On April 8 we stated that we hoped to have some data from Wales available by the end of May. This release has been put back due to the complexity of transcribing the original Welsh-language records, and we now hope to upload all of the Welsh data by the end of June.
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:
We have loaded a fresh version of the searchable data onto the website, with a number of enhancements:
Please find below a full list of the 36 counties available at launch. Please see our separate post on the rollout dates of the remaining counties.
If you have not already seen it, we have already posted an article on the order of scanning and rollout of the counties, click below to read it:
http://blog.1911census.co.uk/2008/12/the-order-of-scanning-and-our-unintentional-northsouth-divide/
Counties available at launch:
Counties not available for launch:
England:
Wales:
Other:
Although the vast majority of the West Riding of Yorkshire is complete, there are 2 pieces which are not yet online as they are still being examined by the Conservation Team to prepare them for scanning. The 2 pieces are from Knaresborough and Doncaster respectively and each contain approximately 1,500 individuals.
We will add them in as soon as possible and update you when they are available.
Although there are already 36 complete counties at launch (35 if you don’t count the West Riding of Yorkshire as a county in its own right), there are more to come before the census is complete.
The counties we have released were the most heavily populated in 1911, so in terms of the percentage of the 1911 population 83% of the people included in the Census (and 88% of those in England) are available on the site at launch.
To understand the order we have been scanning the counties (and therefore the order they will become available) please read our previous post on scanning order: http://blog.1911census.co.uk/2008/12/the-order-of-scanning-and-our-unintentional-northsouth-divide/
Because of the way the pieces are ordered, those of you looking for relatives in the north of England and in Wales will have to be patient whilst we scan and transcribe the final pieces of the census. The good news is that we anticipate having the entire census complete by summer. The less good news is that we cannot give you a concrete date for when each individual county will become available (and neither can our Customer Support team!).
There’s a very good reason for this: scanning and preparing the census for publication online is a long process which is not 100% predictable. Although we have been making excellent progress to date (hence the early release of the counties so far) given that they were originally due to complete in 2011 , there are always a few unpredictable things that can delay the process. These include having to stop scanning to hoover dust out of the scanning machines, having to send pieces for conservation before they can be scanned or simple delays in moving the huge quantities of data generated from one place to another. The data for the 1911 census will take up over half a petabyte of storage - that’s the equivalent of over 50 million copies of the Yellow Pages and quite challenging to move around!
Rest assured that as soon as we have more counties to release, we will let you know immediately by email (if you are signed up to receive updates) and on this blog.
Overnight we have loaded 14 new counties.
The new counties now available are:
We’ve added eight new counties overnight - the counties now available are:
London (previously available)
Middlesex (previously available)
Staffordshire (previously available)
Wiltshire (previously available)
Bedfordshire - NEW
Berkshire - NEW
Buckinghamshire - NEW
Cambridgeshire - NEW
Cornwall - NEW
Devonshire - NEW
Dorsetshire - NEW
Gloucestershire - NEW
Enjoy!