British Data Available On Cd-Rom

Sun., July 4, 1999

Donna Potter Phillips The Spokes

I have great news for those seeking to locate ancestors living in 1881 in England, Wales or Scotland. The 1881 British census is now available on CD-ROM, according to an announcement from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Even better, it’s available at an affordable price.

After 11 years and more than 2 million hours of volunteer labor, the largest census ever to be automated is now available on CD-ROM for home use. The automated 1881 British census contains information of more than 30 million individuals in England, Wales and Scotland. (Unfortunately, the 1881 census for Ireland does not exist.)

The story behind this project is one of tremendous individual participation and the cooperation of thousands of people dedicated to the creation of the most complete, complex and largest census database ever created to date, said Elder D. Todd Christofferson, director of the church’s Family History Department.

Begun in 1987, the index is the result of a collective effort of volunteers from the Federation of Family History Societies in the United Kingdom and the LDS church. Every effort was made to reproduce the information as it was originally recorded by the British census-takers.

Each of the 1 million-plus pages was photocopied. Each letter and name was transcribed and double-checked for accuracy. No wonder the project was in the works for so long.

Here are the project factoids:

It took 11 years to complete

There are 1,211,695 pages of the original census

It took 1.4 million-plus hours to transcribe

It took 1.2 million-plus hours to enter the transcribed data on computer

It took 10,000-plus volunteers and transcribers, 369 computers and 11,266 floppy diskettes

Among the 30 million entries, users will find the following entries:

Charles L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), an M.A. Student & Lecturer at Oxford University

Joseph R. (Rudyard) Kipling, 15 years old attending school in Devon

Master Winston Churchill, the 6-year-old-son of Lord Randolph Churchill

The census has been published on a set of 25 compact disks, including an eight-disk national index and viewer that allows users to quickly search across the entire database. To make the census indexes easier to use, the data has been divided into eight regions: East Anglia, Greater London, Midlands, North Central, Northern Borders and Miscellany, Southwestern, Wales and Monmouth, and Scotland.

Users will be delighted to find that the census includes enumerations for the Royal Navy in 1881. That means it lists all people living, working or traveling on a boat or ship at the time the census was taken. The Miscellany Region includes those in poorhouses, mental institutions, workhouses, schools and hospitals.

The census is available for purchase in its entirety or by region. Cost for the entire 25-CD census is $33 U.S. To order, call (800) 537-5971, or order online at www.familysearch.org.

System requirements to run the disks are: Pentium processor or equivalent; Windows ‘95, ‘98 or NT; a minimum 8 MB RAM (16 is recommended); CD-ROM drive; SVGA monitor with 256-color card; and 25 MB hard disk space.

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