Our payment provider, Worldpay, experienced an outage earlier this afternoon, meaning it was not possible to buy credits on 1911census.co.uk for a short period.

The fault was noticed at approximately 4.30pm UK time and was resolved at around 5.45pm. Apologies for the inconvenience to those who attempted to buy during this period and could not - everything should now be working normally if you wish to try again.

Incidentally, if there is ever a problem buying credits on 1911census.co.uk and you require some urgently it is possible to top up your account at findmypast.com - simply sign in with your 1911census.co.uk sign in details and follow the links to buy credits.

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!

We have identified an issue with our payment processor which could cause confusion when you receive your bank or credit card statement if you have bought credits on the beta site.

We have identified that some payments made to 1911census.co.uk are showing on bank and credit card statements as “ScotlandsPeople” instead of “1911census.co.uk”. brightsolid operate ScotlandsPeople as well as findmypast.com and 1911census.co.uk and the wrong company name was applied to the 1911census.co.uk account because of an administrative error.

We have now corrected this but some customers may still get the incorrect company showing on their statements. Please accept our apologies for this error, and our thanks to customers who reported this to us.

Please note that this will not affect your use of the site or the safety of your personal details in any way - it is simply a case of your bank being given a different company name to print on your paper or electronic statement by our payment processor.

However, please be aware of this when checking your statements and remember that your payments to 1911census.co.uk may show as “ScotlandsPeople”.

If you have any concerns please contact the Customer Support team on support@1911census.co.uk or 020 3326 4700.

We wish you a happy 2009 and look forward to welcoming you back when the site launches later in the year.

The 1911census.co.uk team