Details collected include: address, name, relationship to the head of the family, marital status, age at last birthday, gender, occupation, and place of birth.
As with earlier censuses, the form asked whether any "lunatics", "imbeciles" or "idiots" lived in the household, causing the Registrar General to observe that: "It is against human nature to expect a mother to admit her young child to be an idiot, however much she may fear this to be true.
[3] Notables named in the census included Winston Churchill, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin.
In the 1980s, in a project that has been characterised as "the largest collection of historical source material to be made available in computerised form",[5] and "the first major 'crowd-sourced' exercise in the world",[6] the Genealogical Society of Utah began collaborating with the Federation of Family History Societies and the Scottish Association of Family History Societies to produce an index to the 1881 census for England, Wales, Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
[9] Free access to the online index is now available from several other sites, though the Scottish data remains exclusive to ScotlandsPeople.