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.

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.

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

Now all the English counties are complete, we thought it would be useful to let you know the number of people found in each county: in decreasing size order. Note the huge comparative size of Lancashire and Yorkshire (West Riding).

1. Lancashire   4,767,832
2. London   4,521,685
3. Yorkshire, West Riding   3,045,377
4. Durham   1,369,860
5. Essex   1,350,881
6. Staffordshire   1,348,259
7. Middlesex   1,126,465
8. Kent   1,045,591
9. Warwickshire   1,040,409
10. Cheshire   954,779
11. Hampshire   950,579
12. Surrey   845,578
13. Gloucestershire   736,097
14. Devonshire   699,703
15. Northumberland   696,893
16. Derbyshire   688,423
17. Sussex   663,378
18. Nottinghamshire   604,098
19. Lincolnshire   563,960
20. Worcestershire   526,087
21. Yorkshire, East Riding (with York)   515,041
22. Norfolk   499,116
23. Leicestershire   476,553
24. Somersetshire   458,025
25. Yorkshire, North Riding   419,546
26. Suffolk   394,060
27. Northamptonshire   348,515
28. Cornwall   328,098
29. Hertfordshire   311,284
30. Wiltshire   286,822
31. Berkshire   271,009
32. Cumberland   265,746
33. Shropshire   246,307
34. Dorsetshire   223,266
35. Buckinghamshire   219,551
36. Oxfordshire   199,269
37. Cambridgeshire   198,074
38. Bedfordshire   194,588
39. Herefordshire   114,269
40. Westmorland   63,575
41. Huntingdonshire 55,577
42. Rutlandshire   20,346

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

brightsolid Online Publishing (including findmypast.com) is delighted to confirm that the England & Wales 1911 Census will be made available to the public tomorrow at http://www.1911census.co.uk.

Please see the other posts on this blog for notes on the service and counties available at launch.

We’ve been working for the past week to make the most obvious fixes to the 1911 site before we let real users loose on it. Our usability agency provided us with a detailed report highlighting the main areas that could be improved so we’ve been trying to tick as many of those as possible in a rather short timeframe. But we’ve got a good few improvements ready for the testing.

Today was the first day of our “real user” usability testing at Westbourne Studios in West London. We are testing the site with 12 users over 2 days with around 45 minutes per test. We’ve selected the participants to get a wide ranges of ages, an equal mix of and men and women and also a range of “internet expertise” - from people that have been using the internet for years down to those who are just beginners.

We’re getting as many members of the team to watch the tests as possible - I went down with members of the Customer Support team from findmypast.com who understand better than most what the site needs to do: they spend all day talking to family historians. However, we have to remember that most people using the 1911census site will have very little knowledge of tracing their family trees, censuses or anything else to do with family history, and make sure the site works for them, rather than preaching too the converted.

The first day is eye-opening: of course the users react to the site in a completely different way to the 1911 team, but they give us some fascinating insights into how ordinary people are likely to use the site and what they expect to find where. The downside is that the testing is already beginning to create a very, very long list of things that we need to enhance or fix to make the site ready for general release.

The good news is that we’ve come away with a much better understanding of what users want to find and are bursting with ideas for improvements. Hopefully we will get just as many tomorrow.