How We Brought The 1921 Census Online | Findmypast By Findmypast

the 1921 census contains the details of 38 million individuals it takes one point six kilometers of shelving to store all the senses books here at Edgefield these never-before-seen records provide an opportunity to delve into the stories of our ancestors connecting the past with the present and the future for a century they’ve been locked away only now the very first time are they being made available to the public

find my pot that undertaken the mammoth pack of digitizing every last one of these records together they build a picture of life in 1921 preserving the nation’s history for us and for future Generations it’s taken a team of Specialists years to digitize the senses and this is how they did it

in order to conserve and digitize the 1921 census majority of the process is Manuel so we have the conservation team are reviewing every single volume scheduled by shuttle and their stuff each volume during that assessment they may repair terrorist the flight increases and they were like that if I’m old and pink and black and all the colors of the rainbow and it can also affect the structure of the papers also it’s somewhat more delicate to handle I like the service she has a lot of opportunity to do that in this job as a significant number of incidents within the census these foreign sites of matter and timely fight between the pages of a sense to spend some time with the last hundred years

what’s the volume is identified as ready for capture or ready for scanning it’s giving it over to one of her scanning technician at that point a scanning technician will feed the cheapest got her one at a time within the she keeps it actually catches an image of both sides through an arrangement of internal mirrors if there’s any part of the volume that has been identified by the conservation team as being too fragile for a machine like that that is captured with an overhead camera to all of these different manual processes are in place to maintain the Integrity of the original historical documents

it’s been an amazing experience working on these projects and working with the pain of a table also passionate about history almost all of them have some kind of a background in Heritage History libraries and archives as well as conservation we have been incredibly fortunate to be able to see these documents fast hand and be the first people to actually save them is actually only the second time that we have access to the original household schedules and this is the original form that your ancestor wrote on so you can see your ancestors signature and see their handwriting and provides a kind of a micro history of that individual family it tells a story with just one document the 1921 census also represents communities of immigrants we have same-sex couples and you’ve disable deck servicemen has come across a number of found objects or things like pressed flowers coins pencils one grave

and if a small notebook by the owner that owns these objects at the Jay station project of this size is a massive effort it’s taken us three years to conserve digitized and transcribed these records be shared with the Weld and shipped out this way friends and family

the Census records on cover a wealth of information about life in 1921 information that could change how you see your ancestors, even how you see yourself to find out visit find my past where will your past take you