Family Historian User Group

I'm just having a moan really.  Started looking at a family I havent looked at for some time.  I have transcribed the info from 1901 census, but not written a ref nor attached an image.  I have tried each member of the family with various variations of info in Ancestry to no avail AAAAAAAHHHHHHH I'm going crazy here[dancing-banana]

ID:3013

If you paste the transcript here I'm sure someone will be able to help you find it.

Ah yes - the thing you know you found on Ancestry, and then it disappears next time you look - even as happened to me, when you put in the same search criteria... So sharing your frustration rather than actually helping!

A good reason for putting in corrections if the names aren't indexed as you'd expect

Thanks for your suggestion Nick.  The family are as I transcribed them they are living at Killifreth, Kenwyn, Truro, Cornwall.  The names are as they appeared on the census.(If I remember correctly) Mamie should be Nannie, and Minnie should be Florence Mabel Gwendoline Janie or some other derivative.  They had another daughter Minnie who wasn't born until 1907.  If anyone can find them in 1901 census I woould be grateful.


John T Blewett            34      H      Tin Miner            Kenwyn, Cornwall
Mary Blewett            34      W                  Kenwyn, Cornwall
John P Blewett            8      S                  Kenwyn, Cornwall
Joseph Garfield Blewett      5      S                  Kenwyn, Cornwall
James A Blewett            4      S                  Kenwyn, Cornwall
Mamie P Blewett            3      D                  Kenwyn, Cornwall

Minnie G J Blewett 2mths D Kenwyn, Cornwall

This little one got away [rolleyes]

John T. Blewett, 34, Kenwyn, tin miner is on the 1901censusonline.com site. I didn't check on the others as I don't have any credits left.

Yes KSS is correct, if you search on the 1901censusonline site and put in Blewett into surname, Kenwyn into place and then search for Male and Female in turn you get:
John T Blewett 34 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Tin Miner
John P Blewett 8 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Juvenile
Joseph Garfield Blewett 5 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Juvenile
James A Blewett 4 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Juvenile
Mary Blewett 34 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn
Mamie P Blewett 3 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Juvenile
Minnie G J Blewett 0 Cornwall Kenwyn Cornwall Kenwyn Juvenile

It is free to search but would cost money to see the image and get the actual reference.

Ancestry just doesn't seem to have anything remotely like this record in the index and I've tried as much lateral thinking on this as I can manage. It would be interesting to get the reference off the 1901 site to then see what Ancestry have indexed it as or whether they have just missed it out.

Nick

[lol][rolleyes] thank goodness you have found them, I was begining to wonder if I had made it up or dreamt them all. I only subscribe to Ancestry, have never been to 1901 site, definatly will tonight. Thank you VERY much.

Have paid up and saved the image of the Blewetts. so far as a ref goes at the bottom of the page it has RG/2223 then at the top of the page it has printed page 1, but on the right upper corner it has the number 70 or 79 printed, I'm not sure which of these is relevant to the ref if you see what I mean?? I intend to check up on Ancestry

Using the National Archives catalogue, RG 13/2223 covers:

Registration Sub-District: Kenwyn
Civil Parish, Township or Place:
Allet Common
Blackwater (part)
Chacewater (part)
Edles
Green Bottom
Kenwyn Rural
Shortlake End
Three Burrows
Three Milestone
Tregavethan

According to Ancestry, this is Kenwyn Districts 8 to 14. However, the last page of District 14 ends at page 66 or 67. Given a blank page or 2 plus a page for the Description of the District, this puts your Blewett family in District 15 - which Ancestry appears not to have or else they have listed it under a different parish. However, for the life of me, I cannot find your family on Ancestry.

One wonders how many more pieces of the Census are missing!

Regards,

Gerry

Further to Gerry's answer. Using the search facility in Ancestry, leaving everything blank except the Piece and Folio it appears that Folio 66 is the last Folio in Piece number 2223, any number I put in greater than 66 returns a blank. So it does appear that the rest of this is missing from Ancestry.

I'd suggest contacting Ancestry to find out what is going on.

Unfortunately I have found a number of missing pages in Ancestry, and although I have reported them I have never received a reply or seen any additions/corrections made. It leaves one wondering whether those 'missing' ancestors really are missing or just missing from Ancestry's pages. I find it is always a good idea to use an alternative like 1901census.com or findmypast.com to search their index as confirmation, especially as the latter have an independent transcription (although sadly only 2 counties have been transcribed of the 1901 census).

There are a number of pages on Ancestry, especially in the 1881 census, that are not in order, i.e., they were jumbled up when scanned. This means you can find the person in the index, but clicking the Show Image link leads to a random page. It can be highly frustrating, or all part of the fun, depending on one's frame of mind on the day!

Thanks for your help, I have e-mailed Ancestry this morning pointing out the missing pages and asking if this is a common problem as it could explain some of my other missing people( I shall now try 1901 online census to find them)I will let you know if/when I get a reply

Good job, everyone! I've had this problem too (haven't we all) and isn't it annoying? May I recommend some helpful tools?

