Anyone else feeling ripped off by 1921 census?

The censuses are public records and belong to us all. Previous censuses have been transcribed without such an expensive song and dance. Monopolies are frowned upon because they enable to charge what they like.
I pay for Ancestry monthly, and would happily pay for FindMyPast monthly, but not if I have to then pay again to access the records. It does sound like a joke.

I found my ex husband's birth certificate on another family tree. I did not have it so had a look. A little research confirmed this was someone I suspected he had an affair with many years ago, one of many actually. There appear to be three children from this relationship which I did not know about. I was not surprised but beware. You may find out things you did not really expect or want to know.

I am glad my mother was brave enough to crawl back in the ruins of the first house we had bombed during the London Blitz and saved one or two documents, which includes my paternal grandma and granddads original wedding certificate, dated 1897 when they got wed on Christmas Day of that year.
Apart from a few other documents and photos.

In my own generation I have a lot of cousins. Many of them have Christian names to honour a beloved grandmother (male and female versions of the name) and a lot of the following generations have that name included too. At least for most of them it is a middle name, and they are known by their first name.

At a great-great-grandparent level I found half-a-dozen boys baptised William within a few years of each other, with the same surname and born on the same farm. I had already discovered that twentyfive years or so later two of the Williams from that farm married two Anns in the same church in a neighbouring parish - luckily not in a double wedding. I managed to work out which was an ancestor of mine by tracing the parents of the two Anns. One pair were Charles and Margaret - the first four children of my William were Sarah, Thomas, Margaret and Charles, and the parents of one of the Williams turned out to be Thomas and Sarah. You have to be a bit of a detective.

On most of the old parish registers the parson/vicar never thought to put the baby's date of birth, unimportant! Or the mother's name of course. But I've seen some where they've put quite detailed information, date of child's birth and baptism, name of parents and even what family they were from! That vicar was someone who actually understood that they were recording important information about a person's identity. If only they were all like that.

PS. If you think searching the transcribed or printed indexes is full of problems, just wait until you get far enough back to search the photocopied handwritten indexes (some of them in beautiful clear copperplate, but others in a faded scrawl) or the parish notebooks of earlier generations, cramped entries in ancient handwriting, listing fathers but not mothers (miracle births?), births within a few months to several identical couples with the same names (duplication when baby was baptised? Cousins born to cousins who themselves were named after parents or grandparents?)

Ilovecheese

I don't know where you live Sarnia but in Manchester the central library are giving free access to the 1921 census on their terminals.

That's ironic. It is Manchester history that I am researching but I live in Surrey! Thanks for the info.

Not the "actual transcripts". "You can also follow a link from the transcript to a scan of the actual page" A scan of the actual page in the index, as the transcriber saw it, so you can compare what was in the original printed version with what the transcriber was seeing and thought they were transcribing.

That is as close as you get to the primary source without paying for a copy of the actual certificate or seeing the original parish register (or a photocopy of it) in a Family History Centre. If the original index page has an ink-blot over the entry you want, and the transcriber hasn't found a way round it, then that may be your next route.

There used to be a site where people passed on unwanted certificates, so there is a possibility that someone has your relative there. That was twenty years ago, Sorry, I forget its URL.

Chestnut

Oopsadaisy1

Sorry oakdryad, Elegran I misunderstood, I thought you meant the actual birth certificate, I’ve seen the typewritten ones.

As I said, the actual birth and death certificates will never be available online and especially not free. They contain personal information and it's right they should be ordered individually and paid for. Would you like your birth certificate available online for anyone to see? I wouldn't.

I realise this, I was thrown by the poster saying that you could see the ‘actual’ transcripts. Of course I had seen the typed pages before.
I have purchased many many Birth and Marriage certificates over the years, all for Ancestors.
Scotlands People, for a fee, will allow you to see the original Certificates online that you can print off.

Oopsadaisy1

Sorry oakdryad, Elegran I misunderstood, I thought you meant the actual birth certificate, I’ve seen the typewritten ones.

As I said, the actual birth and death certificates will never be available online and especially not free. They contain personal information and it's right they should be ordered individually and paid for. Would you like your birth certificate available online for anyone to see? I wouldn't.

I have bought the 1921 scans and it was great to see my ancestor's handwriting. However it has to be put correctly to be found by the search function. I did find my grandparents but I don't know how as there were so many errors. Anyone trying to find an address in the village of North Cave won't find it. In the search my family's address came up as 'Thorpe' instead of North Cave. The parish is called North Cave and Everthorpe with Drewton. That just looks to me like not taking care. All quite clear to read when I got the scan. I have notified fmp.

