Dear List,

I have been looking at Jewish families on census images for several years,
and I have never come across any official indication that they were Jewish
- certainly there was no census question about race, unlike in American
censuses. Now I have been very surprised to discover the following entry
(oddly enough, while looking for a vicar's widow!) in the 1861 census of
Greenham, Berkshire:

Abraham Myers Head Married 49 Dealer (a Jew Boy!!) Prussia

This is the second time I've seen race mentioned - in the 1871 census of my
own Cambridgeshire village, among the local coprolite diggers, was a young
American labourer who is noted as a Negro, but in this case I had the
impression that the enumerator was merely recording an interesting fact
with no pejorative intention.

Has anyone else found any kind of personal comment >from an enumerator?

Estelle Wolfers