Over two lessons a week apart, Year 8 pairs each take one household from the town's 1851 census Sheet and write a 150-word account of it: who lived there, what their ages, occupations and birthplaces suggest, and one thing the census cannot tell them. The teacher has arranged for volunteers from the town's family history society, most of whom now live elsewhere in the country or abroad and could not come into school, to read the accounts on a private Padlet that the teacher runs. The board has one column for each household, comments are switched off and author names are hidden. Pairs post their account in their household's column, the volunteers add their replies as posts in the same column, and every post waits for the teacher's approval before it appears. During the week the volunteers reply with what their records hold and the class's source does not: the same family in the 1841 or 1861 census, a burial register entry, a line from a trade directory, or a correction to an occupation the pair misread. In the second lesson pairs read the approved replies, rewrite their account to take in the new evidence, and add a sentence on how it changed their view of the household. The class ends by asking which of the textbook's claims about industrial towns its households now support.
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