1911 census by Anne Astling
In April of this year I attended the 30th anniversary conference of the Guild of One Name Studies and 2 of their seminar sessions were given over to presentations on the UK 1911 census which you may already know is now fully online. It gave me a greater insight into what is available - and why it has cost so much to make available. I hope when you have read this you may feel more encouraged to pay for access to the original entries, at least to track your own immediate families. I would add that although Elizabeth and I should be collecting names from the 1911 census (as we have for the others) to put on the T-T database, the cost of accessing all of them would of course be totally prohibitive for us. We hope you will help us with that task by sending in the entries for your particular family groups.
The technical side of processing the 1911 census to make it publicly available online was complex and required the most up to date resources in both hardware and software. The sheer volume of data was enormous: the 1911 census was the first one where the schedules were completed by the householder, and more information was requested than had previously been the case - and of course the population had grown too.
All the original schedules have been scanned, page by page, so that not only can we see transcripts of the contents, we can also see images of the original schedule. The checking procedures were also much more rigorous than for the 1901 census. Those of us who remember the chaos not only of the launch of the 1901 census online but also the relatively poor quality of indexing can perhaps have some understanding of the reasons behind the extra care taken with this one - and the consequent cost!
Because the original schedules were kept and it is these that have been scanned rather than filming collated data as in previous censuses, we will not have access to microform versions of the census records. My understanding is that the online records are the only way we can access the data. You will perhaps have visited the site and realised that the initial index is free and that there are two levels of charge. One is for the transcript of the data, and the second higher charge is for a view of the original image: however you only need to pay the first time you look at the data and can save it for future viewing free.
My initial thought was to view the index, and I discovered this has its uses in spite of its limitations, particularly if you have a degree of confidence as to where individuals were likely to be living and the makeup of the family group. Thereafter I suspect the majority of us would only wish to pay the cost of the transcript, which would give a lot of information about these family groups in much the same way as the enumerators’ records of previous censuses. (Certain information for each record will be blanked out until the 100 years closure period is over of course - we are in the fortunate position of having the census available 2 years early).
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