 If
trawling through reels of census microfilm in a windowless, airless
basement in the old PRO or in a record office, library or family
history society isn't your favourite pastime, why not browse through
those records in the comfort of your own home?
With the use of personal computers becoming more widespread, the
ideal solution to making the census records easily accessible to
the general public was to transfer those records from fiche (reduced
images of photographed documents) to CD-ROM.
One of the pioneers in this field is S&N
Genealogy Supplies/British Data Archive, a UK-based family-run
company.
The CDs are very simple to use. The census images can be viewed using the Adobe Acrobat browser provided with the CDs. They are bookmarked by piece number, and street or area indexes are also provided, enabling the user to locate their particular area of interest and the sub-district or piece number which covers that area. Once images are displayed on your screen, you can zoom in and out, move the image around, and even rotate the image 90 degrees, something that can be useful when printing.
What sets them out from the competition, is the quality of their
products. Each page has been scanned several times to get the best
possible results. If some are missing or unreadable on the original
microfilm or fiche, those images are obtained and included on the
CDs. Their census CD sets cover all of the English and Welsh counties,
even if some of those counties are not economically viable.
To learn more about those products, click here. |
