We’re very proud to announce that we will be taking the 1911 Census on tour - first stop is the ‘WhoDoYouThinkYouAre? LIVE’ show in London on the weekend of Friday 27^th February – Sunday 1^st March.

If you’d like to find out more about the census and get tips on how to use it, we’ll be hosting a series of workshops and lectures on all 3 days. Or just come and say hello to the team.

We’ve also got a special ticket offer for 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 also available for £22* each, including 3 workshops and fast track entry to Ask the Experts!

*£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.

Below is some more information on the event itself (from the organisers):

The countdown has begun! With only a few short weeks left until the biggest event in the family history calendar, Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE 2009 looks set to be another fantastic show.  The event boasts celebrities, record holders, expert speakers, family history societies, and a huge range of family history products and services to indulge your interest and aid you in your research. 

This year also sees the show dates changing to the earlier weekend of Friday 27^th February – Sunday 1^st March. With most people exploring their family history in the winter months, the event comes at the perfect time of year to bring family historians together and make incredible discoveries about the past! 

If your interest has been ignited by the release of the 1911 census, then Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE is the perfect place to find out more. Hosted by findmypast.com and in association with The National Archives, this exciting addition to the wealth of family history resources available to researchers will be showcased at the event, and there will be a whole host of experts on hand to help you discover how the census can aid you in your research. 

The show would not be complete without its celebrity time travelers, and this year Ainsley Harriott, Sir Matthew Pinsent CBE and Lesley Garrett CBE will be taking to the stage to recount their fascinating family stories. With slavery, royalty, determination and tragedy littering their ancestors’ colourful lives, Ainsley, Matthew and Lesley’s exclusive live sessions are guaranteed to entertain and inspire. 

With new additions including “Scottish Saturday” to help you research and celebrate your Celtic roots, a DNA Workshop supported by Family Tree DNA and a Regional Workshop supported by the Federation of Family History Societies, as well as old favourites such as the Society of Genealogists’ Family History Show and workshop programme, not to mention some 200 exhibitors, Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE is a one-stop genealogy shop like no other. 

So book your tickets today and don’t miss out on this unique opportunity to fill in the gaps in your family tree and make your connection to events in history.

As you know, findmypast.com users can use their credits on 1911census.co.uk and vice versa, using the same email and password to login to both sites.

This is lovely unless you have forgotten your findmypast.com password!

This can be a problem for users who have previously registered on findmypast.com - they will get a message on 1911census.co.uk saying that their email address is already registered but they cannot request a password change or reminder directly from there.

Here’s what we recommend you do if you have and are therefore having problems logging in to 1911census.co.uk.

1. Go to the password reset page on findmypast.com: https://www.findmypast.com/forgottenPassword.action
2. Enter the email address that you having problems signing in to 1911census.co.uk with
3. Wait for the email from findmypast.com with your password in it (it should arrive almost immediately, check your spam folders if you cannot see it within a minute)
4. (Optional) If you want to change your password, sign in to findmypast.com, go to “my account” and change your password, then sign out of findmypast.com fully.
5. Make sure you are signed out of findmypast.com for 3 minutes (grab a cup of tea) before you try to sign in to 1911census.co.uk
6. Sign in to 1911census.co.uk using your new password

We’re very excited to tell you that we have started unlocking the search features.

You can now search using wildcards, or using the “name starting with” feature. To try these out, go to “Search” and click on the “Show advanced fields” button at the bottom.

Both these features will give you a lot more flexibility. For example, I just searched for all footballers in England starting with S.

Wildcards are very useful if you are unsure of a spelling - you can substitute any or all of the parts of a name with a “*”. Searching for “R*B*T*S*” would give you a huge number of variants including Roberts,  Robertson, Rabbits, Reblatts and more. “AN*T*” will find Anthony, Annette, Antony, Anita and many more variations.

N.B You cannot search using a wildcard as the first character yet, but we will switch this on soon. Keep an eye on this blog for updates.

Coming soon - a variants search: this finds variants of first names and surnames. A variant search for Elizabeth would find you Liz, Eliza, Liza, Betty, Betsy, Beth and more

For more on search features, read this earlier post: http://blog.1911census.co.uk/2009/01/extra-search-features-coming-after-launch/

We have turned on a nice little piece of functionality that shows you on the search results page whether you have already paid for an image or transcript. This allows you easily to see images and transcripts that you have already viewed and therefore makes it easier to know exactly when you are about to be charged. It also helps you not look at things you’ve already checked!

Anything that you have already paid for is marked as “PAID”. Anything that you are about to be charged for has the number of credits displayed on the button itself.

