Who Lived in Muirhead Street, Gorbals in 1841?

I had found Agnes Feren and her sons, Charles and John living in Muirhead Street, Gorbals, Glasgow in the 1841 Census. Her husband, Thomas Neill, was not living with them and Agnes is listed under her maiden name. The children are McNeils not Neills.

Since Agnes, Thomas and Charles have been such a brick wall for me, I decided that I would look at the whole street and see what I could find out about gender, age, country of origin etc to get a bit of background about the area where the family were living.

On the Find My Past Web site here I searched for Muirhead Street, Gorbals Glasgow and the search returned 508 results. I extracted them into household units but I also did some analysis on the total number of residents. The file metadata tells me that I created it on 16 July 2022, so it was a while ago. The whole file can be downloaded here.

The street contained 96 households though it is not clear how many houses were built and/or occupied at that time. Of the 508 people, 374 were born in Scotland (74.80%), 115 were born in Ireland (23.00%), 11 were born in England (2.20%) and for 8 no information was recorded (1.60%) 245 of those born in Scotland were born in Lanarkshire (48.23%)

Scotland	Ireland	England	Not Known
374	115	11	1.60%
74.80%	23.00%	2.20%	1.60%

As far as the ages of the residents are concerned I sorted these by age group and nationality.

Age	Scotland	Ireland	England	Total
0-15	185	24	1	210
16-25	73	29	4	106
26-40	81	35	3	119
41 & above	34	27	3	64
Total	373	115	11	499
			No Country	8
			No age given	1

Age	Scotland	Ireland	England	Total
0-15	88.1%	11.43%	0.48%	210
16-25	68.87%	27.36%	3.77%	106
26-40	68.07%	29.41%	2.52%	119
41 & above	53.13%	42.19%	4.69%	64
Percentage	69.54%	27.60%	2.86%	499
			No Country	8
			No age given	1

What we see here is that there are fewer Irish in the 0-15 age group by quite a way but there are many more in the older age groups. This is, of course, before the mass migration of the Irish Potato Famine that is usually understood as running between 1845 and 1852.

What was amazing was that the number of men and women were exactly the same – 254 of each and there were only slightly more women from Ireland at the expense of the Scottish born but the difference was still only a few people.

Sex	Scotland	Ireland	England	n/a	Total
Men	195	53	5	1	254
Women	179	62	6	7	254
					508

On a wider time scale and for all of Glasgow the following table, ,derived from Census data, comes from “The Working Class in Glasgow, 1750-1914” Cage R.A. (ed)