The Firefox browser allows for 'extensions' to be added, so you can customize the browser to work the way you like.

Two extensions, Scrapbook (by Gomita) and Zotero are bibliographic tools which will allow you to save a copy of the page which is in your browser. I have used Scrapbook the most -- I've only recently added Zotero and haven't had time to learn it yet.

Scrapbook has a feature 'Open Source URL' which allows you to return to the page you captured as a live page. So if you have run a search on Ancestry, and don't have time to examine all the results, you can save the results screen and return to it later. (Of course then you have the problem of finding the saved page with Scrapbook itself ...)

I also like the extension 'PDF Download' from Nitro Software which has recently added a 'Web to PDF' function.

I was searching for a list of South Devon newspapers, and found a result on Google Book Search -- the page from the book was reproduced in a scroll box like the one in which I am typing this message. When I saved the page with Scrapbook, it saved the surrounding page with the bibliography entry but it did not save the page itself from inside the scroll box. However, the 'Web to PDF' saved it all, including the parts of the page inside the scroll box which were not showing at the time.

I too have had my share of 'where did I find that' misadventures with Ancestry -- it is especially embarrassing when you make what you think is a 'new' find and Ancestry informs you that 'you have already saved this in your Shoebox'! [oops]

And for ease of searching, I highly recommend Steve Morse's One-Step Web Pages at http://stevemorse.org/ -- there are pages for searching the census at Ancestry and 1901Censusonline.com.

Jan

Some time ago I found a whole sub district missing on Ancestry. I submitted an error report and kept hassling them. At one point they replied and said the speed things get fixed depends on how many people it affects, as I was the only one complaining it was low priority. I pointed out as a whole sub district was missing it would affect several hundred records not just the family I was looking for. I think it appeared about three months later although this was about a year since I first reported it.

I have also checked my emails and found I reported the parishes of Chilwell and Attenborough in the 1871 were under Derbyshire when they should be under Nottinghamshire. This has still not been fixed two years later. I have just sent them a reminder.

Gosh!! I have a feeling this is potentially quite a big problem with Ancestry. Makes me wonder if Ancestry is worth an annual subscription, has anyone had similar problems with other sites or is it just Ancestry? 1901censusonline looks very good but I think it could end up being very expensive.[eek]

Although I have had some problems I have over 250 census images, almost all from Ancestry, so I do think it is worth an annual subscription for at least one year. With seven census databases each with 30 to 40 million entries, it is impossible not to get some errors. We can help by reporting missing items and by submitting corrections to names that are wrongly transcribed.

The Steve Morse One-Step Web pages I mentioned above allow the user to enter the piece number directly (ignore the hard-coded RG13 and enter the rest of the numbers as indicated).

For the US census, there is an actual microfilm browser that pulls up the image and allows you to scroll through page by page.

But for the UK census, it displays a list of names on that page with the calculated birth years (if you don't have a sub, it displays links for many of the other bits of the data, and if you click the link, it takes you to the 'deny' page which encourages you to buy a subscription).

If you can get a reference from elsewhere, as Nick suggested, it is interesting to plug that in and see what Ancestry shows you, whether you have a subscription or not.

Jan

Jan: the Ancestry census search pages lets you enter the piece number to search on (as well as page or folio numbers if need be), so no need to use the Steve Morse page for this.

Understood, but I thought Morse's web pages were worth a mention.

I've found sometimes that if I use his search forms, I can coax more information out of Ancestry than I can when I use Ancestry's own forms. His notes on search parameters can be helpful.

And if you are searching multiple census years, using Morse's forms makes it easier to do so without having to type in the same information multiple times.

Jan

As promised here is the reply I recieved...no help at all really.
Thanks to your help I found 2 other families I was looking for on 1901online, they were in the same missing folio!!!!

'Thank you for your email.

We appreciate your error report about the missing images for Cornwall in the 1901 census. The problem has been reported to our developers. Feedback from you, our valued customer, helps us correct errors and improve the website. Your patience and efforts to assist us in this matter are appreciated.

Please understand that fixes to errors on Ancestry are posted firstly in the order of those which affect the greatest number of users, and thereafter in the order in which they are reported. For this reason, fixes for some errors may take longer than others to be posted. We appreciate your patience.

For the most part, reviewing the database descriptions about the problems in a particular census can tell you what parts are known to be missing according to The National Archives.'

[rolleyes]
I have replied pointing out that the folio concerned is NOT missing from NA.

This is the same standard reply I had from them a few years ago. The key point is about affecting the greatest number of users. It may be worth pointing out to them this is not a single image missing but a whole district so affects many people. Then all you can do is check for it every few months and send them a reminder every six so they don't forget.

As with all things they will set priorities. As they have finished with the censuses the bulk of their staff will presumably have transferred to another digitisation project so there will probably only be a small group picking up errors like this.