Incidentally, for those of you who want to be ultra-cautious about clicking and spending credits by accident (it’s easy to get carried away), you can ask the website to double-check each time it is about to charge you some credits. Just go into “my account” and tick the box marked “Warn me before each use of credits”.

Just to reassure you - the website will never charge you twice to view a transcript or an original page that you have already paid for. It is just that we have now made it clear on the buttons themselves where you have already paid for something.

We hope that makes life easier!

As demand has calmed after the weekend, we are now beginning our programme of unlocking some of the functionality that was restricted at launch.

As of now, you are no longer required to download an image to your computer to view it (although the option to download it for your records remains and all images viewed are stored in “My Records”).

The image is now automatically displayed within the page and you can use our image viewer to zoom in, rotate or generally examine the image as you wish.

Please note you need to have Adobe Flash installed on your computer - if you do not have it already (most PCs do), your computer should prompt you to download it when you try to view an image

If you prefer to have the download link available as a default instead of the image viewer, you can change back to this option by visiting “My Account” and making changes there.

Just a few quick observations about commenting on the blog:

1. We will not reply to all posts (there are a lot) so if you require a specific answer, please contact our Customer Support team
2. Many of the questions being asked are actually answered (in some cases comprehensively) by earlier posts. Do have a look through older entries to see if your question has already been covered.

We have just made an update to the site which increases the site’s tolerance of a user’s slow internet connection. At launch, we limited the time allowed for our servers to respond to slow internet connections to allow us to serve a greater number of pages to a greater number of people.

People on dialup or other slow connections are now less likely to get a “site busy” message.

We have also fixed the old links from the 1911 pre-launch website so anyone who bookmarked pages will now go straight through.

A few people have been having difficulty finding ancestors using the address search. Here are some tips to improve your chances of success!

The address search uses data from the RG14 (Household) schedules rather than the RG78 (Enumerators Summary Books). This means that the data being searched is what your ancestors would have written on the form rather than what the enumerator would have written. Because an enumerator would have been more likely to give a single, standard name to a particular street, there will be more variations in what the householders in a road have put on their form.

For example, the road near where I used to live is called “Clapham Manor Street”. Householders in this street have used various permutations such as Manor St, Manor Street, Clapham Manor, Clapham Manor St, Clapham Manor Street and more (including misspellings on the original household page itself).

We are using intelligent filtering to clean up the more obvious variations such as “Rd” for Road and “St” for Street but obviously, some lateral thinking may be required with these records. Here’s a few tips.

1. The wildcard search will be available soon (next few weeks). This will allow you to search for variants within a district (in my example, perhaps “*manor*” within the registration district to find all roads with ‘manor’ in the name in that area.

2. The RG78 Enumarator Summary Book images will also be available soon. These will let you find a family nearby, then look at the street summary to identify their neighbours (hopefully including your elusive ancestors). They will also give you fascinating details about the area your ancestors lived in.

Hope that helps!

A few people have been experiencing the following error. UPDATE: The reason for it happening is because when your browsers request a page from us, we compress it when we send it back. This allows us to send your page faster, and to send more pages to more people simultaneously. Some browsers (either older ones or ones where the deafult settings have been changed) do not accept compressed pages and have to be told to do so.

We recommend that you use the latest versions of Firefox, Safari (my personal favourite) or Google Chrome to access the site (and the internet in general).

“Content Encoding Error

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.”

One of our customers (Matthew McGinlay) has very kindly posted a solution, as below. Thank you Matt!

The fix is for firefox

1) In the address bar type “about:config” (but without the inverted commas)
2) Tell it that you will be careful, Promise!!
3) In the filter type encoding
4) There should be one option reading “network.http.accept-encoding”
5) Click in the value column and type “true” (again without the inverted commas)
6) This should fix it and you can search to your hearts content.

We have temporarily restricted the search facilities available at launch to allow a greater number of searches to take place at the same time. As soon as we can, we will ‘unlock’ the search feature to allow you to search much more flexibly and find those elusive ancestors. Here are the main features to be unlocked.

1. You will be able to perform a person search without the need for a surname, allowing you to find ancestors where you are unsure of the surname or to perform broader searches (finding all tram drivers within Manchester for example)
2. You will be able to perform ‘wildcard’ searches. This is where you can search using only part of a word if you are unsure of a spelling for examaple “an*t*” will find Anthony, Annette, Antony, Anita and many more variations
3. You will be able to perform ‘variant’ searches - this finds variants of first names and surnames. A variant search for Elizabeth would find you Liz, Eliza, Liza, Betty, Betsy, Beth and more
4. You will be able to perform an address search without the need for a street name allowing much more flexibility
5. You will be able to search date fields with a wider variation in date - for example birth year will allow to to search 5 years in either direction instead of the current 2 years