Sample of 1861 Oxfordshire Census

First a little background.... take a £45,000 film scanner... and the census scans we have produced to date were generally good, but a problem arose where the ten to twenty or so pages of an occasional enumerator's book were in faded ink. That made it pretty difficult to read a small percentage of the pages. We have done some experiments with a £4,000 add on widget to the film scanner to try to overcome that problem, plus extra image enhancement techniques. It worked. ;-)

If you would like a preview of the results, a few pages from the Oxfordshire 1861 census, to compare them with the previous scanning system then :

• Right click on the link below to download the file

• From the drop down menu, select "Save Target As...."

• Select a place on your hard disk to download the file.

• Then when the download is complete, simply view the file oxfsamp1.pdf using Adobe Acrobat Reader in the normal way.

Please note: if you simply click on the link with the left mouse button, the file will try to display in a window live. This may not work for many people, therefore follow the instructions above to right click on the link and select to save the file instead.

• Right click here to download the sample 1861 Oxfordshire census file
  (this file is in PDF format for viewing using Adobe Acrobat Reader)

• Click here to go to the Parish Chest census project page, and order the complete set of the Oxfordshire 1861 census registration districts on CD