In Scotland a national census has been taken every ten years since 1841. It is used to produce statistics, but the full details are kept secret for one hundred years. Thus the 1901 census was made public in 2001, and is now available on various web sites. Some time before this, the Society produced hand-written transcriptions of each census for the Parish of Dunning from 1841 to 1891, and converted them to computer readable format.They are available for download here in either Acrobat Reader (pdf) or zipped Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (xls) files.

The census is a complete record of the occupants of the parish, including visitors, showing their name, age, address, relationship to the head of the household, occupation and so on. It makes interesting reading for anyone researching their Dunning ancestors. By comparing years, people can be seen growing up, marrying, starting work and so on, and the changes in population and types of employment can also be followed.

We have taken care to use the spelling from the original returns. Odd spellings include Margret, Jannet, Charels, Johman, McLoud, Murry and many others. In particular it seems that those who recorded the 1841 census may not have been very literate. (Unfortunately this census also contains rather less data than the later ones). For this reason it may be useful to carefully eye-scan the whole census if an automatic search fails to find the name you're looking for.

The dates of the censuses were 6 June 1841, 30 March 1851,
7 April 1861, 2 April 1871, 3 April 1881 and 5 April 1891.

Please double-click the version you wish to download.