Our sister-site, findmypast.com, has officially launched the first and only 1911 census subscription available anywhere online. This means you can now access the England and Wales 1911 census for a fixed fee and without the worry of wasting PayAsYouGo credits. Findmypast.com is also the only site to offer a complete 1841-1911 census collection.

Buy a full subscription and get 20% off - just 10 days to claim

Findmypast.com’s full subscription gives you unique access to records from every census (1841-1911) plus millions of other records, including military, migration and parish records. If you purchase the full subscription you’ll get a 20% discount (offer only valid until 31 October). This means you can do all your family history from a single website, for a fixed fee.

The special introductory prices are:

• 12 month full subscription – £119.95 (includes 20% discount)
• 6 month full subscription – £74.95 (includes 20% discount)

Don’t miss out: offer ends 31 October.

Claim your discounted findmypast.com subscription today

Better value than PayAsYouGo

If you plan to view fewer than 10 households (images and transcriptions), it will be cheaper for you to continue using PayAsYouGo credits, but if you view more than 10 records, a subscription will be your best option.

Subscribe without losing your credits

If you have existing credits, their expiry date will be extended to three months beyond the expiry date of any subscription you buy, so don’t worry, you won’t lose them. You can also use them to access the records not included within our subscriptions, such as Living Relatives searches.

Subscribe to findmypast.com

This week it’s the turn of the actress Kim Cattrall to take part in Who do you Think you Are?. Though the actress is best known for her roles as Americans, she was actually born in Liverpool and raised in Canada.

The family’s journey to Canada can be found on findmypast.com’s Passenger Lists. Kim is seen at three months old travelling with her sister, Cherry, and her mother Shane (listed as Gladys on official documents) in November 1956.

Kim Cattrall on the Passenger Lists

Kim’s father Dennis had travelled several months earlier in April, when Shane was pregnant, so Kim was on her way to meet her father for the first time.

Kim Cattrall's father on the Passenger Lists

Kim’s family have remained close to their Liverpudlian roots and Kim has returned many times over the years. This time Kim is on a mission to solve the mystery surrounding her maternal grandfather George Baugh.

George married Kim’s Grandmother Marion Thomas in 1928. The event can be found in findmypast.com’s birth, marriage, and death indexes.

Kim Catrall's grandfather's marriage

However, George walked out on his wife and three daughters when Shane was eight – leaving the family in poverty – and was never heard from again. The only clues Kim has are a photograph and a newspaper article from the 1980s, which mentions her grandfather’s sister.

Shane and her sisters are desperate to know what happened to their father, but will they like what they find? Is Kim’s prediction that ‘I think it’s going to end in tears’ going to be right? Watch BBC One tonight at 9pm to find out.

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.

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.

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

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.

Overnight, we have uploaded records for the remaining English Counties (Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland) and added the missing Gateshead district records into the county of Durham (they were incorrectly listed as part of Northumberland - this is now fixed and they are searchable under Durham, as they should be).

Therefore all English counties are now complete.

Scanning of Welsh records is well underway and we are working on the transcriptions of the first batch of Welsh counties, which will be the next data release. Although we do not have a precise release date for them yet, we anticipate that we will have some data from Wales available in the next 4 to 6 weeks.

We are quality checking the final three English counties at the moment (Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland), as well as the missing Gateshead data from Durham (which was not uploaded with the rest of the county owing to an error in the master data catalogue, which has now been rectified).

If no problems are found, this data should be available on the live site either tomorrow or Wednesday. Gateshead data will be searchable under the county of Durham, as it should be.

UPDATE Tuesday 16:50: we’re redeploying the data now, it should start appearing late this evening / early tomorrow morning if all goes smoothly.