Some questions about the 1939 register....

[Jo.]

I can only assume that the transcription of the records is of very poor standard....

As that is the only reason I can assume lays behind why I can't find most of my relatives

I know that they are living in the area at the time, and they also pass the 100 year rule, but do they show up nah they don't not at all... 

So it's a case of spending long hours, manually searching the images to locate them, what isn't helpful, is how they sectioned everything up, you can't start at the beginning of a register and work you way through, you have to hit a name, then see where their location is to, and hope that the next name you chose is in a different image file... 

Oh well, never mind it will keep me quiet for many many hours lol

[clairec666]

I can only assume that the transcription of the records is of very poor standard....

I thought that at first, but I've seen some awful handwriting on the original images, must have been tricky to transcribe.

A mistranscription might mean that a record isn't matched with the death index, and of course we can't look at the image and make a correction because it's been blacked out!

[CarolA3]

Surely, the thing is,  there was not one register.  Each Borough or district  would have its own local register.

There was one register.  That's why it was called the National Register.

The part that's been released covers England and Wales.  There are other parts for Scotland and Northern Ireland but they haven't been released.

Carol

[Mean_genie]

The thing that we call the 1939 Register was created by the enumeration in September 1939. A new set of books was then created for anyone born in England and Wales, or arriving from elsewhere, or being demobbed from the armed forces after that date. Collectively, all these books were called the Central Register, in use up to 1991 when the NHS computerised its records.

ScouseBoy is right to say that there were many registers. Each Local National Registration Office kept a register for its own area, in the form of a card index. Updates were made to both the local registers and the Central Register, but they were not identical; for example, changes of address were only recorded in the local registers, but markers relating to people who had failed to attend when called up for military service were only noted in the Central Register. That's a somewhat over-simplified version, but you get the drift! 

[CarolA3]

Each Local National Registration Office kept a register for its own area, in the form of a card index. Updates were made to both the local registers and the Central Register, but they were not identical; for example, changes of address were only recorded in the local registers, but markers relating to people who had failed to attend when called up for military service were only noted in the Central Register. That's a somewhat over-simplified version, but you get the drift!

Thank you Mean_genie, that's interesting.  I remember using a local card index as part of another national set of records during my (mercifully brief) civil service career.

For our purposes though, I believe the only available record is the Central Register for England and Wales.

Carol

[ScouseBoy]

Surely, the thing is,  there was not one register.  Each Borough or district  would have its own local register.

There was one register.  That's why it was called the National Register.

The part that's been released covers England and Wales.  There are other parts for Scotland and Northern Ireland but they haven't been released.

Carol

  You have got to imagine how things were  operated and managed 76 years ago.   There were no computers.  Were there even photo copying machines?

Admittedly  for a big Government operation they could have bought in the best state of the art equipment then available.  If  punch cards were available from IBM; NCR;  Kalamazoo or another manufacturer, then punch cards was a possible method of sorting and filing information.

Different sub sets of the Register would be needed to be held locally, I am sure.

[CarolA3]

I can only suggest that you read what Mean_genie posted.

Carol

[Jebber]

From FindMyPast

The process of bringing the Register online for the first time has been the work of hundreds of people. The Register itself consists of 7,000 volumes which contain over 1,200,000 pages listing the names, addresses, marital statuses, occupations and more of over 41,000,000 people. If you were to stack the books on top of each other, the resultant pile would be over twice the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Jebber

[Mean_genie]

Considering the technology available at the time (ie no computers) the machinery for keeping the local and central registers up to date was remarkably efficient. Lessons had been learned from the things that worked and didn't work when National Registration was first attempted in 1915. They didn't use punch cards, but they were nothing new - they had been used for the tabulation of the 1911 census.