The counties of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire* and Berkshire**, comprising over 459,000 records, have been added to the 1851 census and are ready for you to search.

Notable names

Among the notable names contained in the new records is Herbert Giles, a prominent sinologist and British diplomat to China. He would become only the second professor of Chinese (after Sir Thomas Wade) at the University of Cambridge. At the time of the 1851 census he was five years old and lived with his parents, two siblings, and two servants in Bampton, Oxfordshire. The head of the household was his father, John Allen Giles, who described himself on the census return as a Doctor of Civil Law and author. (Click the below image to enlarge).

New images, faithful transcriptions

Each of the new records comes freshly and faithfully transcribed from original documents, and is accompanied by newly scanned high-quality images.

More counties will follow soon.

Find your ancestors on the 1851 census now

*The registration district of Buckingham is still being transcribed, and will be added in summer 2009.

**The registration districts of Andover and Kingsclere are still being transcribed, and will be added in summer 2009.

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Overnight, we have uploaded records for the remaining English Counties (Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland) and added the missing Gateshead district records into the county of Durham (they were incorrectly listed as part of Northumberland - this is now fixed and they are searchable under Durham, as they should be). These are now available on our sister site 1911census.co.uk.

Therefore all English counties are now complete.

Scanning of Welsh records is well underway and we are working on the transcriptions of the first batch of Welsh counties, which will be the next data release. Although we do not have a precise release date for them yet, we anticipate that we will have some data from Wales available in the next 4 to 6 weeks.

Findmypast.com users can sign in to the 1911census.co.uk site using their findmypast sign in details but the records are only searchable using PayAsYouGo credits.