After months of little information and ongoing delay, ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) has finally released the 1921 census, almost a year after the equivalent for England and Wales was released.
I have spent the last couple of hours searching for relatives and taking in feedback from other folk on social media. The concensus so far seems to be that it is working (for some, gloriously so!), better so than many were expecting, and it hasn't crashed! However, there are certainly issues that are still impacting on the site for some folk from last week's disastrous site revamp that has caused so much grief - not just online, but also at the family history centres across the country offering access (many of which have had to cancel appointments).
The first thing to report is that I have managed to find all the people I have been looking for so far, but there certainly have been issues. The biggest problem that I have found so far has been with the use of wildcards - they simply don't work just now. I have a great uncle called John Brownlie Paton, who I searched for using 'John B* Paton', with the * wildcard in play. This returned no results. I tried 'John B Paton' (without a wildcard) and seven entries were returned, but none were for him. A simple search of 'John Paton' returned dozens of entries, which when arranged in order of age flagged him up - indexed as 'John Brownlie Paton'! A colleague advised me to reset the search term each time - to manually select the wildcard option beside the name field with each search - but when I did this for John I got 543 results for 'John B* Paton', retuning the names of anyone called John, whether they had a middle name beginning with B or not! And in some cases, completely different middle names.
The * wildcard issue is a big one, and should absolutely have been picked up, and I have read several accounts of folk having the exact same issue, not just with the 1921 census, but with searches across the whole ScotlandsPeople site. A colleague has informed me that she is also having horrendous problems performing searches for names such as McLeod, using M*Leod to help look for McLeods and MacLeods. Along with other folk, I have contacted ScotlandsPeople customer team to ask them to look into this.
Other issues I have been informed about, but not yet encountered myself yet, are problems selecting more than one district to carry out a search within, and folk receiving 404 error messages (likely due to the volume of enquiries on the site). One person commenting has stated that there appear to be no records for North Harris at all. I also had one image that I thought the resolution seemed quite low on, with some compression distortion visible - I queried with ScotlandsPeople if the 1921 images are at the same resolution as the 1911 census, and I have been assured that they are.
But there are of course some positives! The first is - I have found a shed load of new records to process! Lots of massively useful information, particularly on the story of my family in the immediate aftermath of their ordeal in Brussels, Belgium, where they were trapped as civilians for 4 years. Another minor delight is to see that the payment regime now adds credits to your account instantly upon payment, instead of the tortuous ordeal of having to wait a few minutes for that to happen in the past - probably not good for my bank balance, but certainly good for the soul!
I'll be writing a more in depth look at the census itself for a Family Tree article shortly, so won't go into too much of that here just now. Suffice to say, if you are not experiencing issues, that is wonderful, and I hope that you are finding all you can! If you are having issues, please persevere by trying to manipulate searches and data by other means, you should hopefully get there eventually. If you do have problems, please let the customer team at ScotlandsPeople know via https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/contact-us, they are working hard to get the site back up to strength again.
Finally, some acknowledgment to those who have placed the 1921 census online - thank you. That's the staff at ScotlandsPeople who have been working hard on this, and to the team at Queen's University in Belfast which indexed it, job done. To the management at the National Records of Scotland, however, I hope some serious lessons will be learned about customer engagement and practice from the whole sorry experience of finally getting to this point.
On the plus side - just nine years to go until the 1931 census!
* An email yesterday from ScotlandsPeople advised me to look at the census guide on on the site to learn how to get the best from the census, with the guide not actually mentioning 1921 at all. This has now been updated at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/guides/record-guides/census-returns.
* The NRS announcement of the census release is at https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/news/2022/1921-scottish-census-released
* STV has a report at https://news.stv.tv/scotland/scottish-ancestors-from-100-years-ago-can-be-traced-as-1921-census-released-by-national-records-of-scotland
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
Hallelujah! New census day is always a happy day! Thanks for spending your first day with it so productively and sharing your findings.
ReplyDeleteIt is extremely disappointing that the searchable fields remain exactly as they have been for years. With common names, the inability to narrow down hits using other information contained in the census is poor (one very minor adjustment would be to add to the ability to cross check another name in the household, to include their age or age range - for instance searching for someone named John, with a William in the household doesnt really help much!)
ReplyDeleteIt's my understanding that Queen's University has also been tasked with creating a more detailed transcript of the census, but I don't know if this is for academic use only or for public roll-out. One thing you can do to identify a full household, or at least those sharing a same surname, is to search for a surname in a district and then re-order the entries by Ref number, by clicking the blue Ref header at the top. Everyone in the same household sharing that surname will have the same reference number, and should therefore be clumped together. It's for this reason that I kicked up with ScotlandsPeople last week when they removed the census references number altogether following the disastrous upgrade to the system - they have since reinstated them.
DeleteGreat tip. Thanks Chris! Donald
Delete" and folk receiving 404 error messages " - yes in about 20 % of all searches of all types. To overcome this each time I have to go back to the start and re-enter exactly the same search terms. Its like playing snakes and ladders with no ladders, only snakes. And getting false messages of "Sorry, there are no results for your search", when I know that's not true, and prove so by varying one of the search terms in some minor way that does not affect the search, and then it is as though the system suddenly wakes up. And the system failing sometimes to pick up a different set of parishes when I change the search county.
ReplyDeleteScotlandspeople have clearly not tested their system before releasing any upgrade.