We are delighted to announce that the 1911 census will be available in October as a new subscription package on our sister website findmypast.com. 1911census.co.uk will continue as a PayAsYouGo-only site. findmypast.com is the only site to offer a subscription to the census.

Subscriptions to the 1911 Census on findmypast.com will be available as two packages:

• 12 months ‘1911′ subscription: £59.95 - the equivalent of viewing 15 transcripts and images using PayAsYouGo credits.
• 6 months ‘1911′ subscription: £39.95 - the equivalent of viewing 10 transcripts and images using PayAsYouGo credits.

Money saving tip: if you plan to view fewer than 10 households, it will be cheaper for you to use PayAsYouGo credits rather than buying a subscription.

The 1911 Census has not been included within findmypast.com’s existing Explorer subscription. If you want comprehensive access to findmypast.com’s records, you can buy the Explorer and 1911 Census subscriptions together at a special introductory price, for a limited time. These discounted prices will be available for at least a month after the launch of the subscription:

• 12 months ‘Explorer and 1911′: £119.95 - a saving of 20%
• 6 months ‘Explorer and 1911′: £74.95 - a saving of 20%

Existing findmypast.com subscribers will be able to upgrade to the new combined subscription using their loyalty discount (currently 20%) at any time - if you decide to upgrade, we will automatically refund the remaining days of your current subscription at a daily rate and deduct this from the price of your new upgraded subscription. Existing findmypast.com subscribers will also get exclusive early access to the 1911 Census before it is made available to the general public.

The 1911 Census will be available as a subscription on findmypast.com no later than October 21st - to receive updates on the launch date, make sure you have opted in to receive newsletters from 1911census.co.uk or findmypast.com.

Finally, don’t forget that you can use your 1911census.co.uk sign in details and credits on findmypast.com, and vice versa. If you plan to buy a 1911 Census subscription, now is a good time to use your remaining credits on the millions of other family history records available on findmypast.com. We’ll add more detail on the 1911 census subscription to the site shortly - if you have any questions at the moment, please contact our Customer Support team.

We were saddened to hear of the death of the oldest surviving First World War veteran, 111 year-old Harry Patch. This follows the recent death of fellow war veteran Henry Allingham, 113, and leaves just one surviving British veteran of World War One; Claude Choules, 108.

As this event drifts further into the past, so too do the memories of these men, and of the horrors of this massive conflict. Harry Patch was a gunner in the Light Infantrymen who survived one of the bloodiest British offensives, the Third Battle of Ypres, while Henry was a mechanic in the Royal Naval Air Service who among other postings, was put to work on the Western Front neutralising the booby trapped bombs left by the Germans as they retreated.

For many years both men refused to talk about their experiences, preferring to shut out the traumatic memories. But in later life, when they did speak, both recalled the nightmarish conditions of the battlefield with their permanently waterlogged trenches (Allingham remembered working up to his armpits in water), the disease and plague of enormous rats, and the smell of death. After the war these men returned to their ordinary lives; Henry as a mechanic and Harry as a plumber.

There were 16 million deaths and 21 million casualties across the countries involved in WWI, and if you have ancestry that is British it is highly likely that a member of your extended family served in the conflict.

And perhaps what is so extraordinary about Henry and Harry is that their experiences, which pushed people to the limits of human endurance, were mirrored by millions of others involved in the fighting, including your ancestors.

Search for ancestors in the military records

Claude Choules in 1911

Britain’s last surviving Great War veteran, Claude Choules, is also the only living person, of any nationality, who has served in both World Wars. In 1911, three years before the start of the conflict, he was 10 years old and lived in Wyre, Pershore in Worcestershire. Here he is on the 1911 census with his father (a clerk to a market gardener), and his two elder brothers, who were labourers:

Search for First World War heroes on the 1911 census now

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 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.

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.

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

Address searching often requires a degree of lateral thinking to get the best results. Here’s a few extra tips and also some new features on the horizon which aim to make your searching easier. The post below is based in replying to questions from a customer searching in Dorking, Surrey but the points apply equally to addresses across the country.

