January 2, 2002

4:24 AM

The 1901 UK Census in onlineincluding the records of Tolkien, Florence Nightingale and Charlie Chaplin No Jedis in 1901 though. Non-PC descriptions include "imbecile", "lunatic" or plain "feeble-minded".
posted by brettski (4 comments total)

"Due to very heavy demand, this site is temporarily unavailable. Please try later"

you think they would have learnt from the similar demand palced on the www.ellisislandrecords.org site. Something like this is always going to be popular - oh well never mind
posted by monkeyJuice at 4:42 AM on January 2, 2002

Those terms used to be standard psychology categories. (Some of them are still written into law.) I prefer to think of them -- at least, idiot, imbecile, moron -- with the original French pronunciations: eed-YOH, ann-bay-SEEL, moh-ROHNG ... :)
posted by dhartung at 9:33 AM on January 2, 2002

...or at least a couple with Bugs Bunny pronunciations...what a maroon...what an imbessle....(accent on the middle syllable)
posted by schmedeman at 11:54 AM on January 2, 2002

This is cool, the transcription is much better than the Latter Day Saints over at familysearch.org, I await the other censuses with keen interest (most of the fun in a census is following people over time.

If you do ever make it to the Family Records Centre and you know an ancestor lived in London after 1840 take a look at the post office directory. With the advent of the Penny post everyone was listed. I've certainly found it very useful.
posted by nedrichards at 2:29 AM on January 3, 2002