The Steer Family History Project
1851 England and Wales Census Project
1901 England and Wales Census Project
GRO Birth, Marriage & Death (BMD) Indexes Project
Record Reconciliation Project

The Steer Family History Project aims to assist people researching their Steer ancestors by making relevant historical records available and by identifying the individuals in those records.

There are lots of records available to us as family historians, gathering information from a collection of records and presenting that on this web site constitutes a project. In these early days the projects will concentrate on making the most likely used record available.

The record collections can be used for other projects, they can be reconciled with each other to identify where the same person appears in each of the records. When there is sufficient information available then distributions and migrations of Steer families can be studied.

The incentive for this project is to have a 'snapshot' across the country of all the people with the Steer name who were alive at a particular time. The requirements are that the surviving records cover the country and that every individual should be included. The snapshot should be the earliest feasible one to maximise the chances of catching migrant families before they left.

It is intended to do snapshot projects for other countries.

A national census is the type of record that fulfils the requirements for such a snapshot, for England there is a choice between the 1841 and 1851 censuses both of which also covered Wales. The 1841 census would list those who emigrated in the following ten years but has the disadvantage of having fewer districts that have been surnamed indexed. Census surname indexes, mostly compiled by family history societies, make the snapshot project possible and the 1851 census has mostly been indexed. The 1851 census has the further advantages that people's places of birth are given, family relationships are shown and adult ages are recorded more accurately than in 1841.

It is known that some 1851 census records have not survived or have become unreadable, there are also documented cases of census forms not being collected at the time. However, the vast majority of the records have survived and film copies have been made, which mostly are legible; 1841 census records are often very faint.

There are questions about the accuracy of the information in the censuses, ages particularly can be a year or so out and sometimes more. Heads of households, who were responsible for providing the information about the inhabitants may sometimes have been mistaken about the origins or age of a person, say, for a young relative or a lodger. The census records that we see today were copied from written returns which were often dictated by the heads of households. The officials would be writing what they heard, which could be unfamiliar names and places, these records would be further transcribed by others and so errors undoubtedly accrued.

There could also be errors in the transcriptions made for this web site.

The 1901 census is that latest one in England and Wales to which the public has access. This census would be a very valuable snapshot of the Steer population, however, there are data quality issues, the aim is to improve the quality to facilitate Steer family history research. It hasn't been possible to organise the index of people by county which would be more beneficial but must wait until the web site supports a searchable on-line database.

Thanks to Steve Steere for the time he spent capturing the 1901 census information.

The main reason for adding the 1901 census to the web site is that a large amount of Steer information had already been gathered from The National Archives (TNA and previously the Public Records Office) 1901 census web site http://www.census.pro.gov.uk/. The TNA web site provides a search facility to locate individuals using their name, age, birthplace and place at the time of the census. The results of a search are lists of people and for each one giving their name, age, birthplace, occupation and census place. At the time the Steer data was collected it was possible to identify individuals that had appeared consecutively in the census pages and to estimate the piece and folio numbers, however, it is no longer possible to do this and hence the previously collected Steer data is of value. The search results had a unique number assigned to each person that corresponded to the order in which the people appeared in the census books. The Leeds Indexers (http://leedsindexers.co.uk/) produced software that facilitated the capture and sorting of the search results and also estimated piece and folio numbers. The piece numbers have subsequently been used to identify counties, registration districts and sub-districts.

Census entries collect this way carry the message "PRO 1901 Census On-Line Free Information" in the Comments section. There can be expected to be errors and anomalies in these entries.

There were a number of shortcomings in the project to place the 1901 census on line. Apart from the access difficulties when the site was opened to the public a number project and technical decisions have had long term detrimental effects on the quality of the information.

Transcription of historical hand written documents requires specific skills and the motivation to be accurate. Transcribers were first recruited from prison inmates and then out-sourced on a commercial basis, in each case either skill or motivation have been questioned. The transcriptions contain a relatively high number of errors for such a project.

Transcription errors will hinder searching, however, there is another aspect which affects search capabilities that was not addressed. Variant data needs to be standardised and this isn't the case for place names. Consequently possible abbreviations for, say the county of Middlesex, (Mdx, Mddx, Mddlx etc.) have to be searched separately.

Altogether search facilities on the 1901 web site are compromised. It could be that searches failed to find a person or that it necessitated the purchase of a number of census images before a person was found.

Although a lengthy process the best approach to the 1901 web site was an open search for all individuals with a given surname, which will return all the individuals irrespective of place name abbreviations or transcription errors. The issue with this approach are errors in the surname, either as originally recorded or transcribed, therefore open surname searches were conducted for many surnames that were known or suspected as being mistaken for the Steer name, or were variants of it: STAIR, STAIRS, STAR, STARE, STEAR, STEARE, STEARES, STEARS, STEECE, STEEN, STEER, STEERE, STEERS, STEES, STEHR, STEIR, STERE, STERREY, STERRY, STERY, STEWER, STOUR, STUR. It is known that some of these surnames are actually Steer entries on the original census pages.

The most value will be gained by identifying which of the possibly misspellings of the surname are Steers or not, in other words to eliminate or correct the non-Steer entries such as STEEN. Also the entries for Steer or legitimate variants need to be verified. It will then be possible to use the 1901 data for studying distribution of the surname and people will more easily be able to find the people they are looking for.

Please enquire about any individuals or likely families about which you would like further information or verification. Use the clickable ticks on each census entry.

Civil registration of births marriages and deaths began in England and Wales 1 July 1837 although initially there was no legal requirement to register an event. The onus was on the registrars to seek out the events, many births and deaths went unrecorded. However, it was difficult to avoid the registration of a marriage because registration took place at the time of the marriage in a church or registry office. From 1837 the information recorded in a parish marriage register is mostly the same as that recorded on a GRO marriage certificate.

Birth, death and marriage certificates contain the important family information but it would very expensive to obtain all the certificates relating to the Steers. All the certificates since 1837 have been indexed nationally by the GRO and although the information in each index entry is sparse it is important to make the Steer index entries available as evidence of the events.

The lack of compulsion to register events in the early years has been mentioned. Registrars would also have to interpret what they were told by an informant who if illiterate could not advise on the spelling of their name or check the written details. A small number of errors would have been made when the GRO indexes were compiled and some of the indexes have further been transcribed.

There could also be errors in the transcriptions made for this web site.

The reconciliation project is a set of exercises comparing different records to find entries relating to the same individuals. Reconciling the records is the all-important aim of gathering the information. Most important for family historians is to identify the same individual in different records so that the story of a persons life can begin to be told.

Reconciling records, particularly where they are complete has other benefits. For example children under the age of fourteen in the 1851 census could be expected to have a GRO birth index entry, but it is known that many will not. A reconciliation exercise between the 1851 census and the GRO birth indexes could be informative about the prevalence of registration or lack of it. Alternatively the exercise could indicate people who are missing from the 1851 census transcriptions, for whatever reason, though this would also mean reconciliation with the death indexes.

A lot of the reconciliation donkey work can be done with the aid of the computer, which can suggest short lists of people from a set of records that might correspond to a person from another record. Computers cannot be left with any final decision about who is who but they are good at locating possibilities and possible ambiguities.