* 1939 Register on Find My Past

[AdrianBruce]

Were people registered at their home (electoral roll) address, or at the address they were at on 29th September?....

The instructions on the blank household schedule form that I have seen, read: "Persons to be included: All persons who spent the night of National Registration Day in this household, whether as members, visitors, boarders or servants, or who joined the household or establishment the next morning without being enumerated anywhere else. No one else may be included." (Their bold text).
So it's the normal 19th and 20th century practice for UK censuses.

Which means I get slightly irritated by those who say that "My relative isn't where they should be." That could be because they really weren't! Clearly some of you have shown your relatives weren't anywhere, according to the index.

[ireneblackburn]

search preview is now showing another name on the results preview. Instead of just the name you searched 'and 2 more people, it gives a second name. That should make searching easier

[philjo]

I'm not impressed by the accuracy of the indexing.
My grandmother's sister was in Blackpool - and it clearly says this at the top of the page of the image of the original. However the transcription & index says Blackburn.
For my grandparents - the address is wrong. On the original it is obvious that the top 2 entries are in one road then the enumerator went round the corner into another street. However the transcription uses the road name from the first entry on the page - preusmably this was done for all of the households on that page.

[jmurphy]

I have seen others report that the Reference number was removed after they paid to unlock the image. I can still see the reference numbers in the preview using Firefox. I plan to log all the reference numbers as I find them.

[Wilfreda99]

Thanks Adrian for the info re persons who were to be included. I haven't yet found my grandfather in the newspapers on FMP for the week in question, so I might "take a punt" and see if it is him if I need one set to make up my 5 family offer, but probably won't bother otherwise at the moment. I plan in the future to try and make a timeline of all the places he appeared so will return to it then.
As a further query: what happened when people emigrated after 1939 and then later returned? I think my aunt, uncle and grandmother (ex wife of grandfather above) are in a locked record because they emigrated to Austrailia in about 1950, so there are no UK death certificates for them. The aunt and uncle then moved onto Canada and stayed there, but Grandma returned home and lived with us. So she has a UK death certificate but I am guessing that when she emigrated her record was deleted and then when she returned she was given a new record. If this is correct, is there any way I could get the two records "linked", which would enable me to confirm the address they were living in in 1939? Of course she is well over 100 years old by now so perhaps the 1939 entry will be unlocked in the fullness of time.

[jmurphy]

It looks as if FMP have removed the reference Piece Number from the results. There must have been too many people using this method to see the names on a page

Irene,
You can still see the ref numbers if you hover over the Preview button on the search results page, at least in Firefox

Mike

And for the moment, we can use "Save Link Location" to copy the link into a research log.

[tatewise]

Please see Lookup Missing Census Facts for 1939 Register (13030).

[quarlton]

As of about 5pm on 18th November FMP have also removed the helpful code from the link.
However, there is a workaround.
See blog posting at kiwitrees.net - he was very quick off the mark

http://kiwitrees.net/kiwi-blog/using-th ... -for-free/

Dave

[Paulieb]

As a subscriber to Find My Past it is annoying to have to pay extra. I paid for 5 searches at about £5 per search looking for my 4 grandparents. I found 3, but would comment that, apart from an obvious transcription error, the information you get is like a limited census. Anyone still alive in 1991 (ie 24 years ago!) will be blocked in the records. You get the details of people not blocked including addresses, ie about the same as any other census. I discovered nothing new. Realistically, many researchers will have relatives still alive from 1939 who can probably give you more information. The real issue is that you have to pay to open every record. With a fairly common name, an accurate birthdate, and a rough idea of where they were in 1939, l opened the best likely match and it was wrong. I then opened the next best match, also wrong. I would have to open at least 2 more records that might be the right person, but each time it is costing money. Imagine trying to find John Smith born around 1900 and you think he might have been in London in1939. How many records would you have to open to get a match and how much would it cost you? The extra material, photos, newspaper accounts are about the place generally and no real relevance to the person you are looking up. The location maps of the street are of some use, though one of the maps showing a street no longer in existence was wrong, as a cousin filled in the correct information. Obviously, some people may have more luck with the 1939 census and l hope we get some comment from people who found it useful, but it does seem over-hyphed and overly expensive.

