As far as I am aware, free digital access is available at the National Archives Kew, Manchester libraries and in Wales. I have no information about why there is this disparity. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing that drives the disparity over bus passes and prescription charges depending on where one lives. Alternatively, there may be some kind of funding arrangement or reciprocity that we are not party to. Do we know, for example, how many conservationists were drafted in from regional records offices to work on the project?
The video on FindmyPast describes the enormous amount of professional work that has been done to make this resource available to family historians so I have no objection to the costs being recouped. Thinking back to those early days of research in the 1980s, I spent a small fortune on train fares to London’s Alwych and later Farringdon to trawl through registers, microfiches an miles of microfilm at St Catherine’s House, the London Metropolitan Archives and the Society of Genealogists. Once the base work was done, I spend a lot of time visiting county records offices.
I suspect may of us have volunteered as transcribers in the past. I have spent many, many hours transcribing for FreeBMD. Transcription is double-keyed by two different volunteers for each page and anomalies flagged and resolved by a third person. I don’t know to what extent transcription of censuses has been double-keyed.
I subscribe to both Ancestry and FindMyPast. I find the two complement one another. I am also grateful to the National Archives who, during lockdown, made many documents not available elsewhere and which would usually cost £3.50 to download, free of charge.
One of the changes I have noticed from 1911 to 1921 is the improvement in handwriting on the census forms. 1911 was the first time we saw our our ancestors’ own handwriting on a census. In my families’ cases, some of it was barely legible. I descend from solid lower working class stock so clearly education and self-improvement were having an effect. I’ve downloaded about twenty pages for 1921 for different family lines and the writing is neat and legible in every case. Tough times too. About 80% of the adults were out-of-work.