The 1911 census

At the moment, the 1911 census is the only one of England not available through Ancestry. You can search and view the 1911 census at Genes Reunited, findmypast, or the official 1911 census site. No matter which method you choose, you will have to pay to see details and the original images. You can get subscriptions or buy credits to any of these sites.

The 1911 census is the most recent that we have access to. The 1921 census will not be available for another 10 years. One of the nice things about the 1911 census images is that you can see your ancestor's handwriting - on the previous censuses we see only the enumerator's handwriting. Unlike previous censuses, the 1911 asked women to report on the number of children born to them, and the number of living children. Additionally, married couples were asked how long they had been married, making it easier to track the appropriate marriage registration using FreeBMD. Middle names are also more commonly reported on the 1911.

Rumour has it that Ancestry is going to include the 1911 census in their offerings later this year. That will be nice, as the search engine for the 1911 is not as nice to use as Ancestry's. Let us know how you get on with the 1911 census.


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Looking for civil records using FreeBMD

FreeBMD contains the indexes to the civil registrations of Births, Marriages and Deaths in England and Wales from 1837. Coverage is excellent into the 20^th century – more recent records are being added (transcriptions done by volunteers). 

You can restrict a search to a particular registration district or county. If your search does not produce what you are looking for, try entering minimal information in the search boxes - perhaps just names and county and a broad time period, or just surnames without first names. The image above is an example of a search for a marriage of an Alice CURTIS in the Dec quarter of 1933 to the September quarter of 1934, without specifying any other information in the search.

After 1866 the age at death was recorded so this is useful in nailing down the birth year.

Unfortunately the indexes after about 1911 do not show middle names in full, just initials, so searching for someone with a middle name won't produce any hits for records after this period. In this case, you can still find middle initials, so for example, if you were looking for a death of a Robert John MacAdam,  you could search for Robert J* MacAdam and that would find the Robert J's after 1911 and the Robert John's before 1911.

After 1912 the mother's maiden name was shown in the birth index, so you can use this when searching to find siblings of your ancestor by entering just the surname and the mother's maiden name.

If you think something may have been mistranscribed, you can view the original image of the index page by clicking on the eyeglasses icon.

You can search the same indexes that FreeBMD covers on ancestry.com - ancestry's coverage goes into 2005 or so (FreeBMD is only currently into the 1940s so ancestry is better for living people), but is not quite as flexible in its use of wildcards. After 1969, the death indexes include the date of birth - currently this is only available using ancestry.