1911 census release moved forward

The National Archives announced today that it will make the 1911 census available sooner than expected. Some "key sensitive information" will still be withheld until the first working day of 2012 under the previous 100-year rule. But the bulk of the census will now be online in early 2009, and available through Freedom of Information requests (for a fee of £45 per address) starting in January 2007. TNA has more information, and Your Family Tree Magazine has an article with some background.

More new (old) books: a gazetteer, more Survey of London, Magna Britannia, and more

Since my last report, British History Online has posted Lewis's 1848 Topographical Dictionary of England; several new volumes of the Survey of London; the Cornwall, Cumberland, Derbyshire, and Devon volumes of Lysons' Magna Britannia (note that the Bedfordshire and Berkshire volumes are available on CD from Archive CD Books); and several other items. BHO now has two RSS feeds for announcing new publications, so from now on I won't duplicate those announcements here.

Recent updates at FreeCEN, FreeREG, and FreeBMD

FreeCEN now has more than 8.7 million transcribed census records. Counties completed in the latest update include Aberdeenshire 1841, Morayshire 1841 and 1851, Roxburghshire 1841, and Warwickshire 1891. Access to FreeREG is now open to all. The site now has 1.2 million records transcribed from parish registers. FreeBMD added 1.8 million civil registration index records in its latest update, for a total of 162 million. The FreeBMD coverage charts now highlight recent additions as well as showing totals by event and quarter. All three sites are running more quickly with the recent installation of four additional servers.

1851 and 1861 censuses of Scotland now at Ancestry

Ancestry recently posted indexes to the 1851 and 1861 censuses of Scotland. These join the 1841 census that I wrote about in June. Still no images, and still very clunky to use, with no way of seeing all the data for a household at once. When images are added, this will be great, but in the mean time, use FreeCEN instead if it has the county you want.

This blog's new look

This blog has a new look. I recently discovered that the old format didn't display properly for Firefox users. It had some lesser problems (sometimes) in other browsers too. Sorry about that. Rather than move mountains trying to fix the bugs, I've switched to one of Blogger's standard templates. I like the old look better, and I hope to recreate it (minus the bugs) eventually.

Genealogy books for holiday reading

A recent discussion on the GOONS mailing list made several good suggestions of genealogy books to read over the holidays or give as Christmas presents. The GOONS list is open only to members of the Guild of One-Name Studies, but nonmembers can read the archives.

Cardiff and London new (old) books

In the past month, British History Online has released

• Matthews's Cardiff Records (in five volumes),
• very detailed (1:2,500 scale = 25 inches to the mile) early Ordnance Survey maps of 16 British cities, and
• three more volumes of the Survey of London.

Meanwhile Archive CD Books has released Robinson's

• The History and Antiquities of Hackney,
• The History and Antiquities of Tottenham High Cross,
• The History and Antiquities of Stoke Newington,
• The History and Antiquities of Edmonton, and
• The History and Antiquities of Enfield,

published between 1818 and 1845. See ACDB's London History page.