Ancestry Magazine

Ever struggle to find someone in the 1841 UK census? If so, you weren’t alone. Researchers looking at digital or microfilmed images of the now-infamous census are often dismayed to find that most of the replicated enumerators’ books are almost entirely illegible.

Why? According to Ancestry.com Index Manager Echo King, the main reason the pages are so hard to read is that enumerators wrote everything in pencil, which aged over time, faded, and previously wasn’t able to be filmed well. “In some cases,” says King, “the writing was so faint that [a researcher] would have to visit the [UK] National Archives and view the original to get any useful information.”

But a trip to the National Archives can be daunting, impractical, and frustrating. Plus, there are no guarantees, says King, who made the trip specifically to see what she could learn about the 1841 census documents. “When we examined the originals,” King says, “we found that some of the pages still couldn’t be read.” Something had to be done.

In January 2006, Jack Reese and Laryn Brown, content specialists with Ancestry.com, traveled to the archives in London to fix the problem.

“We used a top-of-the-line professional copy stand with a 16-megapixel digital camera and daylight-balanced lights to achieve high resolution,” says Brown. “We did not use any special filters or lighting, as overexposure was [one of the problems] with the original filming.”

The pair photographed nearly 20,000 images from the pages of the 1841 UK census, which covers around 1.6 million names. Today, they consider their project a stunning success.

“We proved that with good lighting, high resolution, and professional post-processing to enhance the contrast, even the most faint samples created legible names that can now be transcribed,” Brown says.

That’s good news for researchers. The new, improved images and the corresponding updated indexes are now available at both Ancestry.co.uk and Ancestry.com.