Census Records
A census is a study of every unit, everyone or everything, in a population. To a statistician, it is known as a complete enumeration (which means a complete count) and the alternative is a sample study. Although in modern times, we use the term census when the "unit" being studied is each person; some of the early UK censuses enumerated every "household" without collecting the details of each individual within the household.
In many jurisdictions, historical census returns are extremely valuable for locating and identifying named individuals and so are highly prized by family historians. That is not the case for censuses conducted by the Commonwealth of Australia before 2000 which are not available for genealogy research. Some (but not all) pre-Federation censuses contain useful and accessible data. |