Houses of Parliament

Census CDs

Transfers from microfilm

If trawling through reels of census microfilm in a windowless, airless basement in the old PRO or in a record office, library or family history society isn't your favourite past-time, why not browse through those records in the comfort of your own home?

Before the rise of the internet, the best way to make the records easily accessible to the general public was to transfer those records from microfiche, microfilm and books onto CD.

S&N Genealogy Supplies, A UK-based family-run company, is a pioneer in the CD transfer field, and have successfully transferred all the London censuses from 1841 - 1901 to CD.

London census CDs – easy to use

The London census images from S&N Genealogy can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader, provided with the CDs. They are bookmarked by piece number, and street or area indexes are also provided, enabling the user to locate their particular area of interest and the sub-district or piece number which covers that area. Once images are displayed on your screen, you can zoom in and out, move the image around, and even rotate the image 90 degrees, something that can be useful when printing.

What sets them out from the competition is the quality of their products. Each page has been scanned several times to get the best possible results. If some are missing or unreadable on the original microfilm or fiche, those images are obtained and included on the CDs.

S&N census CD sets cover all English and Welsh counties, even if some of those counties are not economically viable.

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Census CD Reviews

(Reviews from GenealogyReviews.co.uk )

Lancashire 1841 Census (DVD)

This useful seven-DVD set consists of images of the 1841 census enumerators' books for the historic county of Lancashire. This differs from the modern county and includes some towns which are no longer part of Lancashire, such as Warrington and Barrow-in-Furness, as well as the cities of Manchester and Liverpool.

The images included in this set have been digitised from premium quality microfilm, and can be enlarged to more than three times their normal size without losing resolution. The very faint 1841 census pages are notoriously difficult to scan, but these images are crystal clear.

The images are supplied with area indexes, and with street indexes for the larger dwellings. Meanwhile, a name index* (searchable by surname, forename and age) points to the piece on which an ancestor can be found.

This set does contain a vast amount of genealogical data!

March 2011, Review by Paul Gaskell

Jersey 1901 Census & Devon 1857 Gazetteer and Directory

If you have family ties to the largest of the Channel Islands, this alphabetically ordered index, spanning 450 pages and featuring details on districts and their inhabitants, will provide fruitful research.

The names and addresses of clergy, gentry and tradesmen in the towns, villages and parishes of Devon feature on this fully-searchable disc. A contemporary history of each of the exact areas covered completes the set.

January 2011, Review by William Humphries

Lancashire 1861 Census

This four DVD set comprises images of the enumerators' books for the 1861 census of Lancashire, and also includes a places index and street indexes to the larger towns and cities. This is a huge amount of data, with the cities of Manchester and Liverpool and towns from as far apart as Barrow-in-Furness and Warrington featuring.

So how does this set compare with online census offerings? Well, the latter have surname indexes, and hence make searching for particular people much easier. However, the DVD set is faster to use, and is not reliant on an internet connection. It definitely has the edge if one's ancestors were living in a particular area, or if the researcher is studying a specific place. It is best scrolled through like a microfilm, and in this set, the user certainly gets an awful lot of high resolution images to browse for their cash!

November 2009, Review by Paul Gaskell

Parish Records

The censuses and official records of births, marriages and deaths do not go back as far as parish records. Parish Records started in 1538 when Thomas Cromwell, the Vicar General to King Henry VIII, declared that all marriages, christenings and burials should be recorded. For the years before the census began, London Parish Records are a very useful resource. A wide range of London Parish Records is available on CD and some are now online.

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