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Official - 1921 Scottish Census release delayed

Discussion in 'Scotland' started by Alexander Bisset, Jun 18, 2021.

  1. Alexander Bisset

    Alexander Bisset Administrator Staff Member

    Well not that surprising but it’s been officially announced there will be a delay in release of the 1921 Scottish census until the latter half of 2022. So unless you were one of those that insisted it would be 20th June exactly after 100 years had past, it’s in line with having the office closed down for 15 months, that there would be a delay of a year or more.

    Sad but not unexpected.

    @peter it might merit a stop press update to tonight’s newsletter?
     
    • Thanks! Thanks! x 1
  2. peter

    peter Administrator Staff Member

    Thanks, Alexander - will do.
     
  3. Stuart

    Stuart LostCousins Member

    ScotlandsPeople have put out an update in their latest newsletter. In general it confirms the promise for before the end of this year, though some of the detail about progress is a bit confusing. The relevant bit says:
     
  4. peter

    peter Administrator Staff Member

    It's the lead article in my next newsletter, which is focusing on Scotland and Ireland. It doesn't affect my own research, but the further delay must be very disappointing for others, especially given how difficult and expensive it is to access the 1939 Register for Scotland.
     
  5. Stuart

    Stuart LostCousins Member

    It means a lot more to me; it's the first time my father appears, as well a loads of his aunts and uncles and cousins leaving home.

    What did you make of the wording? Taken at face value, the "transcription of the index" is well over half of the work and the main transcription phase is yet to start.

    My recollection of Findmypast's description of the English census programme was that step one was scanning and conserving the sheets, which included transcribing the sheet index data and creating the indexing system to access the images and transcriptions. Step two was transcribing the personal data.

    That does not match what's been said this time. 3 million index entries is too many to be just one per sheet, so have they been transcribing the "left hand side" personal data as an index first? But if all the scanning had been done beforehand, it sounds as if they have not done two-thirds of the work yet this year. Maybe those words were written some time ago!

    As to whether "towards the end of this year" is a delay from "the latter half of 2022" - that depends on how you measure string, I think.
     
  6. peter

    peter Administrator Staff Member

    The way I read the announcement is that they are transcribing the data that goes into the index so that users can search the census, and then they will transcribe the rest of the information on the census form.

    How the workload is split between the two processes will depend on what search fields, if any. they plan to add. I suspect none, since they didn't add any fields for the 1911 Census.
    Of course it's a delay - the 'latter half of 2022' started in July, and there's clearly no way they're going to publish it before October, by which time they'll be in the 4th quarter of 2022.
     

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