Family Historian User Group

philjo, can you let us know where you found that information from? I thought that the data was not due to be released on subscription until 2012?

The info is on the 1911 blog at http://blog.1911census.co.uk/

David Dewick said:
As a separate question, has anyone tried the Pilot site available on familysearch.org? I used it for the first time yesterday and was able to pull up American census record images that have sparked an interesting search through a part of my family I thought I had pretty well covered.

Yes, the first time I tried it, I was astounded at how fast images loaded, even on my dial-up connection.

BTW, if anyone would like help finding elusive ancestors on the US Census, I have access to Heritage Quest through my local public library (i.e. different indexing than Ancestry).

Back to the 1911 Census:

I agree with the comments that the cost per image is too steep for the person who has to go 'fishing' to find their relative. I am familiar with the problem -- I could not find my father's family on Ancestry while looking for their names because the surname was not spelled the way I expected (and I did not know my grandparents' names, only the names of my father's siblings).

Once my brother told me the town where the family lived, I decided to 'walk the ED' and voila, there was my family on the very first page I looked at. I was lucky there, but obviously at 3 pounds and up, it is too expensive to browse through an entire town looking for one's family, or to do what some researchers recommend, record six families on either side of one's own.

However, if you compare the cost of (say) the NEHGS's Research trip to London (over 5,000 US dollars for two people, one non-participant), being able to fetch a couple of images about my husband's family for a few pounds each is quite affordable.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that no matter how unsatisfactory the presentation may seem right now, we do have the census a couple of years early, and we can get at it from a distance.

When I started my search a couple of years ago, we only knew that my husband's great-grandfather and some of his family had 'gone back to England' and could only guess that they had gone back to the same area they had originally come from. Now at the cost of a few pounds, I can see a census return for the family, and in the householder's own handwriting, too.

This is tremendously exciting (and bittersweet -- what a pity my father-in-law is not here to see this).

Jan

Just wanted to mention that the US publication Family Tree Magazine has a posting on their blog Genealogy Insider where blogger Diane Haddad got a behind-the-scenes look at Ancestry's data center:

http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insi ... enter.aspx

Ancestry.com’s monthly hosting costs run $300,000—$143,000 for the space, $112,000 for power and the rest for bandwidth. That’s part of what you’re paying for in your subscription. (A larger chunk of your subscription fee goes to adding new content and upgrading current content.)

She says they claim to have '2.5 petabytes of data (one petabyte is equivalent to 283,000 DVDs)'.

(That figure includes the user-submitted -- I am tempted to add 'often not worth the cost of the bandwidth' -- content like Family Trees, etc.)

Jan

FYI. I asked Ancestry when they would have the 1911 census on subscription... just got this reply:

Due to the nature of the distribution agreement we don’t yet know when this content will be available to publishers so that it can be supplied within a subscription service. This content is currently only available on pay per view via the “1911 census website”. Ancestry.co.uk is committed to offering the richest and most diverse set of family history content, and is concentrating on bringing to its audience historical records which go further back in history. We will continue to update our customers with all new content news and at the moment are working to release the London Metropolitan Archives collection which predates civil registration in 1837 and date as far back as the 1500’s.

[grin] Untill they allow wildcard searches for surnames, heres a tip which i picked up from elsewhere, In surname field just put a comma, you may need to put extra info so that number of searches returned is small, but managed to find my GreatGreatGrandMother as her surname is incorrectly transcribed.

I too find the cost for 1911 too high for general use.  However that didnt stop me spending rather toooo  much over the beta site at xmas[grin].  I found the images very good, much better than most on ancestry. I have not found any missing or mistranscribed entries YET, and am fed up with poor images and missing families and mistranscrbed images and indexes on Ancestry. I am happy to pay to cover costs of setting up & running a service but am concerned at this level of cost.

I understand that 1911census.co.uk have exclusive rights for six months after the complete census has been put online, after that it can be licensed to other sites. But note that it refers to the complete census being online, only parts are at the moment, so how long can they drag out putting on northern England, Wales & Scotland before the six months clock starts ticking?

Image quality great, download speeds very fast but I still have issues with the quality of the transcripts/indexing.

Robert

'so how long can they drag out putting on northern England, Wales & Scotland before the six months clock starts ticking?'


