1939 register help with schedule sub numbers

[Sprouted]

Hello,

I am confused by what I am seeing on the 1939 register. Usually I have noticed that if you preview a record it will tell you how many records are closed in that household. In this instance it doesnt seem to mention that any records are closed but on the enumeration schedule there clearly are closed records. (it may be because I have unlocked the household). I cannot work out how many people in the household are closed. I have attached a snip of the image below to help to explain. By counting the black horizontal lines I would say 4, however the schedule sub-number just does not seem to add up and I cannot work out what is going on. The bottom person has a sub-schedule of 7 on the original image but on the transcription it is recorded as 10. Any advice appreciated.

[andrewalston]

All I can imagine is that the people in the redacted lines were not "proper" family members, such as evacuees, and the Registration Officer did what they usually did in a census and dealt with them separately.
Are there similar numbering schemes in nearby households which might give us a clue?

[Sprouted]

Hi thank you for your reply.

All other entries on the page appeared to look as they should, except for the household below "mine". I have now looked into the household below and found that all household members transcribed were there on the original image so the redacted lines are a mistake somehow.
I then logged out of the site and searched the 1939 register for both my household and the neighbours and found it told me that in my household one person is officially closed. (same with the neighbours- they were 4 in the household not 7 like the lines might make you think).

So I think I can feel pretty confident that they are not 3 other people that I should be looking for.
I think it is worrying that when I am logged in with my subscription the transcription states that there are 6 people in a household but when you preview it without logging in you are getting more information as it tells me that one more person is closed.

I will report the issue to findmypast anyway. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.

[Nick_Ips]

All I can imagine is that the people in the redacted lines were not "proper" family members, such as evacuees, and the Registration Officer did what they usually did in a census and dealt with them separately.

Do you know if this was an official policy? Many households I've looked at have an unexpected child with a different surname - checking the birth details indicates they came from an evacuated area, so my assumption has been they were evacuees. I believe some evacuees were put up in camps, or maybe in larger numbers in a building such as a hotel or the manor house/hall in a village. Maybe in the later case the children would be listed separately from the main household?

The line with the sub-number 7 is the 10th line in the household - I think the transcriber has departed from TWYS because whatever is on the redacted lines needed to be assigned a sub-number.

I have found the number of people/closed records displayed on the preview page to be unreliable. I know that they were particularly out of sync when the first batch of new records were opened, not sure if this was subsequently fixed though.

I suspect that until the redaction is removed (possibly not until 2040) you will never know for sure what is going on with this household.

[chris_49]

I've even found that at least one of these mystery redactions turned out when unredacted to be nothing more than a blank line! Sorry I didn't note the example. Three is pushing it a bit though. Does there appear to be handwriting on the redacted spaces?

When I've seen evacuees and visitors I've seen them given a number but it wouildn't surprise me if this was inconsistent

[Sprouted]

Thanks for all the info - so I think now I can say that there may be others that are closed, or there may be some other reason but I will not really know until like you say 2040 or entries cross the 100 year mark. There does appear to be handwriting on at least 2 of the lines yes, I do have names of other siblings so it could be them but it was the numbering that had confused me as it did not match with the order of their dates of births and all other entries seem to be consistent from oldest to youngest.

[Nick_Ips]

Typically households go in the order husband, wife, children (oldest to youngest), other family, visitors.

But this isn't a hard and fast rule, I've seen all kinds of combinations, including listing all male children, followed by all female children. So unfortunately the position of a redacted record cannot really be taken to be anything more than a hint at birth order.

Also, even if you know there was another child of the family which corresponds with the redacted record there is no way of knowing that paticular child was there when the register was taken - they could have been staying (with family) elsewhere and the redacted record could be for someone entirely different.

It is such a shame they adopted a whole-line redaction policy, rather than just redacting the date of birth.

[Mean_genie]

The snip is a bit too small to get a proper idea of what is going on, but some of it is clear; the two blacked-out lines between the sub-numbers 3 and 4 are likely to be either blank lines, or partially blank, where someone's name or job description was very long, and the enumerator extended it onto an extra line. Or he/she may have made a mistake and crossed out the whole entry and started again. Between 5 and 7 there should be only one entry, and since this is within a household it won't be a an unoccupied property, which sometimes accounts for a blank or blacked-out line. There is a mark in the schedule number column against 7, but I don't think it is a new schedule number because the visible fragment on the line below looks as though it is part of '59' which would be the next schedule number in sequence.

You can't post the whole page, but if you don't mind sharing the four-letter district code, or the piece reference, people  could have a look for you.