Findmypast’s Amy is taking her own journey back into her family’s past. Read on for her latest discoveries…

Now that I know my great-grandparents were alive, I can search to see if I can find them in the recently released 1911 census. I’ll take my great-grandmother Ada Maria Howard as an example to demonstrate how to find an ancestor.

I’ve selected the 1911 person search from findmypast’s census collection and have entered basic information to begin with, following the findmypast rule of thumb of ‘less is more’. I’ve entered Ada in the first name field (leaving the variants box ticked so that the search includes nicknames, middle names and initials) and Howard in the surname field.

Initial search - please click to enlarge

This search returned 314 results, meaning there were 314 Ada Howards living in England and Wales in 1911. Fortunately, I have a bit more information about my great-grandmother courtesy of her marriage certificate (featured in the post below) so was able to narrow these results down a bit.

I selected ‘redefine current search’ and added a birth year to the search terms. Ada was recorded as being 23 years old at the time of her marriage in 1926, so I’ve entered 1903 as the birth year. The search defaults to include births two years either side of 1903, a really handy tactic to avoid any age inaccuracies in the census. It’s not unusual to see a year or two shaved off of or added to ancestors’ ages in census returns – be it down to vanity, an attempt to conceal an illegitimate child or even simply that the head of household couldn’t recall the exact ages of his/her children.

Redefined search - please click to enlarge

By adding this rough date of birth, I managed to narrow the list of results down to just 27 possibilities. However, Ada’s marriage certificate had provided me with another handy bit of information – her father’s name, Ernest. So I selected ‘redefine current search’ again and then switched to ‘advanced search’ via the tabs at the top of the search screen (see below). Here I entered ‘Ernest Howard’ in the ‘other persons living in the same household’ search field.

Advanced search - please click to enlarge

This time, my search returned just three results. One of these, the top result in the image below, looked like a clear winner as this Ada Howard was living in Hertfordshire in 1911 – the same county my great-grandmother was married in 15 years later. In addition, the marriage certificate had informed me that Ada’s middle name was Maria – not matching the middle names of either of the other two search results.

Search results - please click to enlarge

To confirm that this was indeed the right Ada, I viewed the transcript – a typewritten version of the original census page.

1911 census transcript - please click to enlarge

You can see that the transcript showed me exactly what I had hoped it would; Ada Howard living as the daughter of Ernest Howard, a Chimney Sweep. If you look at the bottom of the transcript, you can also see that the address the family were living at in 1911 exactly matches that recorded on my great-grandmother’s marriage certificate – Chapel End, Buntingford. I then decided to view the original census image.

Original 1911 census image - please click to enlarge

The 1911 census is the first from which original householder schedules have survived – the other surviving censuses from 1841 to 1901 consist of the census enumerators’ summary books. This means that the 1911 census return you can see above was actually completed by my great-great-grandfather Ernest Howard – you can see his signature at the bottom right of the page. Next to Ernest’s signature, we are also told exactly how many rooms (rooms, not bedrooms!) their home had. In the Howard family’s case, there were seven people living in just four rooms.

The 1911 census return has also provided me with brand new information about Ada’s mother, my great-great-grandmother. Her name is a bit tricky to read on the census return, however it has been recorded as ‘Merey’ in the transcript. The census form also informs me that she was 40 years old in 1911 and had been married to 45-year-old Ernest for 22 years. These handy bits of information will enable me to search the BMD indexes once again, this time for my great-great-grandparents’ marriage and births. In addition, if I look over to the right of the census form, I can actually see where Ernest and Merey were both born.

My 1911 search has provided one final bit of rather shocking information. In 1911, my great-great-grandmother had given birth to an impressive 12 children but sadly only half of these had survived. The number six has been listed in the census form’s ninth column, recording the number of ‘children who have died’. The 1911 census return has provided me with a lot of new information about my family, however the most striking point is just how precarious my great-grandmother’s existence must have been!

Follow Amy’s research into her past on her blog.

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.

Want to find out what the statisticians of the time gleaned from the 1911 census data?

Take a look at the reports on the excellent Vision of Britain website from the University of Portsmouth

The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex publishes an extraordinarily useful resource on censuses, online, on its excellent histpop.org website.

Histpop is: “an online resource of almost 200,000 pages of all the published population reports created by the Registrars-General of and its predecessors for England and Wales and for Scotland for the period 1801–1920, including all Census Reports for the period 1801–1937, along with ancillary archival material from The National Archives, and critical essays contextualising much of the material.”

