in a particular place at a specific date, so giving some idea of the importance of quarrying in the local economy, and it also identifies the houses in which they lived.
A census of the UK has been taken every ten years since 1801, with the exception of 1941. From 1841 onwards, the original returns (the enumerators’ returns) list the members of every inhabited house, and give their age, relationship to head of household, occupation and (from 1851) place of birth. The records are not made public until they are 100 years old, so the last available at present are the returns for 1891. Those for 1901 will be made available in January 2002. The returns for England and Wales will be available in digitised form on the Internet from that date.
Only microfilm or microfiche copies of the original returns from 1841 to 1891 may be consulted. Those for the whole of England and Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are available on microfilm at the Public Record Office’s Family Records Centre in Myddelton Street, London. Most local record offices or libraries have copies on microfilm or fiche for their own area. Scottish census returns are held by the Registrar General for Scotland at New Register House, Edinburgh. Census returns for the whole of Ireland are held by the National Archives, Four Courts, Dublin. Few of the nineteenth-century Irish returns have survived, but those for 1901 and 1911 are fairly complete, and are open for public inspection.
The Public Record Office has a number of leaflets on the census available on its website.