The first half-day of the census launch is going well so far.

As of 1pm, family historians have performed 925,000 searches on the 1911 Census website.

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.

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:

1. Bedfordshire
2. Berkshire
3. Buckinghamshire
4. Cambridgeshire
5. Cheshire
6. Cornwall
7. Derbyshire
8. Devonshire
9. Dorsetshire
10. Essex
11. Gloucestershire
12. Hampshire
13. Herefordshire
14. Hertfordshire
15. Huntingdonshire
16. Kent
17. Lancashire
18. Leicestershire
19. Lincolnshire
20. London
21. Middlesex
22. Norfolk
23. Northamptonshire
24. Nottinghamshire
25. Oxfordshire
26. Rutlandshire
27. Shropshire
28. Somersetshire
29. Staffordshire
30. Suffolk
31. Surrey
32. Sussex
33. Warwickshire
34. Wiltshire
35. Worcestershire
36. Yorkshire West Riding

 Counties not available for launch:

 England:

• Durham
• Cumberland
• Northumberland
• Westmorland
• Yorkshire – East Riding and North Riding

 Wales:

• Anglesey
• Brecknockshire
• Carnarvonshire
• Cardiganshire
• Carmarthenshire
• Denbighshire
• Flintshire
• Glamorgan
• Merionethshire
• Montgomeryshire
• Monmouthshire
• Pembrokeshire
• Radnorshire

Other:

• Isle of Man
• Channel Islands
• Royal Navy
• Military Establishments

We expect the site to be very busy at launch, and so we have taken a number of measures to make sure that as many people as possible can get their searches completed successfully.

The first is that we have deliberately restricted some of the search functions on the site, meaning that the search is not as flexible as it will be later on - please see our separate post on the extra search functionality that will be ‘unlocked’ after launch.

Secondly, we are only allowing users to download original pages, rather than view them directly on the website - an in-page viewer will be switched on shortly after launch.

Thirdly, only one image will be available at launch: the principal side of the original household (or institution) page. Most searches have up to seven associated images, which will be made available to you shortly after launch. These extra images are included in the cost (30 credits) of the original page so you will not need to pay extra to view them once available. The images include the rear of the household form and images from the Enumerators’ books (akin to images from earlier censuses but with more detail and in full colour). Please see our separate post about the extra images - they are really rather exciting and unique to the 1911 Census!

During launch, if the site becomes exceptionally busy, we will also restrict the number of new people entering the site. We want to allow the people who are already using the site to complete their searches rather than make the site impossibly slow for everybody. We have built the site to withstand a very large (but not infinite) number of visitors, so if you find that you are not being allowed in, please bear with us.

We call this ‘velvet roping’ - much as you would restrict access to a building to large numbers of visitors to ensure the comfort of those inside, we will try to make sure that the experience of those searching is not overwhelmed by new visitors if the site becomes very busy.  Real-time service updates can be found on this blog, which we advise you to check frequently for the latest news.

Obviously, we will ‘unlock’ the powerful search features, switch on image viewers and add the extra images as soon as possible after launch and let you know by email and via this blog when we have done this. We cannot commit to specific dates for this yet, so please check here for the latest news or sign up for our newsletter (in the “My Account” area on the website).

A lot of people have fed back that searching the census is not as flexible as it could be! There’s a good reason for that - at the moment some search functions are deliberately restricted. This is to allow the site to deal with more queries immediately after it goes online in 2009, when it is expected that there will be huge demand from people trying to access the service. 

The majority of people will be able to find at least some of their ancestors with the current search options. However, as soon as the demand has  stabilised, we will release updates to the site to turn on searching with wildcards (including an initial wildcard), provide NameThesaurus variants, and will also lift the restriction that requires users  to use a surname for a person search or a street name for the address search. When these restrictions are relaxed it will be *much* easier to find the more elusive ancestors.

Sorry we can’t open these up to you for the moment - however, we need to test the site as it will be at launch. We will email everybody who is registered on the site the moment new features become available after launch, so make sure you register.