The 1911 census

Last week, the 1911 census of England and Wales was publicly released two years early. However, me and Lesley were invited to take part in the beta testing of the online site in December as we were subscribers to the previous censuses released by FindMyPast.com.

Currently the 1911 census is only available as a pay per view of each page (at about £3 per page) rather than on a subscription, which does make it rather expensive for trawling through all variants of Fitz(-)henry. And as yet not all parts of England and Wales have been released. But we're using canny search techniques to minimise the duplications and soon we hope to have a summary of what we've found up on the FitzhenryDNA website. When we do, we'll let you know here.

What makes this census special is that for the first time the householder filled in the forms themselves and if there was a married couple involved, they were to state how many years they had been married and how many children living and dead the woman had borne.

So on the (very good) images of each household, you get to see your ancestors' own handwriting. You also hope that they knew how to spell their own surnames, so unlike the previous censuses one level of transcription error is removed. And their count of their own children should be accurate so we now have a cross reference for the trees that we have constructed so far.

If anyone has already "found a Fitz" in the 1911 census and wishes to share the information with us, please drop us an email so we can concentrate our funds on the Fitzhenrys that haven't been extracted yet.


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