[AnneEast]

Whilst I appreciate that there will be many people (probably younger than me!) who will find valuable information on the 1939 register, I personally have no intention of spending any money at all. At the prices quoted I would only be able to afford to open pages for immediate family, all of whom I know about. If it was part of the normal FMP sub I have many queries I could persue! Maybe one day it will be in the sub but until then I will leave it alone.
Anne

[brianlummis]

Interestingly the National Archives research guide for the 1939 Register in Section 3 states "This service is pay per view only at present. However, you can view these records online free of charge at The National Archives in Kew." There has been some speculation that at some time in the future that the Register will become part of the subscription of Find My Past and this would seem to confirm that it could happen. For the time being I am not that worried about what I might be missing as I have plenty of other avenues to explore to keep me out of mischief!

[jmurphy]

As of about 5pm on 18th November FMP have also removed the helpful code from the link.
However, there is a workaround.
See blog posting at kiwitrees.net - he was very quick off the mark

http://kiwitrees.net/kiwi-blog/using-th ... -for-free/

This may be old news by now, but the URLs have now been encrypted.

I had saved a group of the old-style links so I could return to particular households, and those do redirect to the new encrypted links.

Also, some subscribers have received promo codes for getting credits at 40% off. Now I have to decide how many households I still want to unlock, given that the credits expire after 90 days. It may take a while to determine which households are worth unlocking, and it would be ridiculous to lose the credits because I couldn't do the research in time. The solution being, of course, to buy even more credits to reactivate the lost ones.

I wonder if FMP has considered how many people will NOT be buying credits now because they can't locate their relatives.

Still, I have to console myself with the fact that a trip to Kew to view the records for free would be far more expensive than a couple of batches of credits. In the larger scheme of things, we've wasted that much money on bad meals.

[brianlummis]

It seems as though my reading of The National Archives research guide (see post 18th Nov 2015) was correct. As from 16th February 2016 the 1939 Register will form part of the FMP subscription at no extra cost.

[LornaCraig]

Yes, from what FMP say in an email sent out today it will be included in the subscription, and for existing subscribers who 'auto-renew' their subscriptions it will indeed be at no extra cost. They are even giving a 10% loyalty discount.

But beware: for new subscribers the price will be increased from £99.50 to £119.95 (for a 12 Month Britain subscription). I imagine that extra £20 will be used to cover the cost of the 1939 register, so it's not really 'at no extra cost' for new users who will have to pay the extra subs even if they don't want to look at the 1939 register.

[jimlad68]

I think the problem here is that while Ancestry and other earlier sites sprang from genealogists with their interests at heart and understanding what they wanted, Brightsolid (findmypast or whatever they call themselves now) came into this purely to make money, what they don't understand is that if it becomes too expensive, many people will just not do the research, regardless of how good a value it is and then making it more expensive for those who are left. The music and video industry have eventually realised this, make it cheap enough and many more people will have lots of it and not bother pirating to boot.

However, FMP have brought a lot of new impetus, skills, etc and competition into the market, but if they see a "monopoly", like UK 1911 census or 1939, they will exploit it all they can. I just hope that now Ancestry is "venture capitalised" it at least retains its empathy towards genealogists. Is the discontinuence of FTM a start, or should they never have started the post FTM16 version in the first place, but that is another story.

[brianlummis]

But beware: for new subscribers the price will be increased from £99.50 to £119.95 (for a 12 Month Britain subscription). I imagine that extra £20 will be used to cover the cost of the 1939 register, so it's not really 'at no extra cost' for new users who will have to pay the extra subs even if they don't want to look at the 1939 register.

Yes Lorna, I should have added this. However it makes a change when loyal customers are rewarded rather than offering enticements to new customers as is the case in many industries!

[AdrianBruce]

... I imagine that extra £20 will be used to cover the cost of the 1939 register, so it's not really 'at no extra cost' for new users ....

Though £20 wouldn't get you very far with the 1939 Register, it has to be said!

I'm just waiting for the people protesting about FMP bundling it in, saying they've already paid for it so it's unfair everyone else should get it for free. And I'm sure if I look hard enough, some of those will have been the ones protesting about the cost in the first place... Cynic? Moi?

