What is a census?

Holly: Don't mind me. I'm just taking a quick look at the national census. So, what is a census and why does it have so many pages?

Well, I'm in Manchester and we're going to find out why the national census is so important for people like us and how one document, albeit a massive one, can help us to travel through time.

Imagine a list of all the people who've ever played for your favourite team, the positions they played in, points they scored, their ages, even what they liked to eat.

Well, that's a general idea of what a national census is. It's a list of all the people in the United Kingdom. It started in 1841 when people called enumerators would go from house to house and collect information and data about all the people who were there at the time.

And it takes place every 10 years and it's still going on today, although we tend to fill it in online or by post. So why do we need to know all of this about everyone?

Well, it helps us to plan the things we need. Hospitals, parks, houses, schools, and it also gives everybody a voice.

The census also lets us see how life has changed through the years. So, let's use the census to travel back through time starting at a place just around the corner from here - Nelson Street.

This is Nelson Street in Victorian, Manchester in 1841, the air is quite thick and smoky because it's the time of the Industrial Revolution.

Chimneys on factories, cotton mills and the streets are noisy with carts rolling by and children out playing. Families were mostly large here, and there was sometimes more than one family to a house with the toilet and the water pump outside.

Most grownups worked in or around the cotton mills, they were spinners or weavers.

Now, like you and me, enumerators were just ordinary people, so sometimes they'd make mistakes or be given incorrect information.

They also wrote in Copperplate, which is a very fancy, curly handwriting that can be quite hard to read.

We know the census is more of a snapshot of history than a completely reliable source.

And now, by the power of the national census, we're going to leap forward in time 80 years to 1921.

We know from archive sources that there are gas lamps and early electric lights on the street, which is a huge change for people.

Instead of carts, we've now got trams and buses rattling past.

The 1921 census asked different questions.

It was the first to record if someone was divorced or not, and it asked if children had lost one or both parents because so many had died during World War One or had died from the Spanish flu shortly afterwards, which was a deadly illness.

The census really highlights the impacts the First World War had on the uk with a huge loss of life.

We see 1.7 million more women than men, which meant that many women had gained independence and were working.

And there was one very famous occupant of Nelson Street, so famous in fact that her house has been turned into a museum.

We know from the census that Emmeline Pankhurst moved here after the death of her father.

She was married to a lawyer, Richard Pankhurst, and after his death, she took the job as a registrar, which is someone who records official records like births and deaths.

It was through this work that she found out about the difficult situations faced by many women.

Emmeline actually petitioned against the 1911 census. She told women to ignore their census returns until they were given the right to vote.

Emmeline petitioned long and hard and eventually helped women gain equal voting rights to men in 1928.

And now her house on Nelson Street is a museum dedicated to her life.

Think of all the people here in the People's History Museum. A museum dedicated to normal people who did incredible things.

Historians used the national census to research a lot of the people on the walls around me and helped us to piece together some earth changing moments in history.