most reliable / unreliable census indexes?

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 28 Sep 2008 20:12

World Vital Records is now offering as part of their international subscription some UK census records, as part of an arrangement with Find My Past.

I'm searching the 1871 census and I'm noticing a problem.

If the census reference is an ordinary household, clicking on the WVR search result link seems to work fine, but if the census is showing a large group of people (a cavalry regiment, ship's crew, etc), often the person whom I was searching for is not part of the group.

I am cross-checking with FreeCEN when possible, but they don't always have coverage.

I don't have a world sub with Ancestry so have not checked there yet.

My search was for 'William Norris' in Devon and one of my search results was:
Rg10 Piece: 942 Folio: 101 Page: 9

When I clicked on the name in the index closest to him in the alphabet, the census image I got was:
RG10 Piece 942 Folio 98 Page No 3

WVR does not allow paging through the images or calling them up by Piece number. If you have a sub to Find My Past, can you tell me if the same problem exists when pulling up the image on that site, or if it works correctly?

And in general, I'm curious about how common a problem this is -- how often do you see (or rather, not see) images in your research because they have been 'mislaid'?

Thanks.

Jan

ID:3060

treefrog · Post by **treefrog** » 29 Sep 2008 07:35

Found him on Ancestry, Jan, in barracks at Maidstone, Kent - he's no. 24 on the list, second to last on the page.

Jocelyn

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 29 Sep 2008 16:52

So he was on Rg10/942/101 page 9?

I'll alert WVR and let them sort out who is responsible for the wrong linking.

Thanks.

Jan

treefrog · Post by **treefrog** » 29 Sep 2008 17:10

He sure was!

Jocelyn

Whitney · Post by **Whitney** » 01 Oct 2008 00:43

Thanks for posting your comments on FHUG. We just posted the 1871 Census last week on WorldVitalRecords.com. As per your query, when you searched earlier, results were only showing for the first 50 individuals per family for that database. William Norris was not listed in this first set of 50 individuals. This evening, our senior programmer extended the number of individuals who can be viewed on each page. Now if a family, such as this one, has several hundred members in it, all of them can be viewed. Im guessing when you searched earlier, you clicked on the next page, which connected you to a new family, rather than the next set of results for that same family. The problem has been fixed. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

For future reference, I would like to tell you how we have set up the search of the Find My Past UK census records on WorldVitalRecords.com. Through our partnership with Find My Past, we have been able to provide the UK census records at a very competitive price as part of our World Collection subscription. Included in this arrangement is the privilege to view the images that are owned by the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

WorldVitalRecords.com does not host any census images from Find My Past, due to an agreement that Find My Past has with the National Archives of the United Kingdom. Our senior programmer has set up the census databases in such a way as to accommodate this agreement.
WorldVitalRecords.com's search results from Find My Past databases link to images housed on Find My Past servers. A special plugin from Lizard Tech (http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_o ... ge=plugins) is required to view these images on WorldVitalRecords.com from the Find My Past servers. The Find My Past census images at WorldVitalRecords.com are not browseable page by page.

Whitney Ransom McGowan, Director, Corporate Communications, FamilyLink.com, Inc.

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 02 Oct 2008 07:13

Whitney said:
Im guessing when you searched earlier, you clicked on the next page, which connected you to a new family, rather than the next set of results for that same family.

When I searched earlier, I got display with William Norris's name at the bottom, and 50 other names above it with links to click in order to launch the image viewer.

Since Norris' name was not on the list, I clicked the name of the person on the list whose surname began with N (in the hope that Norris' name would be nearby). Since this is an army unit rather than an ordinary household, as you say, there were hundreds of names. I did not have time to try all 50 names on the page to see what the results would be.

For the most part, I have been pleased with your arrangement with FMP -- it has been useful to have access to these census records through my International Subscription.

Thanks very much for your comments. I look forward to doing more searches in these collections.

Jan

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