Working with The National Archives, subscription-based Ancestry has now made the 1841 Census available online. Taking more than four years to digitise the images, the 1841 census is the earliest UK census of real use to family historians - and the last of those available to the public to appear online in full.
The census was taken on the night of 6 June 1841 and contains details of the young Queen Victoria who was at home in Buckingham Palace with Prince Albert. The 29-year-old Charles Dickens, whose “Barnaby Rudge” papers were being serialised at the time, is with his wife and children in London's Devonshire Terrace.
Queen Victoria listed simply as “The Queen”, but Benjamin Disraeli and Florence Nightingale are just a few of now famous people mentioned.
Now anyone with access to the internet can now access the Ancestry web site without going to the Records Office or a library. A census is taken every 10 years in the UK. Unfortunately, the 1841 census is not as informative as later ones as ages were usually rounded down to the nearest five years, places of birth are not given and family relationships are often unclear. But it is better than those earlier than 1841 as they represent little more than headcounts of the population.
Digitising the images from 1841 presented problems that had not been encountered with the other censuses. According to Josh Hanna, managing director of Ancestry, UK about 40,000 pages were illegible on microfilm and unacceptable so the originals at The National Archives had to be studied and around 6% of the pages required special scanning.
Searching your ancestors has become a popular past time in the UK after it has been featured on a number of televisions programmes. The BBC in the UK has recently shown a television series “Who Do You Think You Are?” that featured a number of celebrities finding out about their ancestors. They were no doubt aided by BBC research assistants, but were also aided by many tools that are now available on the web.
The BBC website itself is a fantastic starting point for such research. Although focused on British history it does help you to structure your research along various timelines. The family secrets timeline allows you to trace the threads of lives that might be clouded by secrecy. The military timeline researches ancestors who served in the armed forces or whose lives were affected by war. And the working life timeline helps people follow up ancestors whose occupation is known, or can be guessed. Whereas using a migration timeline enables people to follow the trail of ancestors who came to Britain from overseas or who emigrated - voluntarily or otherwise.
Other services are also available particularly if you are of Irish or British origins.