How do I search the 1921 Census for employer information?

How to see employment details for a person:

A person's occupation and employer information is shown within the record transcript or an original record image from the 1921 Census of England and Wales. The 1921 Census was the first census of England and Wales to include details of employer and place of work.

How to search by employer name:

It's also possible to search for an employer name (e.g. ‘WHSmith’ ) and see all those who listed this employer in the 1921 Census.

It is important to note that those filling out the census in 1921 did so by hand and variations of the same employer do occur.

These variations may be due to spelling errors, different ways to write the name of the employer or unique individual working situations.

To search the 1921 Census of England and Wales you will need to be logged in to a Findmypast account.

Once you are logged in, you can navigate to the 1921 Census search form as follows;

 Select ‘Search’ from the navigation bar at the top of the page
Within the menu, click on the 1921 Census
This will take you through to the 1921 Census search form

  There are a variety of search fields, all of which are optional.

Around halfway down the search form, is the employer search field.

We recommend using an asterisk (*) before and after your search terms. This will help your search return some of the variations, for example, searching *WHSmith* would return records with ‘WHSmith on strike’ as well as those that only say ‘WHSmith’.

As you fill out the employer search field the search button will preview how many results there are. When you are satisfied with your search terms select view results and you will be taken to the results of your search.

The search results will show a list of all the individuals with an employer response that matches your search criteria. From here you can view some of the information extracted from the record to help you determine which result is the person you are looking for. You can also preview the transcription or record image by hovering over the transcript or image symbol on each search result.

If you do not think the search has found who you are looking for you can further refine it using the search fields on screen.

Understanding Occupation codes

You may see green ink annotations of numbers on record images next to the Personal Occupation column. These are occupation codes added by the census office for statistical purposes. These codes enabled the census office to aggregate similar occupations and take a broad view of population proportions for different occupation categories. See the full list of 1921 Census occupation codes here.

Did you know? You can also search the 1921 Census by person or an address

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