1926 already on Ancestry

Barely a wet week has passed since the 1926 census has launched and Ancestry has already got a trancribed version on their site. Presumably this will be the same transcription as on the National Archives version because they couldn’t have re-transcribed it themselves so quickly and the Creative Commons licence means they can just take it.

There are no images going with this at present but they do link to the National Archives directly so it’s easy to get the image. They have indexed additional information categories like occupation, marital status, birthplace and religion. I’m not sure whether this extra info is transcribed already and shared or if Ancestry did some background wizardry.

Let’s test it out with a search for a John Kirwan born in Wexford in 1925.

Results show that a few seem to be missing a birthplace. I checked the child living in Barberstown Upper, Co. Kildare, but he was actually born in Barberstown so I’m not sure why he’s coming up as being born in Wexford. In fact, quite a few of these results were people not born in Wexford, and there are some terrible mistranscriptions. Have a guess at where Zippensay really is. Accuracy seems to have been sacrificed for speed.

I also tried a search for Methodists without any names or other information and was returned a list of 8646 people. All the ones I checked were actually Methodists. I got cheeky then and tried the one Buddhist I already know about and it did not find her.

However, given the fact that we cannot currently search the main site by birthplace, you just might find someone who has been separated from their family of origin.

To use this collection, you only need a free Ancestry account: you do not need an Ancestry subscription, so nothing to lose in trying a different algorithm. Let me know how you get on.