The section relating to the 1911 Census is crammed full of useful background documents relating to the census, including:

• Examples of the different types of schedules used
• Instructions for those involved at all points of the project
• Notes on the teaching of the Census in schools
• Many other fascinating background documents

Just to let you know that although Gateshead is in the county of Durham in 1911, for the purposes of the census it was enumerated and collected as part of Northumberland.

Hence records covering this area will be released with Northumberland records.

UPDATE (24/03): we have investigated this anomaly and it seems that the root of the problem is an error in the TNA data catalogue, which has now been addressed and corrected. Gateshead data will now appear when the Northumberland data is loaded in a few weeks’ time but will be searchable under the county of Durham, as it should be. Thanks for your patience!

You can now download our presentation from the WhoDoYouThinkYouAre LIVE show at Olympia.

The first half shows just the slides, the second half repeats the slides but with our presentation notes on them, which is probably much more useful. Please be aware that it is quite a hefty download (6Mb). We have provided it in PDF format so everyone should be able to view it by downloading free Adobe Acrobat reader software.

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.

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.

There have been a few questions on transcription accuracy and our policy towards certain aspects of transcribing the records. We hope this post clears up a few questions!

The transcription accuracy of the 1911census.co.uk website at launch is in excess of 98.5% according to recent tests - this threshold is set as a requirement by the National Archives.

Transcribing the census is a massive exercise - every single digitised document has to be read and transcribed and this process results in over 7 billion keystrokes over the course of the project. Naturally in this volume of keystrokes, more than a few errors will be made.

However, during the transcription process, we do apply a number of processes (developed during our many years’ experience of digitising censuses and other historical documents) to correct the most obvious errors and keep inaccuracy to a minimum.

The 1911census in particular poses specific problems - because the household summaries are the core documents rather than enumerators’ books, the variety of the handwriting itself is significantly wider - in fact there are 8 million different hands writing returns, making interpretation of the handwriting a much more challenging task!

Now some good news - the 98.5% accuracy at launch will improve over time.

The first way that it will be improved is by users of 1911census.co.uk reporting errors to us. Each report is reviewed by hand by the transcription team and if the change is approved, the change is incorporated into the search results, usually within a month (when the next data upload is made to the website).

Our policy is to accept changes only if they match what is on the original page (i.e the household form). So if your ancestor made spelling mistakes on the original page, they will be carried through into the transcript. This is actually more common than you might think, so please be sure to check the original page before you assume that there is an error, rather than an accurate transcription of the original document.

The second way that we improve the quality of the transcription over time is by applying ‘data standardisation’ processes. This is basically a set of rules we develop over time as we identify errors and apply to the data. A basic standardisation that we apply for example is converting “Geo” to “George” and listing records from Kent, Surrey and Middlesex as “London” if they fall within the metropolitan London area. We are developing and applying more data standardisations over time to eliminate more of the current transcription errors and to make searching easier, but some of these processes are much easier to apply once the data is complete.

All of our transcriptions undergo thorough batch sampling, by the transcription house, by The National Archives and by our in-house Quality Control team. Any batch failing to meet the required level of accuracy is rejected and rekeyed.

One way of reducing transcription errors is by ‘double-keying’ every entry - this basically means getting the transcriptions done twice (by different people) and then comparing the two versions and eliminating differences by hand. However, the cost of doing this naturally doubles the transcription cost, would not improve the accuracy rate by a hugely significant degree (you can never reach 100%), and the costs would have had to have been passed on to the public – resulting in higher prices for the census service.

We could also have taken the route of transcribing fewer fields – just a name index, like the old pre-digital booklets – but feel that this would have resulted in fewer people being able to find their ancestors as it would narrow the number of fields you can search on. It would also have made the transcription much less useful for academic study, which is one of the uses to which 1911 census will be put when it is completed.

It is important to remember that the transcription is designed as a finding aid for the original documents, which should be viewed as the “source of truth”; happily most users are able to find their ancestors despite the inevitable errors that creep in.

We have also provided very flexible search options (using wildcards, for example), which, with some lateral thinking, can also help you track down those who do not appear on the first search. The search options had to be constrained at launch to allow for the volumes of people searching, but we have been unlocking these features as the week has worn on, and there is more to come (see other blog posts).