Comments on: 1911 Census subscriptions available in October

By: judith jack jewlery

judith jack jewlery — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 22:35:06 +0000

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” Hugh Downs

By: Pat Slugocki

Pat Slugocki — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:19:36 +0000

A couple of months ago I was able to change the 1911 census image from djvu to jpg by using ’switch to standard viewer’ on the image. I did not use the 1911 for a bit as my voucher ran out and I had a lot of FH stuff from a cousin to add. On Christmas Eve I tooke out a subscription for 1911, and can no longer see ’switch to standard viewer’. Is it there, and I am blind, or has it gone?

By: Sally

Sally — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:00:17 +0000

@Iantester - Thanks for your reply, I am sure a lot of frowns have now turned to smiles. This new limit will make it a lot easier for researchers to do one name studies or like myself, one place studies.
Well done Findmypast.

By: iantester

iantester — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:42:17 +0000

@Sally - I’m happy to confirm this is the case. The Fair Usage limit is designed to catch people abusing the service, not to stop you doing your family history. It has been set by looking very closely at the data showing how people use the site, and we hope you’ll agree that 5000 views a month should be plenty for personal research!

By: Sally

Sally — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:07:34 +0000

I have received an email from Findmypast for ‘NewTerms and Conditions Updates’ which says
“Fair Usage limits – we have dramatically increased the monthly Fair Usage Limit for subscribers and simplified how we calculate it. The new limit is a huge 5000 record views per month and we will send a warning email if you start to get close to this limit. We will also be introducing a counter on the website soon to let you see how close to the limit you are getting”.

It is after midnight here so not sure if I am reading this right - does it really mean that I can look at 5000 images per month or do I need to go to bed and look at the email again in the morning?

Good to know I will get notified when I am near my limit and I look forward to the counter so that I can check my own downloads.

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:50:29 +0000

Why not share a sub ? / Sub let it / Would anyone know
After all you paid for access but not by whom !
I took out the 6 month deal with FMP and did a search on everything that I had previously listed for 1911 - The sub was better than PPV.
Only took a few days, big pile of paper plus image downloads.
Now need enter to tree software and check.
No doubt I shall find a few more - plus some backtracking.
So while the Sub was sort of better ‘Value’ I still didnt need the timescale.
Why not monthly or quarterly ?
A 6 month sub of £75 is far too expensive
The transcriptions are not presented the same way as the 1911 site either [Less]

By: Ian Thirlwell

Ian Thirlwell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:32:46 +0000

@iantester - thanks for the suggestion. Having been using findmypast for some years, since the BMDs went online (old 1837online system), I hadn’t realised there was a different viewer. I had recently found an alternative which was to open in Irfanview on download and save as jpg, but the standard viewer may be more convenient.

By: iantester

iantester — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:09:10 +0000

@Jean - no need to worry, your subscription allows you to view as many records you like within reason, so you are not being “charged”.

@Ian - If you “switch to standard viewer” on the image window on findmypast, you will get the images as jpegs - both images are of identical quality for the 1911 Census. You’re only seeing DjVu because this is what is set as your default viewer from your previous use of the site, and you can change this simply. Hope that helps! We are reviewing the filename format across all censuses so we will change this if we can find a more user-friendly solution.

By: Ian Thirlwell

Ian Thirlwell — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:16:27 +0000

@iantester - 1911census is labelled “powered by findmypast.com”, like at the top of this blog. So where did the 1911census search engine come from?
Irrespective of this, I should expect a simple search on a person’s name, no variants etc, to produce the same results on each site given they are both working with the same data and, I hope, the same transcriptions of this data. If you start complicating the searches then perhaps different results may arise because of different handling of variant data in the search fields.
Another irritation is also apparent. Having downloaded many images from 1911census over the past months, I now find that not only are the findmypast images in djvu format (for consistency with the other censuses I suppose but annoyingly different from the jpg format of 1911census) but the filename format is completely different.
I never did understand why findmypast in its original incarnation chose djvu, requiring a special viewer, over jpg or even tif for its images.

By: Jean

Jean — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:33:59 +0000

THE GOOD and THE BAD
I tested the new images and the buttons to view the images are displayed in the header of the Original Schedule. ‘On mouse over’ each button displays the caption - ‘This image is free to view’.
This works wonderfully and gives a good service.
Now for the downside - to display the Original Schedule I had to select ‘View census image’ on the 1911 census search results page - and this ‘costs’ 30 credits or a charge on my subscription.
I had already downloaded the Original Schedule 10 days ago - but now my subscription will be charged for a second time in order to access the additional pages.
Where is the benefit of early access for existing subscribers?