First of all, apologies to all of of you who experienced a slow site during Saturday’s first England match: we were slightly overwhelmed by the response. But like the England team, we are now in hard training to make the second part a much more satisfying experience!

Although it’s great to hear that many of you found some nuggets during the free period, we’re working on a plan to make sure that everybody (especially our subscribers) get the normal, fast findmypast experience for the second match this Friday evening. And we’re also plotting ways to make sure that those based overseas don’t have to set their alarm clocks for strange hours to take part.

Keep an eye on this blog for more news, but if you haven’t registered yet, please do so now!

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.