In the following days, employees of the Public Record Office and of QinetiQ (pronounced "kinetic"), the prime contractor involved in the online census records, scrambled to stabilize the website. Alas, their efforts were fruitless. The site continued to crash due to a variety of problems with hardware, software, and system load. You can read about this in my earlier columns at:
www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/5123.asp,
www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/5154.asp,
www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/5619.asp and
www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/eastman/5682.asp

This week’s good news is that the 1901 UK census is coming back online. In fact, it is available now, although with significant restrictions. The 1901 Census for England and Wales is currently being tested with small groups. Its bandwidth has been increased, and the site reportedly has been made more stable for the heavy request traffic that it got when it first launched.

According to the main page for the 1901 census, "The 1901 Census website is currently running as a live public Internet test site. During this test period, which we anticipate will last a number of weeks, the service will normally be available 09.00 to 19.00 hours (GMT+1 hour) Monday to Saturday." On another page, the website states, "We are conducting this test phase in order to undertake detailed monitoring and further optimise the site settings to ensure a good user experience for the high levels of demand we expect when we launch the live service." Users are being limited to 2 hours of continuous use.

I used the test site briefly this week and it seemed to work well. The UK-1901-CENSUS-L mailing list on RootsWeb has many stories of successes and failures in the past few days.

You can access the 1901 U.K. Census at www.pro.gov.uk

A privately-owned webpage with more information is available at: www.web-community.co.uk/census/news.html. You can also subscribe to the UK-1901-CENSUS-L mailing list as well as search the mailing list archives at: http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/intl/UK/UK-1901-CENSUS.html

A number of software tools for use with the 1901 census are also available:

1901 Census Extractor v2.1c (With Built-in GuessTimator)

A Microsoft Spreadsheet for copying data from the PRO Census website results pages and pasting the data into the spreadsheet. The page and person identifiers are then extracted into columns, which can be sorted to establish families. Version 2.1 now includes the GuessTimator, which will generate Piece and Folio Numbers. The 1901 Census Extractor v2.1c is available at: www.leedsindexers.co.uk/Internet_Tools.htm

1901 Census GuessTimator v1.1c

This little windows program allows you to enter the pageID number from the 1901 Census Results Screen. Press the button and it will generate the Piece and Folio Numbers. It works very well - but you may have to search for folios either side if you can't find the entries on the original piece. This program is still in its infancy of testing and is available at: www.leedsindexers.co.uk/Internet_Tools.htm

Get1901DataV2

Researchers using the Person Search or Advanced Person Search on the 1901 Census website may find the application Get1901DataV2 useful. This allows the results of multiple searches to be collected together, stored, displayed, sorted, and grouped into families. It also displays estimated (but usually accurate) PRO Piece and Folio Numbers (using a table and algorithm devised by Jeffery Knaggs). This application was written for Win 98 but has been reported to work in Win 95, Win XP and Win 2000, too. Get1901DataV2 is available at: www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/CensusSoftware/

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