1811 Armadale Census

The 1811 census for the parish of Farr has survived and is available to view at the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, Scotland (Ref: HCA/D269/1). A national census has been taken in Great Britain every ten years since 1801. However prior to 1841 most of the census records were either lost or destroyed after they had served their purpose. It is therefore quite rare to find a census from 1801, 1811, 1821 or 1831. The 1811 census unfortunately did not include ages and it only included the name of the head of the house. It also included whether the family was employed in agriculture or trade and how many males and females were living in the house. I have in my possession copies of the entire 1811 census for the parish of Farr but below I have only included the segment for the village of Armadale, which includes my ancestor Alex Munro.

One possibility is that as Alexander Munro of Armadale could have been the Sergeant Alexander Munro of the 76th and 42nd Regiments who was born sometime between 1735 and 1744, and whose wife Jane Munro died in 1780, that the Hugh Munro who was father of the second Alexander Munro could have been a son from this first marriage of Alexander Munro. This would mean that the second Alex Munro on the 1811 census was the grandson of my ancestor Alexander Munro of Armadale and named after him.

The Sergeant Alexander Munro and his wife Jane or Janet Munro may have come from the parish of Resolis, Ross-shire, as explained on page: Possible parish and estate records (part 1). Their five children were: Elen and John who were twins baptised 17 May 1767, an unnamed child baptised 29 August 1768 who could have been Hugh as mentioned above, Lillias baptised 5 October 1770 who appears to have remained in the parish of Resolis, married and had children there, and Jannat baptised 7 June 1773 who as the youngest child could have been the third female in Alexander Munro of Armadale's house on the 1811 census. 

It could be that Robert Munro b. 1791, son of Hugh Munro, as shown in the above family tree was named in the same way that Hugh's elder brother John Munro (1767) later named his son Robert Munro in 1816, as explained on page Possible parish and estate records (part 1).

It could be that John Munro b. 1812 shown in the above family tree was named after his father Alexander's paternal uncle, John Munro b. 1767 who is mentioned in the paragraphs above.

It is also perfectly possible that the second Alex Munro in Armadale was not related and that he simply moved there because that was where his wife Mary Mackay was from, but then it is interesting to speculate why the two Alex Munro households were listed together on the census. Most of these pre-1841 census and rental records listed related families and family members together. I did once find a family tree on Ancestry for a Munro family in New Zealand who descend from this second Alex Munro in Armadale, but the tree owner was no longer active and did not reply to my messages. However, the children listed on that tree do not have baptisms in the parish registers, leaving only the census records as possible sources for them. Trees on Ancestry also show that other descendants of the second Alex Munro moved to Canada.