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Firstly let me wish you a happy New Year from everyone at S&N.

We have released complete 1841 and 1851 online transcripts for many counties. The value of our all-inclusive subscriptions is now well over £3,000 and all you pay is the equivalent of £4.66 a month.

Email News offer - We are giving a free online trial to an All Inclusive subscription with the special offer to all those that take a premium subscription out as part of the trial. See below for details.

In this issue:-

• UK Events
• Special Email News Offer
• What’s New on CD
• What’s New Online
• Independent Analysis of Census Quality
• Opportunity to take part in a survey of family history research habits

UK EVENTS – January 2006

Come along to these UK events and meet the family behind S&N.

These forth-coming events can save you pounds with our special fair pricing.

************** BRACKNELL FAMILY HISTORY FAIR *******************

* Sunday 29th January, 10am to 5pm. *

* Sports and Leisure Centre, Bagshot Rd (A322) *

* Bracknell, RG12 9SE. *

* Entrance £2 *

* www.familyhistoryfairs.com *

****************************************************************

Bristol Who Do You Think You Are Event - BBC Family History Weekend

Saturday 11th Feb 10am to 4pm

City of Bristol College, St Georges Road, BS1 5UA

Entrance Free

Sussex and South London

Sunday 12th February

K2 Crawley Pease Pottage Hill, Crawley

Entrance £2

Oxfordshire Family History Fair

Saturday Feb 18th

Exeter Hall, Oxford Rd, Kidlington

Entrance £2

For further details of fairs visit

http://www.genealogysupplies.com/events.htm

Special Email News Offer – Free subscription

Get 5 days free access with 5 credits to our All Inclusive subscription with access to BMDs, Parish records, Census Transcripts, Land Records and more.

You can also get a special deal when you sign up for a PERSONAL PREMIUM all-inclusive subscription during the trial.

To take advantage of this offer, please go to

http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/special/freetrial/?rcode=email

and follow the instructions.

Only one free trial subscription per person; offer open until the end of February 2006 (UK time).

Not available to existing all-inclusive subscribers or in conjunction with any other offer.

WHAT’S NEW ON CD

• RootsMagic UK v3 Standard Edition PLUS Researching Your Family History DVD £ 44.90
• City of London Lying-in Hospital, Index to Baptisms 1841-1868 Vol 4-6 £ 12.00
• Gloucestershire 1851 Census £ 34.95
• Overseas Births, Marriages and Deaths 1761-1924 £ 29.95
• Pigot's 1828-1829 Directory of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Shropshire £ 17.45
• Pigots 1835 Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Monmouthshire, Rutlandshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, North Wales and South Wales Directory £ 17.45
• Radnorshire 1851 Census £ 24.95
• Somerset 1841 Census £ 34.95
• Staffordshire 1841 Census £ 34.95
• Staffordshire Census Bundle - 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871 £ 104.85
• Staffordshire Census Bundle - 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1891 £ 129.75
• Sussex 1841 Census £ 34.95
• Sussex Census Bundle - 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871 £ 104.85
• Sussex Census Bundle - 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1891 £ 129.75
• Sussex Census Bundle - 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1891 and 1901 £ 139.80
• Tracing Your Family History £ 20.00
• Who Do You Think You Are? Family Tree Maker 2005 Deluxe UK Edition £ 19.95
• Who Do You Think You Are? DVD £ 11.90
• Who Do You Think You Are? Series 2 Book £ 11.49
• Who Do You Think You Are? Standard Edition Software £ 9.95
• Army List 1904 £ 19.95
• Buckinghamshire, The Visitation of Buckinghamshire 1634 £ 16.95
• Cheshire, The Visitation of Cheshire 1613 £ 16.95
• Clergy List 1852 £ 17.45
• Cumberland 1901 Bulmer's Directory £ 17.45
• Durham 1841 Census £ 34.95

WHAT’S NEW ONLINE www.TheGenealogist.co.uk

This list is just the material added over the last month and is a fraction of the material available to our all-inclusive subscribers that pay as little as £4.66 a month.

The total value of included indexes is now £3235 per annum

[26 Jan 2006]

Extra information on transcripts 1851 onwards

All transcripts from 1851 onwards now include the birth place (where recorded) as well as the birth county.

[25 Jan 2006]

New and improved transcripts and indexes

We have now completed the 1851 census transcripts and indexes for Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire and Warwickshire.

We have also added images of the original census pages to the London 1841 and Lancashire 1851 transcripts.

[12 Jan 2006]

New feature and new transcripts

At the request of some of our customers, most of the indexes and transcripts now have a button at the bottom of the results page to open a printer-friendly version of the results list. This is also useful for those who are partially-sighted as it is a simple, text-only, black-on-white page.

Completed the transcript project for the 1861 census for Surrey, Suffolk and Cambridge, all of which are available as a name-indices or transcripts and are included with all-inclusive subscriptions.

[10 Jan 2006]

New transcripts

Today we completed the indexing project for the 1861 census for Glamorgan, Cumberland and Berkshire. Available as a name-indices or transcripts.

