Some customers were experiencing problems viewing Enumerator’s Summary-Book images. These issues have now been resolved.

UPDATE: 24 June – If you continue to experience problems viewing images, please contact our Customer Support team, who can assist.

Please note: there are no Enumerator’s Summary Book pages for British Navy ships or military establishment returns, plus Summary Books for a small percentage of ordinary returns have not survived.

The pages from the Enumerators’ Summary Books are now available for the entire census. These pages are included in the cost of viewing an image, so if you’ve already viewed 1911 census images, you can now view the corresponding Summary-Book pages at no extra cost.

The Summary Books are a combination of descriptive and statistical information from the enumeration district. They can add depth to your 1911 census research and in some cases reveal new leads to other members of the family. The information to be found in the List and the District description is probably of most interest to the family historian and can give you an overall picture of your ancestor’s neighbourhood and its character.

The ‘list’ is a summary of the neighbourhood around your ancestor’s home. It lists all the buildings, describes their purpose, and includes other features in the area. For example, it might list an empty building plot between two houses, a storage yard, or a traveller’s caravan at the roadside, so It is a good way of getting a sense of the character of the area. It also lists the head of the household for each occupied building, so it may tell you if other family members lived nearby.

The ‘District description’ is also known as the ‘enumerator’s walk’ and describes the boundaries of the enumeration district, the parishes that lay within the district, and the contents of each parish. Since it notes streets and geographical landmarks, such as railway stations and other notable buildings, it can provide a good geographical outline of the enumeration district.

Extra RG14 household (or institution) schedule images

In addition, we’ve added two new images from the household or institution schedules (RG14s):

• The address panel from the back of the schedule, which shows the address as written by your ancestors, plus the registration district and subdistrict
• The front page of the volume in which the schedule was stored, giving more detailed information on parishes and districts.

Although they are less detailed than the Enumerators Summary-Book pages, these images give an improved sense of the original schedule documents your ancestors completed.

Please note: some 1911 census returns do not have accompanying Enumerator’s Summary-Book pages. There are none for British Navy ships or military establishment returns – the head of the establishment or ship’s captain was effectively the enumerator. And the Enumerator’s Summary Books for some parts of England and Wales have not survived, so will never be available online.

UPDATE: June 19th - we have reports of a few people experiencing problems viewing the new images. If you do experience problems please contact our Customer Support team, who can assist.

The final batch of records has now been added to the 1911 census, and includes the Channel Islands of Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, and the Isle of Man.

We’ve also added records for around 135,000 soldiers based at 288 military establishments overseas, and around 36,000 naval personnel on 147 Royal Navy Ships overseas.

In 1911 the British Empire was nearing its peak and you can find soldiers and sailors located across the globe at remote outposts of the empire, as well as in other countries, such as Egypt, where Britain had a political and military presence but which were never formally part of the empire.

You will be able to search for army personnel who were stationed overseas, plus family members who went with them, as well as soldiers who were absent on the night of the census, and navy personnel who were onboard ship.

You can find help and advice on searching these records in our search tips.

It’s official: Sir Tom Jones, the world famous singer hailed as a Welsh icon, is actually three-quarters English.

The shocking news arrived with the launch of the Welsh 1911 census records earlier this week. The Times, The Mirror, the Daily Star, the Daily Express, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and Hello! magazine were quick to publish the story, announcing three of Jones’s grandparents hail from the West Country, not Wales.

Sir Tom Jones's paternal grandparents

His paternal grandparents (shown on the image above) were James Woodward, an ironmonger’s haulier born in Gloucestershire, and Anne Woodward, born in Wiltshire. His maternal grandmother, Ada Jones, who originated from Pontypridd, had parents from Somerset and Wiltshire. Sir Tom’s only wholly Welsh grandparent was his maternal grandfather Albert Jones, a miner from Cardiff. Albert and Ada Jones are shown below:

We are pleased to announce that all counties in Wales are now available on the site, a total of over 2.4 million individuals and over a million households.

As the 1911 census is the first where household schedules were preserved, you will find that some of the census returns are printed in, and completed in, Welsh rather than English - these amount to about 13% of the total schedules for Wales. To help those of you who are not native Welsh speakers but have Welsh ancestors, we have added a new section to the 1911 website which explains the Welsh returns and also provides translation tables to help you interpret your ancestors’ documents.

Our profound thanks to Geoff Riggs and the members of the Association of Family History Societies of Wales who have developed and made this information available - we are very grateful for your time and effort, and are sure that users of the site will appreciate your contribution hugely.

On April 8 we stated that we hoped to have some data from Wales available by the end of May. This release has been put back due to the complexity of transcribing the original Welsh-language records, and we now hope to upload all of the Welsh data by the end of June.

Want to find out what the statisticians of the time gleaned from the 1911 census data?

Take a look at the reports on the excellent Vision of Britain website from the University of Portsmouth

Now all the English counties are complete, we thought it would be useful to let you know the number of people found in each county: in decreasing size order. Note the huge comparative size of Lancashire and Yorkshire (West Riding).

1. Lancashire   4,767,832
2. London   4,521,685
3. Yorkshire, West Riding   3,045,377
4. Durham   1,369,860
5. Essex   1,350,881
6. Staffordshire   1,348,259
7. Middlesex   1,126,465
8. Kent   1,045,591
9. Warwickshire   1,040,409
10. Cheshire   954,779
11. Hampshire   950,579
12. Surrey   845,578
13. Gloucestershire   736,097
14. Devonshire   699,703
15. Northumberland   696,893
16. Derbyshire   688,423
17. Sussex   663,378
18. Nottinghamshire   604,098
19. Lincolnshire   563,960
20. Worcestershire   526,087
21. Yorkshire, East Riding (with York)   515,041
22. Norfolk   499,116
23. Leicestershire   476,553
24. Somersetshire   458,025
25. Yorkshire, North Riding   419,546
26. Suffolk   394,060
27. Northamptonshire   348,515
28. Cornwall   328,098
29. Hertfordshire   311,284
30. Wiltshire   286,822
31. Berkshire   271,009
32. Cumberland   265,746
33. Shropshire   246,307
34. Dorsetshire   223,266
35. Buckinghamshire   219,551
36. Oxfordshire   199,269
37. Cambridgeshire   198,074
38. Bedfordshire   194,588
39. Herefordshire   114,269
40. Westmorland   63,575
41. Huntingdonshire 55,577
42. Rutlandshire   20,346

The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex publishes an extraordinarily useful resource on censuses, online, on its excellent histpop.org website.

Histpop is: “an online resource of almost 200,000 pages of all the published population reports created by the Registrars-General of and its predecessors for England and Wales and for Scotland for the period 1801–1920, including all Census Reports for the period 1801–1937, along with ancillary archival material from The National Archives, and critical essays contextualising much of the material.”

The section relating to the 1911 Census is crammed full of useful background documents relating to the census, including:

• Examples of the different types of schedules used
• Instructions for those involved at all points of the project
• Notes on the teaching of the Census in schools
• Many other fascinating background documents

Below is the latest version of the counties completed to date.

ERRATUM: a small piece of Flintshire (nestling between Cheshire and Shropshire) is erroneously coloured in. Many thanks to our friends at the Association of British Counties for permission to modify their map.