We have extended the credits of users whose credits were due to expire between 12/04/09 and 22/06/09 by 90 days at no extra cost. This will affect all users who bought £6.95 credit packs between launch (January 13th) and yesterday (March 22nd) and have not since bought more credits or bought a larger package (these credits will have been extended accordingly).

All users affected will receive an email within the next 2 hours to confirm.

We hope you enjoy the (free) extra time to explore the records!

Please note that any £6.95 credits bought after yesterday will have the standard 90 day validity period applied.

Just to let you know that although Gateshead is in the county of Durham in 1911, for the purposes of the census it was enumerated and collected as part of Northumberland.

Hence records covering this area will be released with Northumberland records.

UPDATE (24/03): we have investigated this anomaly and it seems that the root of the problem is an error in the TNA data catalogue, which has now been addressed and corrected. Gateshead data will now appear when the Northumberland data is loaded in a few weeks’ time but will be searchable under the county of Durham, as it should be. Thanks for your patience!

2 volumes of Yorkshire (West Riding) were not put online at the same time as the rest of the county as they were damaged and had to spend some time in Conservation Care at The National Archives before they could be scanned. These 2 volumes related to Knaresborough and Doncaster.

We are happy to tell you that these 2 final volumes are now live and available on the site and that Yorkshire (West Riding) is now complete.

We have added another 3 counties, the keenly-awaited Yorkshire North & East ridings and Durham. All three counties are searchable as of now.

The next data release will be the final 3 English counties: Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland. We estimate these are approximately a month away.

Enjoy - let us know what you find.

Good news!

We are going to extend the expiry date of any credits with a 90 days expiry date (the £6.95 package) bought to date on 1911census.co.uk.

Their expiry date will be extended by an additional 90 days (meaning they will expire 180 days from the date of purchase), meaning that if you are waiting to research ancestors in counties not yet released, your credits will remain valid whilst the data comes online.

All users affected will be emailed to confirm the change of expiry date within the next 2 weeks. We will create a new post on the blog once the change has been made as well.

You can now download our presentation from the WhoDoYouThinkYouAre LIVE show at Olympia.

The first half shows just the slides, the second half repeats the slides but with our presentation notes on them, which is probably much more useful. Please be aware that it is quite a hefty download (6Mb). We have provided it in PDF format so everyone should be able to view it by downloading free Adobe Acrobat reader software.

Around 1,500 people were accidentally unsubscribed from the last email newsletter, following a glitch in the email which meant that an unsubscribe link was put in the wrong place. We have now resubscribed those affected and sent a follow up email to apologise for the error and confirm their resubscription.

If you were afffected and did not receive an email to confirm your resubscription, please contact Customer Support.

We thought we’d give you a few dates for your diaries as 1911census.co.uk continues on our UK tour with the 1911 census classroom, 1911 shop and free lectures on using the census to trace your family tree back through time.

The next place we will be is once again in London, at the Best Of Britain show at the end of March. This is a massive event dedicated to British travel and tourist attractions and is produced in association with VisitBritain, so it’s a great excuse to plan your holiday at the same time.

For more information, including ticket prices, see the official show website.

We can also confirm we’ll be attending two large family history fairs later in the year, so put these dates and locations in your diaries now and we will send further information nearer the time:

York Racecourse, York: June 27th
Gateshead International Arena, Tyne & Wear: September 12th

We are preparing the next counties for loading onto the website during March. Depending on the speed of the data load and any problems found, we anticipate they should be available in 2-3 weeks.

At a minimum we will load the 2 remaining Ridings of Yorkshire and Durham. We may be able to get one or two others in at the same time if all goes well.

We have loaded a fresh version of the searchable data onto the website, with a number of enhancements:

• Transcription errors reported up to February have been checked and corrected where necessary
• Data standardisation has been applied to first names to correct common mistakes such as Geroge for George
• Data standardisation has been applied to ages to make them standard: for example the various ways that householders may have written “months” has been standardised