Contrary to our earlier post, Herefordshire data is not available on the site - apologies for those looking for ancestors there! We hope the other 25 counties are keeping you busy! And happy Boxing Day.
We’ve received many comments on this blog and through the surveys expressing disappointment at the lack of northern English and Welsh counties during the beta period. We’d like to reassure you that this is not intentional!
We’ve been scanning and transcribing the census in order of National Archives catalogue piece number. Broadly, this was originally dictated by the civil servants of the time who ordered the numbering system so that it started in London, moving outwards and upwards through the English counties, then the Welsh counties, and finally the islands and military establishments. This is the order in which the records will be released on 1911census.co.uk in 2009.
Incidentally, the original documents are also stored in this order at the National Archives, so we have been working our way through the two kilometres (or one and a quarter miles in old money) of shelving that these records take up. The records take an enormous amount of time to prepare using hundreds of staff – the 1911 census is eight times larger than previous censuses as it is the only census to date where the household schedules have been preserved. We still have a long way to go until scanning is complete – we will continue to work at The National Archives well into 2009 to finish the image scanning and we then still have the job of transcribing the remainder of the census.
Unfortunately the early timing of the beta test means that the counties available are inevitably concentrated in the south, but we wanted to be able to test the site as early as possible with a reasonable number of records available.
The counties available during beta is restricted to those for which all pieces have been fully scanned and transcribed and which have had personal details redacted (removed) from the images. This is the reason that some southern counties are still not available – we are still in the process of redacting the images or completing the entire county. They have also been selected to give a good balance of urban and rural counties in order to test the address search functionality.
Our policy is to release only complete counties (as defined by The National Archives catalogue for boundaries) to avoid confusion .
Inevitably, in a project of this size some counties have to come later than others, unless we’d taken the rather cruel decision to wait until absolutely everything was complete before letting people take a look, but this would have been contrary to the spirit of the Information Commissioner’s ruling that the records should be made available as soon as possible. Everyone should be satisfied in 2009, rather than having to wait until the original opening date of January 2012.
We hope you’ll bear with us as we continue the project and that the wait for northern counties, Wales and the islands and military records will be worth the wait.
Overnight we have loaded 14 new counties.
The new counties now available are:
We already have over 2,000 complete feedback surveys - thank you!
Please do keep filling them in - they are *incredibly* useful.
You can find a link to it on your beta invitation email. Alternatively, there is a link on the “Sign out” confirmation page - just click the “Sign out” link top right and the link is towards the end of the page.
We’ve added eight new counties overnight - the counties now available are:
London (previously available)
Middlesex (previously available)
Staffordshire (previously available)
Wiltshire (previously available)
Bedfordshire - NEW
Berkshire - NEW
Buckinghamshire - NEW
Cambridgeshire - NEW
Cornwall - NEW
Devonshire - NEW
Dorsetshire - NEW
Gloucestershire - NEW
Enjoy!
Beta testing of the census is underway, with good feedback coming from the testers.
Known issues as at 17 December:
Some registration districts, such as Bermondsey, are not being displayed in the search results, although the data is available and searchable.
On the advanced search, the registration district drop-down list occasionally sticks on a particular district. Take care and double check correct district is used in search.
The site has been opened to beta testing to a limited number of users. The counties currently available are London, Middlesex, Staffordshire and Wiltshire.
Today we went to the SoG (Society of Genealogists) headquarters to review the site with a selected group of expert users - a mixture of professional genealogists, academics and historians. The idea was to let them loose on the site to test the improvements we’ve already made since the usability testing but more importantly to gain insight into what professional genealogists need from the site. We were particularly keen to get their feedback on the untested part - the transcripts and original pages from the census.
Normally, the trip to the SoG is a brisk 5 minute walk from the findmypast.com offices - today it was a rain-drenched dash as the heavens opened and London took the full brunt of a day of torrential rain.
Testing with the experts is a completely different experience from testing with general users - because they’re professional genealogists they’re less fussed over the details of how the homepage looks and if the registration is easy. Instead they focus relentlessly on the quality of the search, the search results and the accuracy of the records.
After briefing them on the background and the “known issues” with the website, we took them into the SoG’s excellent library and simply left them to it, making sure that there were plenty of us around to look over shoulders, take notes and answer questions.
A very productive day for everybody, I think. We got some tremendous insights into what the professionals will be looking for (and another long list of features and improvements to add) and the experts got to see the data for the first time. Rather excitingly, lots of them also found some unexpected new twists in their family trees, which is the real pleasure of family history. And they loved the colour images.