Census day itself was pushed back from the originally planned 24th April due to widespread strikes that were planned on the 15th of the same month. The Scottish Union of Dock Labourers called a month long strike in sympathy with coal miners, who in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, the National Union of Railwaymen and the National Transport Workers’ Federation planned to take to the streets against wage reductions in a new post-war depression. This led to the government declaring a state of emergency, which included the moving of the enumeration of the country to Sunday the 19th of June.

For family historians, this matters. A census is a frozen point in time rather than a recording of what usually happened, and holding a census in the summer can lead to the population not being at their usual homes (as indeed many had already taken to the coast, to enjoy holidays). Be prepared to look for your relatives further afield than you may have found them otherwise. The population of Buteshire in particular, a county known for being the home of a number of popular tourist destinations, was noted to have increased by over 260% in some areas.

To a fair extent, the Scottish census looks very much like the one taken in the rest of Britain (there was no census in Ireland at the time owing to the Irish War of Independence). You’ll notice that those wonderful questions from 1911 that give you a length of marriage for couples, and the number of children born (both still alive and sadly passed) are now no longer present.

This loss is counterbalanced by some new information that you may have already come across in the southern counterpart that give an unprecedented window into working life for a genealogist. We’ll see not just what somebody did for a living, but who they worked for, and the address of that workplace. For those under 15, we’ll also see if either or both of their parents are deceased.

In Scotland there were additional questions about whether each person (over three years) spoke Gaelic only and also whether they were entitled to benefits under the National Insurance (Health) Acts.

The census is a once in a decade affair, and with what felt to many like the world falling apart around them, many took advantage of this rare opportunity to have their feelings heard. It’s certainly not unique for enumerators to find messages left for those in power in census returns, some whimsical, some moving, all giving a window into the lives of those heads of each household who filled in these forms. Even without these additional comments, there’s something powerful about seeing the original handwriting and signature of our ancestors.

In Scotland, when the census was tabulated, these returns were destroyed. All of those comments, every stroke of our ancestors’ hand, is gone. The records we will have access to will be scanned copies of the books that enumerators copied the information provided to them into. We can still learn the same facts, but we have certainly lost an incalculable amount of personality and social commentary. The enumeration books that we’ll see at the end of the process should, as a small comfort, be easier to read than in 1911. The 1921 census was typed for the first time as it was summarised – which will hopefully do away with those all too familiar handwriting transcription errors.