Sorry to harp on about this 65 yr old Elsie:

(Eric's transcription)

Jane GOUDING 30 Ind N [FMP indexes as “Gonding” but I think it’s “Gouding”, i.e, they forgot the “L”]
Elsie “ 65 Ind Y [perhaps her mother in law?]

Alice “ 12 Y [great choice of name for first daughter]

Eliza “ 10 Y

John “ 3 Y

I've been thinking about the possible scenario when the enumerator visited this 1841 Liverpool household of Jane Goulding. His own spelling wasn't great, going by the entries on the same page (Danial, Samual, Margret further down the same page), and he's unlikely to have had the names of the household members spelled out to him as they were possibly illiterate, so he'd just be making a stab at what he thought he'd heard. The toothless 65 yr old woman may have given her name in a mumbled voice with a strange accent, and Coulthard is, I guess, one of those names that can be pronounced in various ways and also isn't easy to spell. Jane will have done better at relating the names of her children and herself, although her surname was recorded by him as Gouding instead of Goulding. When he came to make the neat copy from his notes, he may just have assumed that the older woman would have the same surname as the younger woman, which would make the task easier for him, and her forename would be just what he thought he'd heard.

I was interested to see whether the name Elsie was fairly uncommon or very uncommon in women born circa 1780, so I searched the 1841 England census index using only the name Elsie/no surname/ no specific location b 1780-1800, and only 3 entries were "Elsie". On looking at the actual images for these 3 entries, all were mistranscriptions. There were variations (Elsy, Elsey), and a random sample of these were mainly transcriptions of barely legible entries. Similarly with the IGI, a search using Lancashire, baptisms 1778-1782, name Elsie/no surname brought up only 4 names and these were all Else, not Elsie.

So I don't believe that the 65 yr old in that household was actually called Elsie. Incidentally, Henry Goulding's parents (according to 2 Ancestry trees, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're right) were John Golding and Dinah Gibson. So the mysterious "Elsie" could have been a stepmother of Henry or some other relative, but I still believe that there's some chance that she was Jane's mother.

Jean