University of Essex - Census mined for history's sake

A £1 million history project at the University of Essex is to create a research resource that it hopes will transform understanding of the period between 1851 and 1911. The project will pool more than 200 million individual records from the British Census. Kevin Schurer, who is leading the project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, said: "These records contain vast amounts of information on every house, household and individual in the country and are the basis of much of our knowledge of changing social and economic structures over this period."