It seems longer (!), but the 1911 Census has now been live for a week.
In that time we have served 52 million Page Impressions and 11.4 million searches during 1.85 million Visits by 1.1 million Visitors from around the globe.
As the initial rush of traffic dies down, we are starting to release new features on to the site. Stay tuned to this blog for more news.
We have turned on a nice little piece of functionality that shows you on the search results page whether you have already paid for an image or transcript. This allows you easily to see images and transcripts that you have already viewed and therefore makes it easier to know exactly when you are about to be charged. It also helps you not look at things you’ve already checked!
Anything that you have already paid for is marked as “PAID”. Anything that you are about to be charged for has the number of credits displayed on the button itself.
Incidentally, for those of you who want to be ultra-cautious about clicking and spending credits by accident (it’s easy to get carried away), you can ask the website to double-check each time it is about to charge you some credits. Just go into “my account” and tick the box marked “Warn me before each use of credits”.
Just to reassure you - the website will never charge you twice to view a transcript or an original page that you have already paid for. It is just that we have now made it clear on the buttons themselves where you have already paid for something.
We hope that makes life easier!
As demand has calmed after the weekend, we are now beginning our programme of unlocking some of the functionality that was restricted at launch.
As of now, you are no longer required to download an image to your computer to view it (although the option to download it for your records remains and all images viewed are stored in “My Records”).
The image is now automatically displayed within the page and you can use our image viewer to zoom in, rotate or generally examine the image as you wish.
Please note you need to have Adobe Flash installed on your computer - if you do not have it already (most PCs do), your computer should prompt you to download it when you try to view an image
If you prefer to have the download link available as a default instead of the image viewer, you can change back to this option by visiting “My Account” and making changes there.
Just a few quick observations about commenting on the blog:
In the first 48 hours of the site being live (midnight to midnight) we have served:
As the site is running smoothly, we are now beginning to look at unlocking some of the site features to improve your experience.
So far, we have only made a single image available on 1911census.co.uk - the principal original page of the RG14 Household (or Institution) Summary.
Within the next month, we will make the following images available at NO EXTRA COST.
If you have already bought the original page of the household original page, you will be able to view any associated images for free, simply by returning to the record you have paid for via the “My Records” area on the website. Any new images that you buy will have all the associated images available at the flat cost of 30 credits for the lot.
Not every search result will have all of the following images available but many households will.
Extra RG14 Household (or Institution) Schedule images:
We have just made an update to the site which increases the site’s tolerance of a user’s slow internet connection. At launch, we limited the time allowed for our servers to respond to slow internet connections to allow us to serve a greater number of pages to a greater number of people.
People on dialup or other slow connections are now less likely to get a “site busy” message.
We have also fixed the old links from the 1911 pre-launch website so anyone who bookmarked pages will now go straight through.
For those of you wanting to know the % of the population covered by the records available at launch, the figures are:
A few people have been having difficulty finding ancestors using the address search. Here are some tips to improve your chances of success!
The address search uses data from the RG14 (Household) schedules rather than the RG78 (Enumerators Summary Books). This means that the data being searched is what your ancestors would have written on the form rather than what the enumerator would have written. Because an enumerator would have been more likely to give a single, standard name to a particular street, there will be more variations in what the householders in a road have put on their form.
For example, the road near where I used to live is called “Clapham Manor Street”. Householders in this street have used various permutations such as Manor St, Manor Street, Clapham Manor, Clapham Manor St, Clapham Manor Street and more (including misspellings on the original household page itself).
We are using intelligent filtering to clean up the more obvious variations such as “Rd” for Road and “St” for Street but obviously, some lateral thinking may be required with these records. Here’s a few tips.
1. The wildcard search will be available soon (next few weeks). This will allow you to search for variants within a district (in my example, perhaps “*manor*” within the registration district to find all roads with ‘manor’ in the name in that area.
2. The RG78 Enumarator Summary Book images will also be available soon. These will let you find a family nearby, then look at the street summary to identify their neighbours (hopefully including your elusive ancestors). They will also give you fascinating details about the area your ancestors lived in.
Hope that helps!
There have been many comments on the PayAsYouGo pricing and the fact that older censuses are nowadays available via subscription packages on other sites such as findmypast.com and ancestry.co.uk.
To be clear - there will be a subscription option later in 2009 which will allow you to access the 1911 Census for a fixed fee. This will only be available on findmypast.com: 1911census.co.uk will remain as a PayAsYouGo site.
Like the 1901 census - the only other census to make its original debut online – and many other major releases of historical records (such as BT27 passenger lists on ancestorsonboard.com and DocumentsOnline at The National Archives), the site has been released on a PayAsYouGo basis to allow the general public (the vast majority of whom want only a few records) to access the records without buying a hefty subscription. We believe this is fair, as everyone gets charged for what they use.
The prices charged on the 1911census site reflect the significant costs in digitising the records and providing the online service. See our earlier posts for more detail on this and the cast of hundreds involved. We will add more information to the main site soon under the “How we digitise the census” section, but those of you who saw the TV news reports over the past few days probably have some idea of the scale of the project. Also see our post below for some video footage of how we digitise the census (apologies that it is as yet mostly unedited).
Earlier censuses cost significantly less to put online because:
The 1911 is a different beast to earlier censuses and, we hope you’ll agree, provides rather a refreshing change in the level of detail provided.
We understand that heavier users (especially family historians and those researching one name studies) will want an “all you can eat” option and we’re committed to providing that on findmypast.com later in 2009. However, we cannot do it until the records are complete and as this is a moving target it would be unfair to give you any precise date, as it would be largely a guess.
For dedicated family historians with many ancestors to find, the price for each item will be cheaper within the subscription option available later, although the initial outlay for a subscription is higher, but for most people PayAsYouGo works out as a lower overall spend.