Several of the original enumeration books of the 1851 census for several areas around the city of Manchester, England were badly damaged by flooding at the Home Office in London. Many pages were not considered worth microfilming, many of those that were filmed were illegible and the books were not made available to the public because of their very fragile nature. The records of over 200,000 people were effectively lost.
In 1991 a team of volunteers from the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society completed a painstaking 14 year project to examine these records at the National Archives in London to extract these names and achieved a surprising 82% overall success rate.
More details of the project and a name index have just been made freely available by the Manchester & Lancashire Family History Society at: http://www.1851-unfilmed.org.uk/.
The site is still being worked on to improve its usefulness.
My thanks to Frank Mitchell for telling me about this great new resource.
Good Morning George
What a great story of volunteer effort. Do you know if there is a description anywhere on how they went about pulling the names out of those sheets? That has to be fascinating in itself. It would not appear that they could just do it on a light table.
Douglas Burnett
Satellite Beach
FL
Posted by: Douglas Burnett | October 11, 2008 at 09:11 AM
There's an example of a 'typical' page on the website - what a fantastic effort to recover all that information! Note: 1991 was when the 14-year project began, not when it was completed.
Posted by: Peter Calver | October 31, 2008 at 08:24 AM
Thank you for making such an effort to resurrect the Manchester records. It has enabled me to find the link with my great-great grandfather and his family. Hopefully, from this, I will be able to trace living relatives after 160 years.
Posted by: Terry Poole | November 07, 2009 at 04:41 AM