Comments on: From Archive to Web: Getting a census online

By: Annabel Reeves

Annabel Reeves — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:27:23 +0000

Hi Chris – if you click here you can see the press release we sent out last year, which talks about the restoration work done to these records, and that also mentions the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society's work. However, we can only share with you details of the work that the team here at Ancestry carried out on these damaged records.

By: Chris R

Chris R — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:57:27 +0000

So Ancestry did all of this with no help from anyone else? Have a look at this website:

http://www.1851-unfilmed.org.uk/project.htm

Clearly, recovering the Manchester 1851 census had been an ongoing project long before Ancestry even existed! Also, the idea of using UV light was the idea of the National Archives, not Ancestry. I am happy to believe that Ancestry built on this idea to develop a specialist camera, and no doubt improved on it, but please give some credit to the people that did the initial work.

Chris.

By: Caroline Gurney

Caroline Gurney — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:08:00 +0000

An interesting post, thank you, but a shame it didn’t say more about the aspect of most interest to genealogists – the indexing. I’d love to know who does your indexing and whether you use technology such as OCR for typewritten or printed records. What training do you give the indexers? What systems do you have in place for quality control? Do you have any plans to expand the options for users to make corrections, to cover dates and places as well as names? It would be great if you could do a whole blog post on this subject.