[AdrianBruce]

Ironically yesterday, the day the announcement about incorporating into the normal subs was made, I succumbed and looked at some 1939 Register entries for the very first time. But not to worry - I was down at Kew waiting for some documents, so thought I'd fill in time, looking some up for free there.

The interesting thing is that I looked at my paternal grandparents' family - my father is still redacted as expected, but the middle brother was in clear, even though he died long after they'd stopped updating the 1939 Register with deaths. What this means is that the FMP process to identify at least some deaths from registrations has worked - though I should point out that, according to Ancestry, Uncle Austen was the only person in the UK with that name - apart from a couple of guys who had it as a middle name.

[jmurphy]

I just hope that now Ancestry is "venture capitalised" it at least retains its empathy towards genealogists. Is the discontinuence of FTM a start, or should they never have started the post FTM16 version in the first place, but that is another story.

In my opinion, Ancestry's new business model is collecting our data and selling it to other companies. The record collections and other apparatus associated with genealogy is only an incentive to get us to put our family trees online so they can associate that data with the DNA test results.

Just like Facebook, we customers have become the product being sold -- the only difference is that Ancestry is double-dipping by charging customers for the privilege of giving their DNA information away. AncestryDNA is the tail wagging the dog.

Nothing would please me more to have some other company come into the US market and focus on providing digital images and other information at a decent price, without all the excess baggage of family trees, forums, and social networking.

[AdrianBruce]

... without all the excess baggage of family trees, forums, and social networking.

Except that my view - and I suspect Ancestry's as well - is that the "average punter" would look down their nose at a site without all that "modern" stuff. Judging by the (in my personal view) more-hysterical responses to the "demise" of FTM, there are plenty of people out there who only use Ancestry for the family-trees. (Otherwise, why would they threaten to dump it because of FTM's "demise", regardless of the effect on their access to original data?)

And they are encouraged in this view by those bloggers who talk tech, tech, tech, cloud, cloud, cloud and "why are you still using a program on your PC?"

[jmurphy]

... without all the excess baggage of family trees, forums, and social networking.

Except that my view - and I suspect Ancestry's as well - is that the "average punter" would look down their nose at a site without all that "modern" stuff. Judging by the (in my personal view) more-hysterical responses to the "demise" of FTM, there are plenty of people out there who only use Ancestry for the family-trees. (Otherwise, why would they threaten to dump it because of FTM's "demise", regardless of the effect on their access to original data?)

And they are encouraged in this view by those bloggers who talk tech, tech, tech, cloud, cloud, cloud and "why are you still using a program on your PC?"

Some people wanted the vertical integration with the desktop software, the mobile apps, and the website, and if they can't have it, they'd just as soon go somewhere else. They're buying an ecosystem, not unlike choosing between an iPhone or an Android smartphone.

[tatewise]

I see you have swallowed the Apple iPhone, iPad, iTunes, etc, marketing publicity. Apple are very good at it, and charge you a fortune as well. Android can generally do all those things too, but cheaper.

[jmurphy]

I see you have swallowed the Apple iPhone, iPad, iTunes, etc, marketing publicity. Apple are very good at it, and charge you a fortune as well. Android can generally do all those things too, but cheaper.

Not me. I use iTunes on my Windows computer, have an Android smartphone, and use TiVos which are built on Linux.

But I understand the people who get sucked in by the promise of having everything "just work" together.

[Florence]

From 16th February 2016 it is included in the usual subscription fee and you don't have to pay extra for it, so needless to say I am waiting.

[jmurphy]

I watched a webinar today from one of the British research specialists at the Family History Library, on England Civil Registration. I was 99% sure I would know most of the information in the presentation already, but sometimes it's useful to get a refresher, and as an ex-teaching assistant, I like to see how people put lectures together.

One useful bit was a timeline of what information has been added to the GRO indices over time. In 1969 they added the date of birth to the death indexes. Is this how they're matching up death index information with the people who died after 1970 in the 1939 Register?

I can see where there would be a lot of problems there -- there might be errors in the birth date in the Register, errors in the GRO index, bad transcriptions in the Register, and so on. One of the people I was looking for in the Register had a year of birth in the search results on FMP that was (19)12 instead of (18)92.

Even so, by cross-referencing the GRO index with the Register, they've been able to open a lot of previously-closed records. If you've already unlocked some households and you haven't checked them in a while, take a look and see if some entries have been opened.