We’ve unearthed the last 18,427 missing pieces of the 1901 census which means that it’s now complete on findmypast.co.uk.

Details of which new records you can now find on the site are as follows:

If you were previously unable to find your ancestors on the 1901 census then these new records could provide the information you’re looking for.

Search the 1901 census for your ancestors today.

Following the 7,000 Lancashire burial records we added to the site yesterday, today we’ve added 100,131 new parish burial records for Lancashire and Cumberland to findmypast.co.uk.

Here’s a breakdown of the new records you can find on the site:

Lancashire: 1725-2005: 87,932 new records

Cumberland: 1813-1999: 12,199 new records

Start searching our parish burial records for your ancestors today.

The Furness Family History Society provided findmypast.co.uk with this data.

We have just published over 7,000 Roman Catholic burial records for Pleasington Priory (St Mary & St John the Baptist) in Blackburn, Lancashire on findmypast.co.uk. The dates of the burials cover the period 1899 to 1996.

Most of the records relate to English and Irish Catholics but you can also find some Italian and Polish burials in these records, among others. Additionally, the records include deceased from religious orders, including nuns shown with their true given names as well as their religious names.

You can find out more about Pleasington Priory here.

These records have been kindly supplied by their transcriber Bill Binns.

Search for your ancestors in our parish burial records.

We’re pleased to announce that the winner of the competition we featured in our March newsletter is Donald Hurd from Canada. Donald correctly answered that the youngest person with ‘Easter’ as a surname on the 1851 census in Lancashire was Mary Easter, aged just 4 months. Donald wins a copy of Nick Barratt’s Guide To Your Ancestors’ Lives.

Thanks very much to all of you who entered…keep an eye out for our next competition which will appear on our Facebook page tomorrow!

Due to a scanning issue, some of the 1851 census images for Lancashire are displaying double pages – one above the other. Effectively all this means is that you may also receive the next or previous census page to the one you’ve opted to view.

As these images contain two census pages instead of one, the file sizes are larger and may therefore be slow to load.

Please bear with us – the fault will be fixed soon.

The county of Lancashire, comprising 1.6 million records, has been added to the 1851 census. These records come freshly transcribed from a new set of images, so if you’ve failed to find your ancestors on the 1851 census elsewhere, then you may just find them among these accurately transcribed new findmypast.com records.

Search for your ancestors in the 1851 census now

Coming in the next month: unfilmed 1851 records online exclusively at findmypast.com

A short time after the 1851 census records go live, findmypast.com will add transcriptions and reconstructed images for around 160,000 individuals from severely damaged  pages. They have been made available for the first time online at findmypast.com after a 14 year project to transcribe the original records by the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society (MLFHS).

The records for the Manchester, Chorlton, Salford, Oldham and Ashton-Under-Lyne registration districts were water damaged many years ago when the storage area they were kept in flooded. Some were so badly affected that no writing at all was visible and many were too fragile to be scanned.

Image courtesy of Ray Hulley, Co-ordinator of the 1851 unfilmed census project.

In 1991 a small team of London-based volunteers from the MLFHS began the painstaking process of transcribing the records, which were held at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. As the documents were too fragile to withstand the glare of artificial light, the volunteers had to rely on natural daylight to read them.

Invisible text revealed

After The National Archives was established in Kew in 1997, the project was transferred and with the expertise and support of the conservation department there, the team made considerable advances in the recovery of the missing text. Using the latest ultraviolet equipment the team were able to see writing that had not been visible with natural daylight, and to re-examine documents that had already been transcribed to recover text that was invisible to the naked eye.

The transcribers followed a policy of ‘faithfulness to the original’ in accordance with best transcription practice, and words were only transcribed as far as they were legible – in many cases only parts of names or other details could be deciphered. In some cases street directories and rate books were used to confirm that names had been interpreted correctly, but the transcribers resisted the temptation to fill in information that they felt ‘should’ have been there.

The reconstructed image follows the same layout as the original, and as with other census images contains not just the information from the household, but the neighbouring houses as well.

Thanks to the statistical information that had been generated before the books were damaged, the transcription team knew that data from 217,717 individuals was missing. The team managed to retrieve 82 per cent of this data. We’re sure that you will agree that this is an impressive achievement, which would not have been possible without the immense dedication of Ray Hulley, the project leader, and his team of volunteers from the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society.

Help save records from being lost forever! Get involved with a project

Dedicated family historians up and down the country are working on other projects to make records like these available to family historians in Britain and around the world. If you would like to get involved with a project like this one you should contact the Federation of Family History Societies who will be able to give you information on your local family history society, as well as projects up and down the country.

The county of Lancashire, comprising over 4.5 million records, has been added to the 1901 census. As ever, each of these records comes newly transcribed from a set of freshly scanned high-quality images.

Find your Lancastrian ancestors in the 1901 census now

Lancashire in 1901

In 1901 Lancashire encompassed several hundred mill towns and collieries, which had sprung up during the industrial revolution. The seaside town of Blackpool had become a magnet for holidaymakers and particularly for residents of Lancashire’s mill towns, who flocked to Blackpool for wakes weeks: the week-long summer breaks when the cotton mills of a particular town would close.

A Lancashire soprano

Among the famous Lancastrians found on the 1901 census is Eva Turner, who would make her name as an opera singer and received a DBE in 1962. On the 1901 census she is nine years old and living in Oldham with her parents and brother. Her father, Charles, is listed as an engine driver at a cotton mill (click image to enlarge):