Free BMD is just a searchable database which draws together all the data which used to be in the big old ledgers that were held at records offices and that you had to search manually page by page. Volunteer transcribers are sent pages from the ledgers to transcribe.

Looking at the original scan can be helpful if you think that despite the double keying, an error may have occurred. A common one is when you click on the page number for a marriage and find there is an odd number of entries. That's usually because there's a discrepancy in the volume OR page number. A further search on the quarter, registration district and either volume OR page number will usually find the missing name.

I did add a post to say that it was the index, but I think you were busy searching BMD just then. You don't see the actual certificate without shelling out for it, but from the index you can get a few clues (registration place, approximate date within 3 months, spouses surname) and a reference for ordering the certificate, plus a look at a scan of the index page, which may reveal if it was transcribed wrongly.. It used to be a bit cheaper if you could quote the reference, but I don't know whether that is still true.

Sorry oakdryad, Elegran I misunderstood, I thought you meant the actual birth certificate, I’ve seen the typewritten ones.

Oopsadaisy1. Click on the spectacles beside the FreeBMD entry.

Elegran whereabouts on the BMD page is the link to the actual transcriptions/ transcripts? I’ve been using it for years and have never found that link.

Yammy I should have added that this is for the index, and gives you a reference number for ordering a certificate. The mother's surname is also given in the index, so you have the start of a search in the index for a marriage.

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.

Chestnut

Yammy

I found my grandparents by using my mother's sisters name which was very unusual.
Does anyone know of an internet site where you can view B.M.D? without paying. I am helping to sort the chap opposite family out and really need marriage certificates for1860/1870.
I don't feel like buying as there are a few options.

I don't think birth or death certificates will ever be available online. They contain personal details and it's appropriate that they are ordered individually and paid for. They can be ordered as a PDF for £7 which is reasonable.

More and more marriages are coming online however, showing the entry in the parish register which provides the same details as the marriage certificate. That is amazing as it saves you £11.50 each time! Makes the subscription to Ancestry or Find My Past really worthwhile and money saving.

Yammy On FreeBMD you can see the transcripts (which I can vouch for as being pretty accurate, as I was one of the volunteers transcribing them. At least two people transcribed each page, and if they differed, they were rechecked by an experienced supervisor.

You can also follow a link from the transcript to a scan of the actual page, and see it for yourself. There are several other bits of information, about registration districts and so on. All this is free. There are other free transcript sites for free census transcripts and other things (not the 1921 census yet)

All this is free.

That’s why the experts recommend only buying the originals and not the transcripts, Rubysong. There are so many errors.

I have found people on the 1921 census but the transcription/index is awful. There are so many mistakes on everything I've looked at. My Beckett ancestors are shown as Bickett and don't come up as a variant. The village most of my family were from is wrongly transcribed and comes up as something no-one would ever find. I understand the transcribers never saw the entire form, only parts of it 'to preserve confidentiality'. If they had seen the whole form there would have been fewer errors.
My father, who would have been 16 and probably working on a farm somewhere, is nowhere to be found. I have tried all variants, place of birth, year of birth etc.
Having said all that, I don't think £3.50 is bad value for the image of the form.
I am extremely grateful to my local county library as they have provided free access to Ancestry throughout the pandemic, which has been wonderful for me.

Yammy

I found my grandparents by using my mother's sisters name which was very unusual.
Does anyone know of an internet site where you can view B.M.D? without paying. I am helping to sort the chap opposite family out and really need marriage certificates for1860/1870.
I don't feel like buying as there are a few options.

I don't think birth or death certificates will ever be available online. They contain personal details and it's appropriate that they are ordered individually and paid for. They can be ordered as a PDF for £7 which is reasonable.

More and more marriages are coming online however, showing the entry in the parish register which provides the same details as the marriage certificate. That is amazing as it saves you £11.50 each time! Makes the subscription to Ancestry or Find My Past really worthwhile and money saving.

In reply to the OP it is not unreasonable to charge £3.50 for each household at all. It cost millions of pounds and took three years to transcribe them. I have had no trouble at all identifying the people before paying. Maybe you need to do some more research if you can't identify your people. Try the 1911 Census and build up the family profile. For any that cannot be identified for certain (maybe away from home or whatever) I will just wait until they are available with the subscription rather than pay for them now.

It could be that the National Archives chose a British company to buy the 1921 Census, rather than Ancestry which is based in the USA?
It’s a shame, but maybe it wasn’t just that money talks.
I find that FMP is difficult to navigate compared to Ancestry.

I've been researching my family through Ancestry.com - and paying monthly - and I'd rather assumed that Ancestry would purchase access to the Census. They haven't. Find My Past having a monopoly seems a bit unfair.