GB Historical DB

Names of Districts, sub-Districts and parishes appearing in occ_1881.

Table ID:
OCC_1881_PLACES     (1251857)
Contents:
Names of Districts, sub-Districts and parishes appearing in occ_1881.
Approx. number of rows:
15,177
Table type:
Gazetteer
Documentation Author:
Humphrey Southall
Chronology:
The data are for the single year 1881.

Sources:

  1. WARNING! Setting the constituency IDs in this table took about 36 hours to run, so do not rebuild without careful thought.
  2. This data set was supplied by the History Data Service in September 2002 along with the main set of occupation/age data derived from the 1881 microdata, as held in 'occ_1881'. More information on how this data was created is needed, covering in particular where these precise versions of the place-names originated. It is possible they derive originally from the GBHGIS project's transcription of the 1911 parish table.

Notes:

  1. The list covers all of England and Wales, but not Scotland. It also covers the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles, which are not currently covered by the GIS.
  2. The table was modified in November 2009 to include unit IDs taken from the GBH AUO, and the 'clean_par' column was added to provide parish names that matched those held in the AUO. The bulk of the names in 'clean_name' were constructed automatically from those in 'civ_par'. 118 names were manually replaced by names from the AUO, but most of these were small and obvious typographic variants. The following changes need to be noted:
    • 'Calton in Mayfield' and 'Calton in Waterfall', both in Ashborne RegD Derbyshire, were changed to 'Calton'.
    • The UKDA listings separately identified Cambridge colleges, but we put them into the relevant parish.
    • 'Trumpington Cavendish College', in Chesterton RegD Cambridgeshire, was changed to 'Trumpington'.
    • 'Folkestone Town', in Elham RegD Kent, was changed to 'Folkestone'.
    • 'Military in Shorncliffe Camp', in Elham RegD Kent, was changed to 'Cheriton'.
    • 'Aldershot Military in South Camp (Hants)', in Farnham RegD Surrey, was changed to 'Aldershot'.
    All our substitutions can be seen by comparing 'civ_par' and 'clean_par'.

Checking:

  1. No checking has been possible on what was supplied by the History Data Service, but the data have been cross-checked against the GBH AUO, and indirectly against the published 1881 census parish-level table, leading to the revisions listed here. Only the change to the Carlisle sub-districts can be seen as evidence of an error, so the data appear to be very clean.

Acknowledgments:


We are extremely grateful to the following:

  1. Hamish James: These data were derived from the 1881 micro-data in September 2001 by Hamish James, whose contribution should be acknowledged.

Indices:

IndexTypeColumn(s) indexed
occ_1881_places_pkey Primary key subd_id, par_id
occ_1881_places_idx_const Unique const_85_unit, subd_id, par_id
occ_1881_places_par_idx Unique subd_unit, clean_par, par_id

Constraints:

The table has the following associated constraints:

ConstraintTypeDetails
occ_1881_places_pkey Primary Key See details above for primary key index
enforce_dims_g_point Check ((st_ndims(g_point) = 2))
enforce_geotype_g_point Check (((geometrytype(g_point) = 'POINT'::text) OR (g_point IS NULL)))
enforce_srid_g_point Check ((st_srid(g_point) = 3034))


Columns within table:

ColumnTypeContents
reg_cnty Text string (max.len.=20). Name of the Registration County. Where the data are for an "Island in the British Seas", the name that appears here is the name of the relevant "State" as defined in the AUO, i.e. GUERNSEY for all the Channel Isles except Jersey. This column was not supplied by the HDS, but was added by the GBHGIS project to simplify matching.
subd_id Integer number. Combined Registration District and sub-District ID.
par_id Integer number. Number identifying each parish.
reg_dist Text string (max.len.=30). Name of the Registration District.
sub_dist Text string (max.len.=36). Name of the Registration sub-District. This is exactly as supplied by UKDA except for: (a) the parishes of Caldewgate, Carlisle St Mary Within, Eaglesfield Abbey and Rickergate, all in Carlisle RegD, were listed by UKDA as being in St Cuthbert SubD, but the census reports list them as being in St Mary SubD (which does not appear in the UKDA list), so 'St Cuthbert' was changed to 'St Mary'; (b) Cwmdu SubD, within Crickhowell RegD, was listed with an accent over the U, which we removed.
civ_par Text string (max.len.=68). Name of the parish as provided by UKDA.
clean_par Text string (max.len.=68). Cleaned version of parish name. These names have all been converted to upper case, and punctuation removed using the 'clean_name' function. In addition, county names in brackets have been removed, as have additional variant names which were included by UKDA using the form 'XXXX aka YYYY'. Some further changes were made to individual names so that they matched the most similar name in the AUO.
cnty_unit Integer number. GBHGIS ID for the Registration County, as listed in the AUO.
dist_unit Integer number. GBHGIS ID for the Registration District, as listed in the AUO.
subd_unit Integer number. GBHGIS ID for the Registration sub-District, as listed in the AUO.
par_unit Integer number. GBHGIS ID for the Civil Parish, as listed in the AUO.
g_point geometry Geographical coordinate for the row (ETRS-89). For now, this is based mainly on parish centroids, mainly as already extracted for the g_place table, but in the longer term needs to be based on the sub-districts where these define a more detailed geography, i.e. in towns.
const_85_unit Integer number. GBHGIS ID for the Parliamentary Constituency containing g_point, as defined in the 1885 to 1917 period. This was added to support specific analytic research.
const_85_method Text string (max.len.=48). Text string recording the method used to set the value of const_85_unit for this particular row.
par_all_in_one_subd Integer number. Flag, set to 1 if the row is for a parish which is entirely in one sub-District, and 0 otherwise.
subd_is_par_aggregate Integer number. Flag, set to 1 if the row is for a sub-District which consists entirely of parishes which are entirely in that sub_District, whose boundary can consequently be mapped simply by merging parish polygons.
g_seq Integer number. Sequence number providing each row with a simple unique identifier, added on loading the data into Postgres.