The source of address details on the census is that taken from the original form filled in by the householder (this contrasts with previous censuses, where the forms were compiled by the enumerator, thus introducing some level of standardisation in recording). Unfortunately, several factors conspire to make the historical document problematic for finding addresses using 1911 census returns. 

The first is that in 1911, the concept of a full postal address with a number and street was less evolved than it is today. Many houses simply carried names and householders would then place the town afterwards. To take an example, looking at modern-day Pixham Lane in Dorking, Surrey, the majority of the houses carried names but most householders simply included their postal address as “name of house, Dorking” and this is the information that we transcribe. Unfortunately this was compounded by the small space on the original form left for the address, meaning the householder would often abbreviate the address to make it fit. Have a look at an example of an Original Page to see how small the space was for your ancestors to enter their address. 

The second is that many householders used abbreviations for words (as we do today), such as “Rd” for “Road”. Again using an example of Lincon Road in Dorking (around the corner from Pixham Lane) if you search for “Lincoln” on its own in Dorking, Surrey all 44 properties are returned sequentially, some listed as “Lincoln Road” others as “Lincoln Rd”. Try searching for just the first part of the address and leaving off lanes, Roads, Crescents etc, but narrow the search area by county and district first.

We will be applying many data enhancements and standardisation processes over the coming months to compensate for these common inconsistencies in the originals and to make the data more easily searchable. However, the transcriptions are in this case accurate based on the original documents. To get the best out of any historical document, a degree of lateral thinking often has to be applied. 

Thirdly, place names and spellings change: in the case above, Pixham had an alternative spelling of “Pixholme” and 35 properties are found in Dorking under this listing. If you can find contemporary maps of the area you are searching, either online or in local libraries and archives, these can prove useful as the name today may be utterly different.

 Finally, with 8 million different sets of handwriting, deciphering becomes extremely difficult and what may appear to be transcription errors (and in some cases are) occur. Thus we found one property transcribed as “Pischolme”. However, when examining the householder’s writing, the awful way he had formed the X would lead any person to transcribe it this way.

 We are working on a number of ways to make searching by address simpler in face of the difficulties posed by the original records, but the unique nature of the 1911 census means these methods have had to be worked out afresh for this census, and the census is very much work in progress, although to date hundreds of thousands of researchers have successfully used the service to identify the records they want to view.

 As well as applying many enhancements to the data to attempt to smooth over the inconsistencies of our ancestors, we will also release the RG78 Enumerators Summary Books soon (current estimate is April), which list the households and heads in each area: this information is invaluable for identifying neighbouring houses when the address information left by our ancestors makes this hard to recover. If you have already paid to view a household image, you will be able to view the linked Enumerators images for free, by returning to your saved records. You will not be required to make further payment to view these.

We will also be adding a wildcard search to the street field to allow you to search laterally and many more data standardisations will be applied over the coming months.

We’re frantically preparing for WhoDoYouThinkYouAre LIVE show which starts on Friday at Olympia in London. For those of you who are close enough to attend and want to visit, we have a 2 for 1 ticket offer below. Final tickets are selling fast so don’t delay - seminars are already sold out.

At the show we’ll be presenting the background to the census, how we disgitised it, some tips and hints for better searching and also unveiling some of the features that are to come in the following months on the site including your first glimpse of the RG78 (Enumerator Summary Book) images. We’ll also be on hand to answer your questions one-to-one. So make sure you drop by the findmypast.com stand: we look forward to meeting you.

BUY 2 FOR 1 TICKETS!

Findmypast.com is giving you the chance to buy two adult tickets for the price of one – that’s just £20*! To claim this special offer, simply call 0844 412 4629 or visit www.whodoyouthinkyouarelive.co.uk and quote FMP241 today!

Special Q Jump tickets are now SOLD OUT for Friday and Saturday.

*£2 transaction fee applies. 2 for 1 offer ends 20^th February 09. On Door standard entry tickets priced at £20 each. Q Jump tickets not available on the door. This is not a BBC event.