1911 Census Release

News of the release of the 1911 Census. See also a link here - I enjoyed the 'finds' at the bottom of the page.

Census returns are kept securely until they are 100 years old, to protect the privacy of the people named in them. The 1911 National Census data, however is being released slightly early (Why? - see this article from 2006) - with a column on infirmities blacked out until 2012. What a huge job the achivists have done to get this all online! Especially as this year's data has been stored in the form of the original handwritten sheets from each house, (rather than the enumerators' collated sheets).

North Yorkshire and Durham records have just come online - some details have been added into this blog - so do take a look before you search.

England & Wales Census data: Not all counties are available quite yet - Northumberland & Wales are yet to come online. The index can be searched for free at Find My Past, and images of the original documents can be viewed (pay-per-view).
Scottish Census data: In Scotland, the census data has protected more strongly, and so will only be released in 2011. Previous years - see here.
Irish Census data: can be searched at the National Archives, Dublin. See here.

If any cousins out there decide to go ahead & look further for some relatives (i.e. actually pay to view the whole image & data on a 1911 census return) then it would be very useful if you could share the results with the rest of the family through this blog. You can simply post a comment or send an email to me. That way we don't pay 1911-census-rip-off.com (as some are calling it!!) any more than we must. Actually I think the fee is quite fair - there has been a lot of work done here. Anyone who doesn't want to pay for lots of sheets can simply wait a few months/years; then it will be much cheaper, as was the case with the 1901 census. In my particular case, I'm going to wait until all the English counties become available, then I can better prioritise what I'd like to see in full, or decide to sit on my hands for a while!

Soapbox moment over...