Genealogy Chat

May I recommend the Family Records Centre one-on-one sessions? I attended one in London this week and discovered, at last, how to get information out of the 1841 and 1851 census. The 1841 census has to be accessed via street address. First you look up the address in an index and find where it is stored on a film. Then you put that film into a viewer and scroll through until you find the page you want. Then you will be able to see who lived at the address you have. With the 1851 census you do not need an address-just an area. You first go to an index to find the location in the library of the microfiche containing your area. Once you have a reference for your area you view the microfiche which is indexed by surname. If you find the people you want (I did- hallelujah!) you will get reference numbers for a film and page numbers. AGain you view the film and scroll through until you come to your people. I tried for ages to work this out using the internet but eventually going to FRC did the trick. I believe there are bits and pieces of the census that have been transcribed and are available on the web but in the FRC you can find the whole thing. I now know that my illusive ancestor , JOhn Thomas MUnro died before 1851 and I can limit my search for his death certificate. There isn't a lot of info on 1841 or 1851 but there are little nuggets if you know what to look for. I know JT's wife's age which helps when guessing JT's age etc...

Yes the FRC is fine if you live in or near London - not much use to us in Australia though! We are stuck with either the on-line censuses or purchasing CD sets which are quite expensive (my ancestors by the time I get back to 1841 were spread over 10 counties - would cost around £500 to buy all those on CD!). The other option for us is to get the films via the LDS but our local one at least only allows us to order 3 films at a time, and they can take months to arrive. An indexed version of the 1841 is coming online at www.britishorigins(.)com - they have 11 counties completed so far, with more promised soon. Not much of the 1851 is available online so far, though Ancestry have promised to have it out by the end of the year. In the meantime, bits and pieces are available at www.familyhistoryonline.net and www.stepping-stones(.)co.uk . The complete 1861-1901 is of course already available at Ancestry. Richard

Whilst I'm glad the FRC session helped you Jennifer I'm worried that you will mislead people into thinking they have to have an address to search the 1841 census at the FRC. You can use a place name index for it in the same way as the other censuses, then search the microfilm for that place. I guess you were searching a part of London which had been indexed by address for 1841 and name for 1851 but for many parts of the country the place name index is still the only way in.

In my experience, census indexes are add-ons, produced much later. The type of index which is available for any given census (in any given county) is very variable. There is no 'official' index that will help you find any particular person or street.

And you are reliant on the quality of the indexing! But 'm glad Jennifer found what she wanted. nell