Good news!

We are going to extend the expiry date of any credits with a 90 days expiry date (the £6.95 package) bought to date on 1911census.co.uk.

Their expiry date will be extended by an additional 90 days (meaning they will expire 180 days from the date of purchase), meaning that if you are waiting to research ancestors in counties not yet released, your credits will remain valid whilst the data comes online.

All users affected will be emailed to confirm the change of expiry date within the next 2 weeks. We will create a new post on the blog once the change has been made as well.

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 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!

There have been many comments on the PayAsYouGo pricing and the fact that older censuses are nowadays available via subscription packages on other sites such as findmypast.com and ancestry.co.uk.

To be clear - there will be a subscription option later in 2009 which will allow you to access the 1911 Census for a fixed fee. This will only be available on findmypast.com: 1911census.co.uk will remain as a PayAsYouGo site.

Like the 1901 census - the only other census to make its original debut online – and many other major releases of historical records (such as BT27 passenger lists on ancestorsonboard.com and DocumentsOnline at The National Archives), the site has been released on a PayAsYouGo basis to allow the general public (the vast majority of whom want only a few records) to access the records without buying a hefty subscription. We believe this is fair, as everyone gets charged for what they use.

The prices charged on the 1911census site reflect the significant costs in digitising the records and providing the online service. See our earlier posts for more detail on this and the cast of hundreds involved. We will add more information to the main site soon under the “How we digitise the census” section, but those of you who saw the TV news reports over the past few days probably have some idea of the scale of the project. Also see our post below for some video footage of how we digitise the census (apologies that it is as yet mostly unedited).

Earlier censuses cost significantly less to put online because:

1. they were *much* smaller
2. some of them were already filmed and did not need to be conserved, curated and lovingly scanned and checked by hand
3. the online storage and retrieval costs of many more, higher-quality colour images is greater.

The 1911 is a different beast to earlier censuses and, we hope you’ll agree, provides rather a refreshing change in the level of detail provided.

We understand that heavier users (especially family historians and those researching one name studies) will want an “all you can eat” option and we’re committed to providing that on findmypast.com later in 2009. However, we cannot do it until the records are complete and as this is a moving target it would be unfair to give you any precise date, as it would be largely a guess.

For dedicated family historians with many ancestors to find, the price for each item will be cheaper within the subscription option available later, although the initial outlay for a subscription is higher, but for most people PayAsYouGo works out as a lower overall spend.

Just a quick note to remind you that you will not be able to access transcripts or images of original pages you have paid for until the site comes back online at the full launch later in 2009.

Therefore please make sure that you print out transcripts and original pages, or download them to your computer, if you want to work on them in the coming months. Everyting that you have paid for is listed in the “My Records” area.

Once the site is properly launched, you will be able to access any records used during the beta period through the “My Records” area. And of course any credits remaining on your account will be available to spend either on 1911census.co.uk or findmypast.com.