Introducing ‘movers’ into community reconstructions: Linking civil registers of vital events to local and national census data: A scottish experiment

The release of national, individual-level census data for Scotland, via the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project undertaken at the University of Essex, makes it possible to identify the number of Scotland’s residents by their county and parish of birth on each census night from 1851 to 1901. This chapter uses the anonymous I-CeM data for 1871, alongside individual, nominal census data from the 1881 census of Scotland, and details from the civil registers of births, marriages and deaths on the Isle of Skye to ’follow’ all individuals born on the island during the 1860s and 1870s to their entries in the 1881 census. This allows the number of migrants to be gauged, and those moving within their home country to be distinguished from those who emigrated. During the linkage process a number of biases became evident, and the implications of these for record linkage and demographic history are discussed.