Scotland has different arrangements and legislation and as things stand will not be released until 2012.

Sorry, I'd forgotten that. They can still drag out putting the rest of England & Wales for a long time though.

Robert

Hi, I don't look on this forum very often, but thought I would throw a few 'wild cards' into the debate on cost, which I don't think at the moment is too expensive (although I reserve the right to wait until it gets cheaper until I look at any images!)

Firstly, we are getting this data a couple of years early, it wasn't going to be released until 2011.

Second, if you transfer the principle to fashion retailing for instance, if you want the latest fashion, you pay a premium price, if you don't like that price, you wait for the sales.

Thirdly, and most importantly, has everyone forgotten about the fiasco when the 1901 cansus was released? It went up, crashed in a spectacular fashion then it was another 18 months before we got it back again. At least by putting it in the hands of a private company it has managed to stay stable *firmly touches a large plank of oak*

Yes, this is public information that will be freely available, but we are getting it in a processed form. It is that processing we are paying for, not the data itself.

For my own research there is only one direct line I am stuck with (my mother-in-law never knew her half siblings) and I will probably pay for the images. The rest of my direct lines I already know about and the 1911 census entries will only be for completeness, I will wait to get the images on subscription. As for the hundreds of cousins, I can wait!

P.S. No, I don't work for Findmypast!

Alan White said:
I've not actually gone beyond the free index yet as I'm waiting for an answer to a question I've asked them. The question is: if I buy an image now with some data 'redacted'* do I have to pay again in 2012 to see the image in full?

I've finally received an answer to this. findmypast say 'no, you will not have to repay for the full image when it becomes available. The changes will be made automatically to your account.'

I interpret this as meaning that the image stored in 'My records' will be replaced with the complete image in 2012.

PeterWieland said:
The rest of my direct lines I already know about and the 1911 census entries will only be for completeness

That's what we thought too, but using Nick's search-for-household trick we've found a few surprises that have made us buy the images.

I've just remembered that when I bought Family Historian, I bought it as part of a bundle which included a voucher for FindMyPast. There's no expiration date printed on the card with the promotion code, so I wonder if that code is still good? Hmmm.....

Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else did the same and was too lazy to redeem their voucher.

Jan

At the risk of beating a dead horse, here's my cautionary tale of the day for how you can shoot yourself in the foot when looking for a family at a particular address, especially when working in cities.

My town of interest is in the USA. The US Federal Censuses aren't indexed to search by street address but I do use maps as a reference when I am searching.

My starting point is an address in 1904, so I am searching the closest available Censuses (1900 / 1910) and City Directories (1900 / 1908). The family is at 96 Race Street. I find them in the 1900 and 1910 Census (once at 97 Race Street, that's a bit odd) and in the city directories. So far, so good. In the 1920 Census their address is on another street that runs parallel to this one.

Now I want to see if the buildings they lived in still exist, and see how close they lived to other families I am looking for in the same neighborhood.

A cursory search for 96 and 97 Race on the US Postal Service web site showed that the addresses are non-deliverable (either places which do not receive mail or for which the building no longer exists). Too bad, thought I, the buildings have been torn down. But perhaps I can still find the lot where the building was.

Google Maps will happily show you a street number on a map whether the number exists or not, so I tried it to see what would happen.

I have a 1900 City Directory street index that describes Race Street and gives all the cross streets with the numbers where the cross streets intersect.

Guess what? I discovered that the location of 96 Race as given on Google Maps is not between the cross-streets I expected per the 1900 Street Directory.

I returned to the city's tax website and using their GIS system, started 'walking' further down the street. In the area closer to the cross-streets I am looking for, I do find some 1880-era multi-family dwellings that are of the kind shown in the census. Apparently the area which had street addresses in the 90s in 1900 is now the 300 block.

So if you cannot find your family, my advice would be, become familiar with the neighborhood where you expect to find your family by any means possible. In the town I am working in, the City Directories give heads of households, street guides with cross-streets, lists of businesses, etc.

Mapping out several blocks of an entire street is tedious, but if I want to figure out how close this family lived to other families in my file, this is what I will have to do.

Perhaps a few of the manufacturing businesses from the early 1900s are still in business at the same locations -- if so, that will give me waypoints to anchor my map.

