What’s New on Ancestry.co.uk

You can now view all our record images in our new Interactive Image Viewer. As well as being faster than our old viewer, this doesn’t need Flash Player to run, so you can see our records on devices like iPads and iPhones, for example.

The new viewer also gives you quicker access to features like the record index and advanced image tools. To use it, click ‘View Record’ from your search results to see the record transcription, then click ‘Try it now’.

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City & County Directories can reveal your ancestors’ addresses and occupations all over the UK, across three different centuries. With so much to cover, it would take us years to type in the information by hand, which is why we use OCR (optical character recognition) to create the searchable indexes.

We’ve recently improved our OCR technology, and re-scanned all the hundreds of directories in this collection. That means your search results should be more accurate, and you should find it much easier to spot your relatives on the results page.

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We’ve made two major improvements to our 1911 Census, making it even more essential in the search for your family’s past.

First of all we’ve released brand new record images, which include the ‘Infirmity’ column that was previously hidden. You can now see if any of your relatives were deaf or blind, or coped with a mental illness.

Plus, we’ve linked the records to our UK Maps, 1896-1904, supplied by Cassini Historical Maps. Once you’ve found your family in the Census, you can then see a map revealing the area they lived in.

Search the 1911 Census

See all our census records