Good News ! 1911 Census!

[Nick29]

Hmmm..... they're already opening it up in stages to prevent melt-down.  I'll still be an old cynic, and choose option #2   

[kerryb]

I wonder how many people have actually paid the £45 or whatever it is to get census records before it is released.  It would be interesting to know.

Kerry

[drodgers34]

I can see a huge demand for maps etc showing the locations of actual houses by street address around 1911.

You can extrapolate backwards and make a good guess where families lived in earlier census'

And again - the closeness of 1911 to 1912 where BMD indexes start giving spouses name for marriages and mothers maiden name for births will allow families to be 'reconstructed' forwards. It might push demand for such as freeBMD to push on in the 1900s

If (as I suspect) family history fans start modelling entire communities, by the time he next census (after 1911) is released it might tend to be be used for confirmation only, rather than a 'roadmap' to the BMD.

Can anyone think of or predict any other flow on effects from the 1911 ? I imagine ancestry.com might suffer a bit until it gets access - although comments in here suggest some people might wait before dropping subscriptions.

[Mean_genie]

I'm sure you're right about the maps. Alan Godfrey should see somes healthy sales figures because they have published quite a lot of maps around that date.

The 1911 Census also roughly coincides with the Valuation Office Survey 'Lloyd George's Domesday' which is a fantastic source for local history/house history/community history. Unfortunately this can be a bit tricky to use, although it is well worth the effort.

FreeBMD is already making pretty good progress with the 20th Century indexes - every time I look at their coverage charts I'm surprised at how much has been added - so by the time 1911 starts to be released there should be a pretty good overlap.

And don't forget all those names on the Commonwealth War Graves site and on war memorials that we'll be able to match up with the census. The poor things had no idea what was coming.

The new TNA publication 'Census - the Expert Guide' by Peter Christian and David Annal has a whole chapter on 1911, including some case studies and illustrations.

Mean_genie

[Nick29]

You can extrapolate backwards and make a good guess where families lived in earlier census'

You could try that with my lot, and get nowhere.  They never sat still for 5 minutes.  As the centuries progress, people get more and more mobile.  What we will also see in 1911 is fewer women going into domestic service, and going into light industry and clerical work instead.

[drodgers34]

I also suspect that the birthrate is already slowing down in 1911.

Britain was a huge baby factory during the latter 1800s - as we can see in the census. The country was spectacularly succesful at producing huge numbers of people to populate an empire

maybe 3-7 is the most common number of kids rather then the 7-14 of 50 years previous

[Sloe Gin]

The cynical side of me thinks its for profit, but then this is FindMyPast we are talking about and no its main rival 

And you don't think FindMyPast wants profits?  This is the site that won't offer the option of a month's access ....

I was disappointed with the email, it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.  I would like to have some idea of the order in which they will release the regions, and a rough timescale.  They are surely in a position to say, for instance, we are releasing London, then Birmingham, then Liverpool or whatever.

[forthefamily]

I'm sure you're right about the maps. Alan Godfrey should see some healthy sales figures because they have published quite a lot of maps around that date.

Already have the maps....... 

mab

[Nick29]

And you don't think FindMyPast wants profits?  This is the site that won't offer the option of a month's access ....

Anyone who thinks that any of these family tree sites is in it for anything other than money is living in cloud-cuckoo land (IMHO).