1861 on CD

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 past-time, 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 S&N Genealogy Supplies apart 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 from the PRO and included on the CDs. Their census CD sets cover most of the English and Welsh counties, even if it may not be economically viable to produce some of those counties on CD.