I doubt if such mistakes could be ascribed to the OCR fault, rather to the fault of census taker or further copyist. Such misreadings of the documents written by hand were rather common – I know some from my own family history.

Wayne and Christina, my great thanks for visiting us and commenting this news. It’s an honour to see the commentary of the famous Hammond & Scull. Have a good weekend.

The fact that many Tolkiens in England were in the music or piano business no doubt has something to do with the interest of the English middle class in music, but it does not necessarily follow that this is why Tolkiens moved to England. Some Tolkiens in fact were in other lines of work.

That’s an interesting observation about the name “Septimus”, which was commonly used in large Victorian families for the seventh child (if a son). George William Tolkien and Eliza Murrell could well have had another, unrecorded child who died young and was never in a census. Also, we’ve seen on several websites (repeating one another) a reference to a third daughter of John Benjamin Tolkien and Jane Holmwood — Jane Tolkien b. 1846 — but can’t verify this in official documents.

There’s still much to be learned about the Tolkien family as one digs deeper into the public record.