1939 Register

Find my Past has just released the UK’s 1939 Register, which fills the gap in UK censuses from 1921 and 1951. The 1939 Register has been dubbed ‘The Wartime Domesday Book’ - it is the most comprehensive survey of the population of England and Wales ever taken.
The 1921 census is the next one due to be released, but that isn’t scheduled till 2021. The 1931 Census was taken, but was destroyed in a fire. And the 1941 Census was never taken due to war going on … so the next one that was taken (and that survives) is the 1951. So the 1939 Register fills this gap nicely.
The 1939 Register was a one-off survey of the public. The war with Germany had just started and officials had little time to lose in preparing for the fighting and privations to come. So on 29 September 1939, just 26 days after hostilites had been declared, a survey nicknamed the UK’s only “instant census” took place. 65,000 enumerators were employed to visit every house in England and Wales to take stock of the civil population.
The findings enabled the issuing of identity cards and ration cards, plan mass evacuations and co-ordinate other war-time provisions - and the register applied to ALL citizens. In the longer term, the 1939 Register would go on to play a central role in the establishment of post-war services like the NHS.
The details the 1939 Register requested were:
– Name
– Sex
– Age
– Occupation
– Address (at the time off filling in the form)
– Marital status
– Membership of navel, military or air force reserves, auxiliary forces or civil defence services or reserves.
It is these individual returns for England and Wales that have been digitised by Findmypast and made available on their database. There are 7,000 volumes, which totals about 41 million records.
As well as the original record image, Find my Past has also added maps, facts and figures and photos of the time to further increase the value of this resource. You will be able to see who lived in the household – although some records are closed due to being younger than 100 years old and still alive. You can choose to unlock these records to access additional information.
Interactive maps show how a neighbourhood has changed over the past 130 years Local and national newspaper articles from 1939, give an insight into the world at this time. Photographs document life in 1930s and 1940s England and Wales. Facts and figures compare average ages, occupations and popular names compared to the rest of the country.
For more about these significant records, read the BBC’s article about the Register.

Irish Census Records

Thousands of Irish census documents, many dating back to the early 19th Century, have been made available to the public online for the first time. The vast majority of pre-1922 records were destroyed in the Irish Civil War by a fire at the Public Record Office, but some of the documents that survived the fire, and others held elsewhere, have now been collated and put online. They include partial census records from 1821 to 1851, a substantial amount from counties now in Northern Ireland. Surviving documents from the 1821 census include household returns from large parts of County Fermanagh. Many of the 1831 census records for County Londonderry have survived, and a substantial amount of 1851 census documents from County Antrim also remain intact. Most of them are not the original documents, but are contemporaneous copies of census forms archived in offices in what later became Northern Ireland. The surviving documents had previously been available to order from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) but they have now been published online, to access free of charge, by the National Archives of Ireland, which undertook the project in partnership with genealogical companies, FindMyPast and FamilySearch. In total, the newly available documentation relates to more than 600,000 individuals on the island of Ireland. Many of the records are from the years leading up to the Irish famine, which is reckoned to have killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population.

For people of Irish descent, tracing their family roots is notoriously difficult because of a series of documentation disasters. Full government censuses for the whole island of Ireland began in 1821 and continued at ten-year intervals until 1911. No census was taken in 1921, because of the Irish War of Independence. However, many of the records were completely destroyed prior to 1922, by order of the British government, on grounds of confidentiality. The original census returns for 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after they were taken. Documents from the 1881 and 1891 censuses were pulped during the First World War. The majority of the returns for the four censuses carried out between 1821 and 1851 were destroyed by a major fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland. When the Irish Civil War began in June 1922, the government-owned building based at Dublin's Four Courts was among the first casualties. Almost all of the records it held, some dating back to medieval times, were destroyed in bomb explosions that set fire to the office on 30 June of that year.

As a result, the 1901 and 1911 Irish censuses are the only pre-partition censuses to survive in comprehensive form. Census records are normally kept confidential and only released 100 years after the original surveys were completed. However, because so many Irish census documents have been destroyed, the 100-year rule was suspended and the public were given early access to the 1901 and 1911 censuses. Further information and other related stories can be found at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-27205043

1940 U.S. Census

After much promotion, the 1940 U.S. Census schedules are now available for searching. There will not be an index immediately available to search by name, however several organizations have joined forces to take on this task and are asking for your help. The 1940 U.S. Census Community Project is a national volunteer service project that will likely make Internet history as the largest and most innovative use of 'crowd sourcing' ever seen. So you can help index the 1940 Census. They hope to have it totally indexed in six months. If you would like to help out go to -
https://the1940census.com/getting-started/
Ancestry.com is advertising the census availability as a means to attract people to ancestry.com. While it is available through Ancestry.com free for a limited time, it is also available through other sources without a fee and no membership requirements. The census can be checked out at: http://1940census.archives.gov

During the live launch event of the 1940 Census, Census Director Robert Groves was set to search for a member of his family. But the image never loaded, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. Upon launch the website 1940census.archives.gov was immediately overwhelmed. In the first three hours, the website had 22.5 million hits.
The site was designed to support 10 million hits a day, with 25,000 concurrent users. Access issues have now been addressed, but it adds weight to the claim that Genealogy is the biggest hobby in America.

National Archives of Ireland

The National Archives of Ireland have digitised the household returns and ancillary records for the censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, which are in the custody of the National Archives of Ireland and represent an extremely valuable part of the Irish national heritage.
All thirty-two counties for 1901 and 1911, are now available. Corrections and improvements will be ongoing. A small amount of material is still missing, and will be placed online as soon as possible.