Talk:FamilySearch Indexing:UK, England and Wales—1871 Census, Additional Helps

Should the word "Parish" be indexed or just the town name? There is no need to index the word parish.

Additional abbreviations - English counties
Not sure why Belrick's edit was reversed - the abbreviations he/she added were accurate and commonly used:


 * Bedfordshire = Beds
 * Lancashire = Lancs
 * Lincolnshire = Lincs
 * Warwickshire = Warks

Dms246 13:40, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Be careful!
I'm indexing an 1871 census from Birmingham. I came across the town abbreviation Bhm in Warwick[shire]. Since it was so frequently used on this page, I assumed it to mean Birmingham. In an effort to confirm my hypothesis, I came to the Additional Helps page which links to Wikipedia articles about places in Warwickshire. Looking at the List of Places in Warwickshire, however, Birmingham is not listed. It appears that this list is a list of current places in Warwickshire, among which Birmingham is not. Upon further investigation however, (Wikipedia: Birmingham), I discovered that "Birmingham was originally part of Warwickshire, but expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, absorbing parts of Worcestershire to the south and Staffordshire to the north and west. The city absorbed Sutton Coldfield in 1974 and became a metropolitan borough in the new West Midlands county."

Since I'm indexing an 1871 census of households in Birmingham, the abbreviation Bhm, mostly likely means Birmingham, in spite of the fact that Birmingham does not show up on the List of Places in Warwickshire. It is important to look at the government in place at the time of the census!