footie's blog

The Freedom of Information Act (2000) was supposed to make it easier to get information out of government, and lead to more openness - especially in those areas where there are outdated indefensible practises.

Well that is exactly the oppsite of what is happening with census records. I have just learnt that the 100-year closure for census records was only introduced in 1966 ! When the 1911 census was taken - no commitment was made to those completing it that the information would be kept secret, and in fact it should have been released in 1962, as the closure rule then in force was only 50 years. But the head of the Public Record Office at the time, refused to do so - delaying the release of the records until after the 100-year rule was introduced 4 years later.

However, the Freedom of Information Act abolished the 100-year closure rule applying to census records ... and the National Archives is still refusing to release them !!

This is being brought to a head in the UK Parliament by Early Day Motion 1198, proposed by Mike Hancock MP, which now has the support of over 130 MPs. The full text reads ...

This grand ambition is the objective of a new initiative from the people who brought us Wikipedia - the open source encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to.

Their goal is to establish a family tree that anyone can contribute to, and thus eventually create a family of the whole world ! It is called WikiTree and can be found at www.wikitree.org.

According to Wikipedia's entry on Genealogy, academics have established that the first common ancestor of all those alive today lived as recently as 2,000 years ago. So for the majority of us, researching purely through written records is not going to achieve this goal. It is going to need a breakthrough in DNA-based genealogical research to enable the project any chance of meeting its goals.

The project was established in April 2005, and is picking up momentum - however, it does not currently benefit from the same funding and general support that Wikipedia does, and so currently has a few drawbacks.

The amount of online resources for genealogists is expanding by the day.

Notable additions that have come to my attention recently include:

• 1861 Census - the searchable index to the 1861 census for England & Wales at 1837online.com is now complete.
• FamilyRelatives.org - a new site offering a complete index to all civil births, deaths & marriages 1866-1920.  They also have records beyond this date available - but not fully searchable.
  
• Together with an ever-increasing freeBMD, it is now possible to save enormous amounts of time that would otherwise have been spent lugging those weighty tomes around the Family Records Centre at Myddleton Place.
  

Great story on BBC News this week - The Comfort of Strangers - about members of an online genealogy forum, frustrated with trying to burst through their own brick walls, have taken to researching other peoples' family history - by selecting people at random from the 1881 census.

The forum in question - rootschat - also features an area for "censuswhacking" - identifying the only person or family with a given first name, surname or occupation in the census. Great examples include Fanny Minger, Silly Trollope and Loonie Cooper.

Dick Eastman, publisher of the renowned Online Genealogical Newsletter for as long as I can remember, has recently launched an Online Encyclopedia of Genealogy.

Since its launch in December last year, the Online Encyclopedia of Genealogy has grown from just a few random articles to a wealth of information about family history societies, obscure occupations found on census returns, guide to sources for military family history research and many more.

It is based on the increasingly-popular "wiki" style of reference source (the original being Wikipedia) - meaning that most of the articles are contributed by other people - and since anyone can edit anyone else's contributions, any inaccuracies are be ironed out quite quickly.

Genes Reunited - the latest service from the people behind FriendsReunited - is fast becoming my favourite site for making contact with distant rellies and other family tree nuts.

Unlike other sites with a more local focus - like the Channel Islands Surnames List, it does not divulge anyone's email address. It also lets you include details of your family tree, which you can choose to share with others. Unlike other similar sites - like Rootsweb's Worldconnect - you choose which other users you give access to your tree.

Following my earlier comments, I have now had an official response from the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography team informing me that :

"According to the list I have Oxfordshire County Council and Reading Libraries have made purchases of the ODNB.

We appreciate that a number of individual readers would welcome either CD Rom or pay-as-you go service. We will be testing the water over the next few months and reviewing how to proceed and will take customers' feedback into account when doing so."

I have just added the latest high-tech interactive family tree functionality onto the family history pages of my web site. It's based on phpGedView - an excellent development.

I received a mailshot today informing me that, after over a decade in the making, the New Dictionary of National Biography is due to be published on 23 September 2004. Without doubt, it is a major achievement, and will be a fantastic resource, but ...

... why make it so expensive & inaccessible ?