1939 Register

Today (November 2nd) saw the long-awaited release of the 1939 Register by Find My Past.

This register served as an emergency census at the outbreak of World War II and was used in part to handle applications for ration books. It is free to carry out a search, but it will cost you £6.95 to view a full page from the original Record.

This register is a fantastic resource because, after the 1911 census, it is the most up-to-date record of the population that is accessible for all to see. This Register will give you, among other things:

• Names of all people living in a household.
• Dates of birth.
• Occupations.
• Marital Status.

While the release at Find My Past covers only England and Wales, the Northern Irish edition is held by PRONI and is available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. If you send off a quick message using PRONI's online enquiry form with the names and addresses of the people you would like to find in the 1939 Register, then PRONI should have no problem in releasing their entries to you.

However, both PRONI and Find My Past only release information covering those born over 100 years ago, so you will have to supply the death certificates at your own cost if you wish to obtain the entries for anyone who is deceased but was born less than 100 years ago.

Personally, I am thrilled by this release. My great-great grandmother moved to Liverpool in the early 1900s and I never knew her date of birth. Now, thanks to the 1939 Register, I can check off one more item on my Family History Bucket List.

As with any database that involves transcribing old handwriting, there are some errors to be found in the names, but thankfully the Advanced Search facility allows the public to search by Street Name and other options to help locate the people you wish to find.

The folks over at Find My Past really deserve more thanks than I can give them. This was a huge project to undertake, and no doubt required a great deal of funding and hard work to see through. The contribution this will make to twentieth-century genealogical research cannot be overstated.

Using the 1901/1911 censuses

Arguably the most accessible and widely-used resources for contemporary family research are the 1901 and 1911 censuses.

While fairly straightforward to use, I meet so many people who tell me that they were unable to find their ancestors on either census, and are at the brink of accepting that they must be descended from a long line of secret agents using pseudonyms and aliases.

However, this is almost never the case. The census pages are full of mistakes, while the online transcriptions often fall victim to human error.

So, let me offer some tips that I have learned and which may help you on your journey:

• Switch the surnames and forenames. As I mentioned, human error is always a possibility, and it is very easy for a National Archives volunteer to put 'John' where it should have been 'Smith' and vice versa. This was the trick that revealed the entry for my three-times great-grandmother Margaret Campbell on the 1911 census:

• 'Browse' it, don't 'Search' it. I imagine that most people click on 'Search Census' when carrying out a look-up, but personally I find the 'Browse Census' facility to be much more helpful in locating the extended family and learning more about the environment in which a person lived. I learned the value of this when I tired of searching for variant spellings of common names and was still winding up with hundred of incorrect results. If you are not getting anywhere by entering the name, then narrow it down by County and DED (District Electoral Division.) Open up each of the Townlands in a separate tab, and then you can start zeroing in on the households. The beauty of this type of search is that it lists all of the neighbours. So, those witnesses on your great-grandparents' marriage certificate? The older siblings you didn't know about? They all become much easier to locate because, while surname spellings and ages might throw you off on the 'Search Census' page, geographical tools will rarely throw you off.

• Extenuating circumstances. If you are still stuck and cannot find an ancestor in the 1901 or 1911 census, then there may be a simple explanation: he or she was not in Ireland. This does not mean that they had emigrated or that something dire had occurred; remember, the census simple reflects who was living where on one single night once a decade. So, male relatives could have been in military service with their wives/children having relocated along with them. If this was the case, then you might find them in the UK censuses. If you don't but suspect that they did serve in the military, then try looking for their records on Ancestry.co.uk's Military collection. If the record states that an individual was serving overseas in March 1901 or April 1911, then they are not going to be in any UK census.

The record that explained why an ancestor of mine was nowhere to be found in the 1901 census.

Sometimes, you get lucky with an ancestor who had a very particular name or profession that makes him or her easier to track down on the census. But for most people, the census is the first place they look when they start researching their families, and it is very easy to get lost, go wrong, or give up altogether.

If you find yourself getting stuck using the census, then drop me a comment and I'll be happy to try to help.

Who knows? Maybe your ancestor was one of the ones with pseudonyms and aliases...