Thursday 6 February 2020

What's happening to the Scottish censuses on FamilySearch?

I've just been alerted to a somewhat weird development on FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org), with regard to the Scottish censuses. According to FamilySearch, this is the number of records now available for the records from 1841-1891:


In 1841, just 2826 individuals were in Scotland. And by 1891, a significant and hefty population increase to err... 6,266.

What's going on FamilySearch?

I should say, I have personally never liked the FamilySearch presentation of the records, with searches returning individuals only, and not households, so it may not be a great loss in practical terms. For a small fee the censuses from 1841-1911, with images, are available on ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk), and the very user friendly 1881 LDS version is also available on the site, completely free of charge to access. Free access to some of the censuses is also available on Scottish Indexes (www.scottishindexes.com) and FreeCEN (www.freecen.org.uk), whilst Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) and FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) both have incomplete partial transcripts from 1841-1901.

The changes are being discussed on Rootschat at https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=825181 - it would be helpful if FamilySearch could provide some answers.

(With thanks to Emma Maxwell)

Chris

You can pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 (out April). Also available, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

2 comments:

  1. The 1901 Census index on FamilySearch was only accessible to LDS members. When non-LDS searched, we always got zero results.

    This has been discussed on the FamilySearch forum: https://getsatisfaction.com/familysearch/topics/scotland-census-1901

    I also asked the National Records of Scotland about why only LDS could view the index. I was wrongly under the impression that it included households and was thus superior to the ScotlandsPeople index. After three months, they replied yesterday to say they did not create the index and know nothing about it. Now it seems it might be a moot point, if the indexes are actually being removed from FS.

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  2. As far as I am aware the census transcriptions for Scotland, like th English/Welsh transcriptions on familysearch are from Findmypast, so perhaps worth asking them, although it could just be FS have a shuffle around of data

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