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.

Our payment provider, Worldpay, experienced an outage earlier this afternoon, meaning it was not possible to buy credits on 1911census.co.uk for a short period.

The fault was noticed at approximately 4.30pm UK time and was resolved at around 5.45pm. Apologies for the inconvenience to those who attempted to buy during this period and could not - everything should now be working normally if you wish to try again.

Incidentally, if there is ever a problem buying credits on 1911census.co.uk and you require some urgently it is possible to top up your account at findmypast.com - simply sign in with your 1911census.co.uk sign in details and follow the links to buy credits.

The search function is currently running slowly, possibly as a result of code changes we made this morning to add additional services to the site. We are working on a fix which should restore the search function and ability to view transcripts quickly. Once this is complete we will aim to restore access to the original pages as quickly as possible.

Apologies for the inconvenience - please check this post for updates.

UPDATE: 13:08 Our engineers have managed to fix the problem and all has been tested, working well again. Nice work, guys!

A few people who are using their findmypast.com login details have been getting the error message “this username is logged in elsewhere”. We have already posted a fix for it, but here is a shorter one suggested by one of our customers. We have tried it quickly and it appears to work but we have not reviewed it comprehensively yet. However, there is no danger in trying what is suggested below!

“Basically when the user gets this message within the 1911 census site all they have to do is click the link at the top of the page called ‘Search the 1911 census’.  This will take the user to the advanced search page but will also automatically log them in at the same time. “

Please let us know if this works for you or not by leaving comments. Have a good weekend, all.

As you know, findmypast.com users can use their credits on 1911census.co.uk and vice versa, using the same email and password to login to both sites.

This is lovely unless you have forgotten your findmypast.com password!

This can be a problem for users who have previously registered on findmypast.com - they will get a message on 1911census.co.uk saying that their email address is already registered but they cannot request a password change or reminder directly from there.

Here’s what we recommend you do if you have and are therefore having problems logging in to 1911census.co.uk.

1. Go to the password reset page on findmypast.com: https://www.findmypast.com/forgottenPassword.action
2. Enter the email address that you having problems signing in to 1911census.co.uk with
3. Wait for the email from findmypast.com with your password in it (it should arrive almost immediately, check your spam folders if you cannot see it within a minute)
4. (Optional) If you want to change your password, sign in to findmypast.com, go to “my account” and change your password, then sign out of findmypast.com fully.
5. Make sure you are signed out of findmypast.com for 3 minutes (grab a cup of tea) before you try to sign in to 1911census.co.uk
6. Sign in to 1911census.co.uk using your new password

A few people have been experiencing the following error. UPDATE: The reason for it happening is because when your browsers request a page from us, we compress it when we send it back. This allows us to send your page faster, and to send more pages to more people simultaneously. Some browsers (either older ones or ones where the deafult settings have been changed) do not accept compressed pages and have to be told to do so.

We recommend that you use the latest versions of Firefox, Safari (my personal favourite) or Google Chrome to access the site (and the internet in general).

“Content Encoding Error

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.”

One of our customers (Matthew McGinlay) has very kindly posted a solution, as below. Thank you Matt!

The fix is for firefox

1) In the address bar type “about:config” (but without the inverted commas)
2) Tell it that you will be careful, Promise!!
3) In the filter type encoding
4) There should be one option reading “network.http.accept-encoding”
5) Click in the value column and type “true” (again without the inverted commas)
6) This should fix it and you can search to your hearts content.

UPDATE: Now fixed (16/01/09 12:36)

Thanks to the poster who pointed out that some of the links to the 1911 site in Google search results are pointing to broken pages - we are getting this fixed now.

If you came to the 1911census site and got a “broken” page, click here to go to the 1911 homepage.