Release of 1921 Scottish census pushed back again
The Scottish government’s records website ScotlandsPeople ( scotlandspeople.gov.uk) has announced a considerable delay to the release of records from the 1921 Scotland census.
The records were originally expected to be published in the summer of 2021, before the release of the records of the 1921 census for England and Wales, which will be made available on Findmypast ( findmypast.co.uk) in early 2022. Later it was hoped that the Scottish census would come out towards the end of 2021.
However, on 17 June ScotlandsPeople posted on its Twitter account: “We know everyone is keen to get an update on progress around the release of the 1921 Scottish Census. We are working hard on this and will be releasing the images on http://scotlandspeople.gov.uk and in the ScotlandsPeople Centre [in Edinburgh] in the latter half of 2022.”
Lockdown is known to have caused problems for Findmypast’s work digitising the England and Wales census, but ScotlandsPeople has not cited the pandemic as a reason for the delay.
A spokesperson said, “Publication of the census is a very complex process – it involves transcribing, indexing and quality-assuring over four million individual named records held on over 200,000 images. Our priority is the publication of the images as soon as we can in a professional and cost-effective manner.
“In the meantime, we will continue to add new kirk-session images to ScotlandsPeople, building on the recent successful launch of over one million images to this record set. We will also continue to add to our historic maps and plans online collection with the addition of thousands of new images planned for this year, and we will publish the latest birth, death and marriages release in January 2022.”
Scottish genealogist Chris Paton told WDYTYA? Magazine, “It is unfortunate that the census release has been delayed, although quite understandable in the circumstances, with the ongoing pandemic continuing to seriously disrupt the service provision of the National Records of Scotland. I look forward to seeing the records when they become available next year.”