My plan is to take the current-day tax maps, mark the construction dates of the buildings on the parcels, and thus be able to see at a glance what buildings were in existence for the 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930 censuses.

Combined with the street descriptions from the city directories that will help when I am looking at the census, to see how the enumerator might have walked.

Moral of the story is: it is not enough to look at a modern-day map and say 'oh, the building is gone' -- you also need to be sure that the street hasn't been re-numbered since the census you are looking at.

A family living at two different street addresses in two different censuses might actually be in the same building. You can't know until you map it out.

It will be very useful once we do have the enumerator's information from the 1911 Census, but in some cases, it won't match up with a modern-day map. It will be easier to recognize this if you can look at a map from the early 20th century, instead of relying entirely on a modern-day map.

Jan

That's fascinating, Jan...For my London ancestors I've found Charles Booth's Poverty maps very useful, and you can compare the late C19 map directly with the 2000 equivalent here:

http://booth.lse.ac.uk/cgi-bin/do.pl?su ... ,6,large,5

Jocelyn

Following on from Nick's search tip, I found this on another forum. I does the same sort of thing but gives you an address in the process.

Using the standard search function, find the person you want and refine the search criteria to eliminate the others so that only that one person is on the page. You might do this by use of age, gender, year, county, district, etc.

Once you have found the person and they are the ONLY one shown on the page, look at the URL (the web page address, http://www. etc.,) and you will see that in the address is the word 'results2' or 'results4'. Change the number to a 3 then hit enter to do the search again.

When the results are displayed, scroll to the bottom of the page and an address is shown. Now copy the address (including any errors) and go back to the 'search' page. Remove EVERYTHING you had in previously, put a comma in the surname box (it has to have something) and paste the address in to the RESIDENCE field and press 'Search'

The search results should now include all residents of the house.

And for those with FMP subscriptions who are waiting for the 1911 census to be available, please note that it won't be available on current subscriptions. According to their newsletter there will be an additional subscription fee. Existing subscribers will be able to 'upgrade' to an enhanced package at a discount. No prices are yet mentioned.

Brilliant tip Patrick!

So far I am finding it very cheap since Northumberland, Durham and Cumberland are not included. The great North-South divide appears to have been backdated to 1911

Irene

GenSmarts is taunting me that they've added an update to reflect that the 1911 Census is coming online, but since I'm on download, the update takes forever, and isn't completing correctly. Argggh!

(I don't know yet if they have fixed the annoying problem that causes it not to work quite right with plain GEDCOM files.)

Jan

I agree very much with PartickT's comments.

Being new to family genealogy, I've found  the 1911 Census website easy to use and worthwhile. So far eight searches and the correct results every time.

I print out the original census scans in colour on an A3 Epson photo printer on A4 paper via Photoshop after using a little Sharpen Edges, and the images are perfectly readable, including the form's original printed text.

Also, bear in mind the census documents have been made available two years early, even if the cost is considered expensive by some.

Brian

Just saw this item in the newsletter put out by Lost Cousins:

The two wildcard characters are ? and *, where ? can be any single character and * stands for any number of characters - or indeed, none at all. So if you were searching for someone called Thompson, but were worried that the name might be recorded as Thomson, you would search for THOM*SON (if you typed THOM?SON you would find Thompsons and Thomasons, but not Thomsons).

You can even use multiple wildcards: for example, *A*E*I*O*U* will find names that have all 5 vowels in alphabetical order (and there is at least one surname in 1911 that fits). There's only one catch that I've spotted - you have to remember to tick the appropriate box to specify that it's a wildcard search.

Jan

And later in the same newsletter, Peter says:

TNA LAUNCHES POOR LAW PROJECT
A while ago I wrote that the project to digitise and catalogue the records from 22 local Poor Law Unions which are held by the National Archives in Kew had been put on hold after being turned down for a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. I was therefore delighted to hear that the National Archives has now agreed to fund the project itself - it's good to know that the money they're getting from the 1911 Census is being put to good use.

Jan

Success!

The voucher for Find My Past which I bought from S&N as part of a bundle with Family Historian had not expired, and I now have credits which can be used on the 1911 Census site.

I've downloaded the household for my husband's great-grandfather -- and it seems he did remarry (something I suspected from looking at FreeBMD, but I didn't want to get the certificate just to find out).

Very interesting.

Jan