What does it take to bring the 1921 Census of England & Wales online?

Our journey to preserve and digitise the 1921 Census of England and Wales started when Findmypast won the competitive tender published by The National Archives in 2018.  We were thrilled to be chosen to complete the challenging but exciting task of bringing the 1921 Census online for the first time. The Census is an amazing window into the past, giving us a snapshot of 38 million lives in England and Wales on one night in the summer of 1921. Now, with our Premium subscription, you can delve in to the most comprehensive record of life in England and Wales ever released to your hearts content.

Preserving and digitising old family records is no mean feat. Throughout the course of the project, over 500 people plus our partners at The National Archives and the Office for National Statistics worked on digitising the census records.

The true start to this incredible journey was on 19 June 1921 when 38 million people across England and Wales took part in the national census.  Almost a century later, Findmypast was given the opportunity to bring the Census online.

The census is stored in 28,000 volumes or pieces.  Each piece contains between 300 to 600 schedules. For the entire digitisation project, they were housed at a specially designed studio at the Office for National Statistics in Titchfield Hampshire, where they occupied 1.6km of storage shelving.

There are approximately 8.5 million household schedules.  If we laid every census schedule next to each other they would stretch across 4,675 kilometres, a similar distance between London and Boston.

The whole process to digitise and preserve the census took three years to complete. 

Preserving history

Digitising the census starts with our conservation team, including conservation technicians and qualified conservators.  The team went through every single piece, schedule by schedule, assessing and preserving the documents.  Their priority was to make sure the document was stable for digitisation and that we had exposed as much of the original handwriting as possible.

Another fun part of preserving 100-year-old documents is the interesting objects you find along the way. We discovered:

• 532 historic bugs
• 12 used matches
• 17 pencils
• 4 erasers
• Lots of tobacco flakes
• One 1910 Belgian coin

During their time with the schedules, the bugs enjoyed nibbling away at the edges of the documents. 

Bringing the 1921 Census online

The scanning team used two methods to digitise the census records. The first was a sheet-fed scanner that captures an image on both sides. The second was with an overhead camera on a rostrum. This is necessary when we have documents that are especially fragile.

The digital images were split into three segments and sent to our transcription partner. We split the images in order to protect the security of the census data. Over 300 transcribers worked on the project. They typed every name, age, address, and occupation found in the documents.

After all this hard work, the 1921 Census is now finally open to the world, ready for you to explore the countless family stories, secrets and surprises that it holds.

Our first-class online experience will help find your family's records and the stories they reveal in seconds.  To help you make the most of this precious record collection, here are 21 handy tips for exploring the 1921 Census, only available online at Findmypast.