Many of you may have had the misfortune to hear me waffle on at great length about the research I've done into my family history. I started about ten years ago but, to be honest, new research has been taken a back seat for the last five or six years. It's been interesting. I discovered that in 1789 my Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Thomas Cross, was born just five miles from where my parents still live. If you're interested, my current results are online.
So why am I mentioning this now? Well a lot of genealogical information in the UK comes from the census that has been taken every ten years since 1841. When the census is taken, the government guarantees that no personal individual information will be made public for a hundred years. These means that every ten years another census becomes available to search. This happens on the first working day of the year following the 100th anniversary of the census.
All this means that on Jan 2nd 2002, the 1901 census will become available for research. And for the first time this census will be available online. I'll be spending some time over the next couple of days working out who should still be alive from the 1891 records I've got so I can track them down on Wednesday.
To bring this back on topic, if you're interested in discussing the use of Perl to process genealogical records, then you might be interested in looking at the Perl-Gedcom mailing list.
