There, under the watchful eyes and careful guidance of the Office for National Statistics and The National Archives, Findmypast set about the immense task of bringing the 1921 Census to the public.ĭigitisation is the umbrella term we use for imaging and indexing a record set to make it publishable in fully searchable form online. The books were placed in archive boxes and transferred to a secure government location for digitisation. For a while they were held at Somerset House on the Strand later, in the basement of Audit House in London and eventually at Christchurch in Dorset. Other than that, the catalogued and bound census returns sat in government department storage, occasionally moving from one place of storage to another. Some parts of it were in fact used internally by the Census Office itself in the late 1920s to prepare for the 1931 Census (sadly now lost following a fire), and limited access was granted to academics on rare occasions. A keypunch machineĬomptometer operators then fed the punch cards into sorting and counting machines, which digested them and spat out the raw data that later became the 1921 Census we know today.Īnd then what? The 1921 Census was closed by law (under the Census Act of 1920) for 100 years. The dextrous punch card girls also undertook basic first aid on damaged schedules, re-attaching detached sections. Census Office clerical staff went through every census return, annotating them with occupational codes and sometimes making revisions in their distinctive green ink.Ī taskforce of nimble-fingered young women, mostly aged between 15 and 17 and known as ‘punchers’, extracted information about each person on each census return on to tabulation punch cards. The schedules were bound into hardback volumes. The enumerators checked and processed the schedules, and then passed them on to the registrar of their district who, in turn, packaged them up for the Census Office in London. A blank census formĪs with the 1911 Census, it is these original householder returns from 1921 that have been kept and which survive today. They then collected them, filled in by householders, the following week. Before census night on 19 June, enumerators distributed blank census forms to be completed by each household in the country. But it won’t magically appear on Findmypast’s website overnight – digitising this precious resource has been three long, hard years in the making. The 1921 Census of England and Wales will be available to explore online at Findmypast from 6 January 2022. This blog looks at the census itself and how Findmypast approached the digitisation of it in our other blog we delve into the details of the essential work that has gone into conserving the census throughout the project – click here to read it. We spoke to Stephen Rigden, Records Development Manager for our partners at Findmypast, to find out about this huge project to publish the census online. The announcement that the 1921 Census will be available online from next January will undoubtedly cause great excitement among researchers around the world.
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