BW 1851 Census

The 1851 census is 40 years before the census that I have previously transcribed. There should be names that carry over and links to the burial register.

Unlike the full transcript of the 1891 census the residential addresses of those listed is not known. Due to the nature of how this information was collated by The Foxearth and District Local History Society and how it has been indexed by search engines such as Google it is not known if the full census was uploaded to the Foxearth website.

Comparing the number of residents from the 1851 census and the 1891 census it would appear that there was more people living and working in Belchamp Walter. These workers also appear to be agricultural workers. The period of 40 years between the two dates saw a dramatic change from a virbrant agricultural environment to one were there was strife between the workers and their employees. The result of which seems to be the agricultural workers strike in 1893.

The population of Belchamp Walter appears to be 671 in 1851 (taken from the index below), in 1891 it was 497. The popluation in 1821 and 1831 is recorded by Thomas Wright .as 608 and 670 respectively.
As a comparison in 2021 the population was 345 and in 2011 - 195 (Wikipedia).

The World Wars and the modernisation of the agricutural industry must have taken its toll on the villages population and there sre few that are farm workers or owners today. The housing from the 19th Century has been replaced by some 20th Century housing built by the council and now privately owned. The housing that has disappeared include Cottage Row, houses on Chapel Hill, Yeldham and Otten Roads, and 1 to 4 Munt Cottages.

The Index

Notes on the table - which is large

As the table is an index of the census it would seem likely that entries with the same surname were residing at the same dwelling. Again, as this is just an index the exact address of the Belchamp Walter resident is not known for sure. If you have access to the 1851 census, i.e. you have a subscrition to Ancestry.com, then I would be grateful if you could provide that information for me. I may take out a subscription for this website sometime in the future. At the moment I have more than enough information for me to update my pages.

Whoever uploaded the census data to the Foxearth website did a minimum of formatting to the index for 1851 and the full census for 1891. To calculate the populations in these two years the 1851 list was easy as it was a straight index list with a single name per line. The 1891 list was the same but added some additional line breaks between residences. This begs the question that "did the Foxearth researcher have a full census for 1851 or just the index?". I deleted these blank lines and the residences that were reported as "unoccupied".

The transciptions could also have been edited as the entry for Alice Reeve, daughter of William Reeve, has a note about being WAACS in WW1, 25 years later.