Genealogy Chat

If I don't know the address of my ancestor, how would I go about searching for them in a Census CD-ROM set purchased from Archive CD Books? Is their collection of scanned images seperated by parish? In other words, could I scan through the whole of a single parish like with indexed Census CDs? If so, how many pages would that be on average, or how long could it take?

Hi Yes the CD's are usually arranged by Parish or Village. How long it will take to search is anybody's guess. It depends on how big the place is, also the quality of the scanned pages differs - some are very faint and hard to read, some of the handwriting is hard to decipher and some are perfectly clear and readable and can be glanced down in a second. If its a small village you can usually get through it in about 20 mninutes, larger villages and towns could take an hour or more. It depends on whether your relatives are on the first few of pages or not! Sam x

Giles There is no definite answer to your question, it depends who you are looking for and which census. I bought the 1871 for Lancashire some time ago but as I didn't have any addresses, it was very time consuming to search for my ancestors. In the end, I used Ancestry as there is an easy search facility. It's all a matter of how much time you have, I work full time so don't get much chance to search my CDs. Lynne

As Sam seems to have confirmed, if you atleast know the parish or village where your ancestor resided, it shouldn't be too time consuming to search for them without an address? Lancashire is a rather large County, so I can imagine it must take longer. Hopefully, the Archive CD Books will indeed be seperated by Parish, but I don't want to waste my money on a completely unorganised collection of census scans. I emailed them, but they wasn't very helpful.

What cd and census is it? Is there any website with the index on or anyone on here with an index to it? Sarah

It's the 1841 Worcestershire Census CDs, but there are no indexes AFAIK.

Hi, I have just bought these cd's they are indexed by parish not always as you would expect and they are not idiot proof so took me a little time to work out but I have found what I wanted. Would offer to help and look for you but it would have to be in several weeks time as the school holidays have just begun. Mail me direct if this is of any use. Pauline

Pauline, Do you happen to have the 1841 Worcestershire Census CDs? How exactly are the CDs organised?

Hi, They are organised by parishes not names. Would have to look thru' to give you a better answer and I'm suposed to be supervising a 3rd birthday.

Pauline, If you get a spare moment, please could you email me the parish of Belbroughton, so I can spend up to an hour searching it myself? That's providing each parish has it's own seperate file or set of files, which is not too big. Maybe I'm asking too much... Do they even have Belbroughton on the CDs? This might possibly come under the parish of Bromsgrove, in which case, it might take me a week to find my ancestor! :)

I just got a more helpful reply from Archive CD Books, and it appears all places might be contained within one giant PDF file with bookmarks to each individual place? I think I'll just order CD2 then... thanks!