[9 Jan 2006]

New transcripts and more images

Today we completed the indexing project for the 1861 census for Isle of Man and Middlesex. Available as a name-indices, or as transcripts with linked images of the original census pages.

Middlesex and Essex 1841 transcripts now also have linked images.

[5 Jan 2006]

Completed the indexing project for the Westmorland 1861 census. Available as a name-index or a transcript with linked images of the original census pages.

We have also added images to the Berkshire 1841 transcript.

Both of these are included in your all-inclusive subscription for no extra charge.

Reproducing the Census - 1841 census image quality

A comparison of quality between Black and White Suppliers and S&N Greyscale Census.

The legibility of the original copies of the 1841 census enumerators books held at the National Archives is poor. The entries were mainly written in pencil on what is now very discoloured paper, so it is no wonder that the filmed images have taxed the reading abilities of family historians ever since they became available.

With several companies making scanned images of the census available on CD, we can now puzzle over census images at our leisure, but the particular problems presented by the faded 1841 census books have proved more difficult to transfer it to CD and retain even the moderate legibility available on the microfilm copies.

The standard approach to scanning other census years has been to produce the images in Black and White only from diazo microfilms provided by the National Archives. This has proved to produce perfectly acceptable images, however when applied to the 1841 census the results are nowhere near as good. I was extremely disappointed by the first 1841 B&W census CD images I viewed for Yorkshire. Many of the pages I knew to be readable on the local library's filmed version were illegible. on the CD images

The alternative to using B&W images scanned from diazo films is to take the more expensive silver halide film from the National Archives, which holds greater detail than the diazo films we are used to seeing in record offices, and scan the page images in Greyscale to capture all the available detail.

This is what S&N have done and having tried their new Greyscale scanned images of my local area, I found that once again I was able to discern the writing on these familiar pages. However it may have just been luck that those particular books were better, so I decided to delve a little deeper into the Yorkshire images and try to make a more comprehensive comparison.

The problem with greyscale images from the publishers point of view is that the file sizes are much greater, which is reflected in the number of CDs in the sets, making them more expensive to publish. The poor quality of the pages also means that many of them have to be rescanned at different settings to capture the maximum detail. The greyscale images of the 147 Yorkshire Pieces HO 107 /1210 - 1357 fill a massive 44 CDs, whilst the B&W images covering the same Piece numbers fit on just eight discs. However, those larger file sizes should in theory manage to capture every little bit of available detail from the films, optimising their readability.

My overall impression of the new S&N CDs was that the greyscale images were much more readable. This didn't mean that it was all legible, though; some pages still had unreadable areas. This is unavoidable given the condition of the originals and the National Archive films. I thought I should be a little more scientific about my comparison, but there was no way I could compare every enumerator's book in all the 147 Pieces for Yorkshire! My solution was to take an enumerators book at random from every Piece with a number ending in zero, in the hopes of achieving a reasonably representative sample. This sampling method seemed to work as the resultant books contained examples of both the best and poorest examples I had come across.

I then viewed every page in both sets of books and noted whether it was fully readable, sometimes with difficulty, or had any portions that couldn't be made out with any certainty. In some cases this was the entire page, but in the main it was only a portion of a page image. Having gone through both the B&W and Greyscale images I found that the S&N greyscale images offered over 30% more fully readable pages than the B&W images. However this percentage increase in full readable pages doesn't fully reflect the fact that the Greyscale page images, mostly suffered from small areas of poor clarity, whilst on many of the B&W images, the areas were generally much larger.

Conclusion

Unless the National Archives could re-film the census using better technology, we have to accept that the 1841 census is always going to give researchers problems, whether using microfilm or digitised CD images. However I am totally convinced that the greyscale images produce far more readable data than B&W images of the same material. Given the choice between B&W or Greyscale images of the 1841 census, I would certainly choose the latter as in my opinion the greyscale images offer the best of a bad census.

"S&N greyscale images offered 30% more readable pages"

Since this article was written we have released online transcripts with images so you don’t have to puzzle over entries. See www.TheGenealogist.co.uk

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David Tippey is well known writer on genealogy and computer issues. whose work appears regularly in Family History Monthly and Your Family Tree, as well contributing to a wide range of other magazines and journals including Family Tree, Computers in Genealogy, Internet and Broadband Advisor and the Family and Local History Handbook.

www.TheGenealogist.co.uk - Genealogy Indexes for Census, Crew lists and other databases

www.BMDindex.co.uk - For Birth Marriage and Death Indexes

www.GenealogySupplies.com - For thousands of genealogy products

www.BritishDataArchive.com - For the census

ONLINE RESEARCH HABITS

All our customers are invited to take part in a survey of family history research habits which is sponsored by S&N Genealogy.

The information you provide will help to build up a picture of how people approach the hobby. The results will be published in due course and all survey answers are recorded anonymously.

To take part, go to www.thegenealogist.co.uk/survey

Feel free to pass the link on to other family historians so that they can take part, too.

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Sue and Nigel

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