Sunday, December 28, 2008

1911census.co.uk blog

1911census.co.uk blog: "We’ve been scanning and transcribing the census in order of National Archives catalogue piece number. Broadly, this was originally dictated by the civil servants of the time who ordered the numbering system so that it started in London, moving outwards and upwards through the English counties, then the Welsh counties, and finally the islands and military establishments. This is the order in which the records will be released on 1911census.co.uk in 2009.

Incidentally, the original documents are also stored in this order at the National Archives, so we have been working our way through the two kilometres (or one and a quarter miles in old money) of shelving that these records take up. The records take an enormous amount of time to prepare using hundreds of staff – the 1911 census is eight times larger than previous censuses as it is the only census to date where the household schedules have been preserved. We still have a long way to go until scanning is complete – we will continue to work at The National Archives well into 2009 to finish the image scanning and we then still have the job of transcribing the remainder of the census.

Unfortunately the early timing of the beta test means that the counties available are inevitably concentrated in the south, but we wanted to be able to test the site as early as possible with a reasonable number of records available."

1 Comments:

Blogger Nikki - Notes of Life said...

I have tried out the 1911 beta website. My thoughts? Expensive but interesting!

7:47 pm  

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