1911 census opens tomorrow

Hi Great news It's official: the 1911 census launches tomorrowTuesday, 13 January, 2009 9:40 AM. (UK time)
http://www.1911census.co.uk/

Copy of e-mail.
Dear family historian,

We wanted you to be the first to know that the 1911census.co.uk website launches officially tomorrow.

We have added many more of the counties that were unavailable on the beta site over Christmas, including Lancashire, Essex, Kent, Yorkshire (West Riding), Nottinghamshire and Herefordshire. We continue to scan the remainder of the census and will make the remaining counties available as soon as possible. A full list of the counties available at launch, and those still to come, appears at the end of this email.

We expect the site to be very busy at first, and so we have taken a number of measures to make sure that as many people as possible can get their searches completed successfully. The first is that we have deliberately restricted some of the search functions on the site, meaning that the search is not as flexible as it will be later on. Secondly, we are only allowing users to download original pages, rather than view them directly on the website.

Obviously, we will 'unlock' the powerful search features and switch on image viewers as soon as possible after launch and let you know by email and via the blog when we have done this.

During launch, if the site becomes exceptionally busy, we will also restrict the number of new people entering the site. We want to allow the people who are already using the site to complete their searches rather than make the site impossibly slow for everybody. We have built the site to withstand a very large (but not infinite) number of visitors, so if you find that you are not being allowed in, please bear with us. Real-time service updates can be found on our blog, which we advise you to check frequently for the latest news.

Finally, we know many of you are as excited as we are to see the remaining counties that will become available over the coming months. However, we cannot give you specific launch dates for these remaining counties - we are continuing to scan the census into the spring and anticipate that the census will be complete by this summer. Rest assured that by staying signed up to our newsletter and checking the blog, you will be the first to know of all new developments.

Thank you to all those who participated in the beta period and we wish you the very best of success in using the 1911census.co.uk website to broaden your family history research.

The 1911census.co.uk team
Reg.