Many thanks for all your comments on the blog - both positive and negative. We’ll continue to monitor and reply when appropriate but do remember that if you want a specific answer within a fixed timeframe, Customer Support is the correct route.
We’re happy to report that so far we’ve approved and published every single comment (although we’ve deleted a lot of spam) so thanks for your moderation!
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.
We are happy to let you know that we will extend credits that are due to expire, for an additional 90 days, at no cost.
This is for the benefit of users who are waiting to search for ancestors in areas which are not yet online.
We cannot extend credits until they are due to expire, so please email 1911 Customer Support (support@1911census.co.uk) 14 days or fewer before your credits are due to expire and let them know which area you are waiting for.
UPDATE (25/02/09): we will be automatically extending credits that are due to expire before the end of March - you do not need to take any steps for this this to happen.
We thought we’d give you an update on the remaining counties and approximately when they will appear on the site. Please note that the dates are highly approximate, but we prefer to give you a rough guide rather than a concrete date that might not be accurate.
The list below is the order of scanning the documents: this might not necessarily be the order the counties actually appear on the site but it should be reasonably close.
The remaining English counties should all be available on the site within two months - the best indication we can give for Wales, Islands and Military at present is summer 2009 but we hope this is more useful than saying nothing! As soon as we can give a closer indication on specific counties and a better steer on Wales, we will.
Order of scanning:
We have released a number of new search features this morning - we hope you find them useful.
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.
We have turned on some more search features for you. Firstly, you can now use a ‘leading wildcard’ (i.e include a wildcard as the first letter of the name). This is helpful as the initial character of names is more liable to be mistranscribed.
Secondly, we have increased the range of dates that you can search: you can now search +/- 5 years on Date of Marriage and +/- 10 years on Date of Birth.
More goodies coming next week - keep your eyes peeled.
In the past week, we have served 4.4 million searches during 476 thousand Visits by 239 thousand Visitors, resulting in 18.7 million Page Impressions.
Since launch that brings us to: 15.8 million searches, 2.34 million Visits, 1.26 million Visitors, 70.7 million Page Impressions.
We are happy to tell you that we have now applied changes to the data on 1911 Census to allow you to search for variants for both first names and last names.
The variants search is essentially a large thesaurus that identifies common variants, mis-spellings and alternative spellings for many of the names within the census. This should be of great help in tracking down elusive ancestors that you have so far not been able to identify.
Click on the “Show advanced fields” button to make use of this search feature.
Coming next: allow a wildcard as the first character, increase range of years available (currently set at a maximum of +/- 2 years).
Enjoy!