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. 

Due to the positive feedback from the beta period so far, and to allow people to search the extra 22 counties we’ve added, we have extended the beta period into the Christmas holidays.

Please keep an eye on this blog for updates on the shutdown date.

There will not be live Customer Suppport over Christmas, Boxing Day and the weekend directly after (27th/28th) but we will be picking up enquiries again on the 29th.

A few people have received invite emails, deleted them and not been able to get back into the site. Please remember to either bookmark the beta site in your browser, or to use the link on the right of this blog, as you cannot access it from the main 1911census.co.uk site.

Finally, please keep the feedback coming, thank you *ever* so much for your time and help so far, and our very best wishes for a happy Christmas and an excellent New Year from the entire team here at findmypast.com and brightsolid.

Overnight we have loaded 14 new counties.

The new counties now available are:

• Hampshire (NEW)
• Herefordshire (NEW)
• Hertfordshire (NEW)
• Huntingdonshire (NEW)
• Norfolk (NEW)
• Northamptonshire (NEW)
• Oxfordshire (NEW)
• Rutlandshire (NEW)
• Shropshire (NEW)
• Suffolk (NEW)
• Surrey (NEW)
• Sussex (NEW)
• Warwickshire (NEW)
• Worcestershire (NEW)

• London (previously available)
• Middlesex (previously available)
• Staffordshire (previously available)
• Wiltshire (previously available)
• Bedfordshire (previously available)
• Berkshire (previously available)
• Buckinghamshire (previously available)
• Cambridgeshire (previously available)
• Cornwall (previously available)
• Devonshire (previously available)
• Dorsetshire (previously available)
• Gloucestershire (previously available)

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.

Just to let you know that the Customer Support team is not available over this weekend - however please do submit questions / issues via the “Contact us” link at the bottom of every page or leave voice messages on the phone system and we will get back to you on Monday.

Many people have reported that the clear search button seems to be a bit erratic. It is working, but not perfectly. Make sure you click on the text in the middle of the button - clicking on the edges doesn’t seem to do anything at the moment. We will try to fix it soon!

A lot of people have fed back that searching the census is not as flexible as it could be! There’s a good reason for that - at the moment some search functions are deliberately restricted. This is to allow the site to deal with more queries immediately after it goes online in 2009, when it is expected that there will be huge demand from people trying to access the service. 

The majority of people will be able to find at least some of their ancestors with the current search options. However, as soon as the demand has  stabilised, we will release updates to the site to turn on searching with wildcards (including an initial wildcard), provide NameThesaurus variants, and will also lift the restriction that requires users  to use a surname for a person search or a street name for the address search. When these restrictions are relaxed it will be *much* easier to find the more elusive ancestors.

Sorry we can’t open these up to you for the moment - however, we need to test the site as it will be at launch. We will email everybody who is registered on the site the moment new features become available after launch, so make sure you register.

“On the advanced search, the registration district drop-down list occasionally sticks on a particular district.” This should now be working properly again.

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.