13 January 2009

A new genealogy database in now online

The 1911 census of the United Kingdom, covering 27 million people, has been digitized and is now available online.

Organisers of the publication are expecting peak demand to be triple that for the 1901 records, published in January 2002, and have prepared 26 servers – five times the previous total – to cope with ferocious public appetite for researching family trees, fuelled by programmes such as the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?

The overwhelming demand resulted in the earlier-than-scheduled date, with teams working flat out for two years to get records digitalised. Only sensitive information such as details of infirmity and the children of women prisoners will be held back to 2012 in line with more traditional 100-year rules about releasing census details.

The 1911 census was the first for which householders' original completed schedules have been retained, so they reveal personal comments, mistakes, anecdotes and sketches omitted from summaries by official census enumerators...

The 1901 census had to be withdrawn for months after the website attracted up to 1.2m hits an hour...

I tried the link this morning and was able to access the database without difficulty.

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