I have been trying to work out how complete these are on Ancestry?

I want to find someone who was in Lambeth in 1869. When I search bu Borough and Parliamentary Division, the earliest for Lambeth is around 1890. Not sure whether this is because they are missing, not transcribed or it came under a different Borough.

MB

I wonder if some clever person could write something for the PC that would set Ancestry to Old View, Flat View, Display 50 and all the other settings that Ancestry do not seem to be able remember whenever you log in. :=)

Try Smith and Lambeth in keywords - earliest is 1860
So maybe Lambeth in Surrey not in London until 1860

Earliest records are 1847 so dunno why its called from 1835

Don't use County or Borough box - search gives no results
Just use keywords

Actually Lambeth in keywords gives some hits in London/Middlesex for voters whose home is in Lambeth

I think when you try new things like the Electoral Rolls the URL takes you to New Search and all your settings get changed. I want OLD search and I want my settings as Martin says

I did wonder about Surrey but I think all London was down as being in a county.

Might try the London Metropolitan Archive catalogue to see what range they have as that is probably the source of Ancestry's data.

It seems to be quite common for Ancestry to release part of a new dataset with the rest following later.

I usually search for SMITh as well! Though often Ancestry will let you search with a blank field or just a single wildcard.

MB

From here

http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/37CAD668-217E-46C2-B877-...

It looks as if they do not have the Surrey electoral rolls at the LMA so not on Ancestry.

MB

"The Surrey History Centre holds a very good collection of electoral registers from 1832 for all constituencies in the county which includes before 1889 the part which was at that date incorporated into the County of London, as well as the area which later became part of Greater London."

Martin,

The London Electoral Roll are a complete mess, if anything Ancestry has made a worse job of Transcribing them than the 1911 Census. Have a look at the Ancestry UK Blog

http://blogs.ancestry.com/uk/2012/01/11/130-years-of-london-...

Basically they have used OCR technology to scan the LMA supplied Microfilms. They have then indexed the results using all sorts of Boroughs and Parliamentary Divisions that did not exist at the time. There is no consistancy to what has been done so a roll from 1880 may say, for example, its for Finchley, London and the 1936 roll says its for Finchley, Barnet and the 1937 one is completely wrong and says its for Hornsey, Haringey.

Title pages have gone through the scanning process and the scanner has tried to read voters names into the text resulting in gobbledegook. The OCR process has skipped names on the images, so some people are missing, and read in some street names as people. Even clearly visable names have been badly mangled. Nothing appears to have been checked as the errors are so obvious that if it had been checked this collection would surely never have been released.

There are supposed to be 139 million records in this collect, but just how many are correctly transcribed is a good question. The mistranscribed 1936 and 1937 rolls for Finchley contain approximately 12,000 records and every single one is wrong!

If you want an idea of what has been transcribed in this batch follow the link below

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=1795

you can get dropdowns for the Boroughs/Counties, Parliamentary Divisions and Years that have been transcribed. But remember that many of the rolls are misindexed. Hardly anything is recorded for the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, instead Ancestry has tried to allocate the historic rolls to the current 32 London Boroughs which were only created on 1st April 1965 which is the latest date of this collection. I know its not easy to be historically correct as some areas have moved from County (Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire) into the City of London and then into the GLC and are now London Boroughs but every roll that I have looked at cleary stated the correct information if only a human had read it and not a machine!

In an e-mail from Customer Services it was indicated to me that Ancestry hope to double the number of records in this collection by the "Fall". I hope they make a better job of this second batch.

Yesterday on London List we discussed an Edward Lee in 1911 shown as Paddington. Where the image showed him to be in Walworth Rd ie south of the Thames. The page 1 of the batch showed Paddington the next page said Newington Southwark. So a wrong Title had been put on a batch. Now what was digitalised was it microfilm (so LMA always had it wrong) or was it microfiche which had been mishandled before the digitalisation...........

Ron,

This is exactly the same problem as the 1937 Electoral Roll for Finchley. A Header has been added that says "MR/PER/C/0622 Hornsey 1937", followed by a further image, in the same font, explaning that some of the pages are faded so they have been filmed to produce the best possible image.

This indicates to me that LMA have added the Header. Ancestry has then run the Microfilm through the OCR process and gone no further than reading the incorrect Header. They have then made the whole thing worse by placing Hornsey in Haringey, a Borough that was only created in 1965 after this collections cut off date.

N.B. The LMA only holds records up to the start of the GLC in 1965.

Just how many of the electoral rolls in this collection have this problem is yet to become clear, but it does appear to be a considerable number.

Has the 1911 roll you mentioned been reported to Ancestry? The more we report the greater the chance that they will do something to put this mess right.

Only just found your comment in the middle of this thread. I have started a separate posting on this.

The release of these rolls in this state is an absolute disgrace.

The poor standard makes it impossible to undertake any comprehensive searches.

And without a sensible indexing system, even browsing for entries is needle-in-a-haystack stuff.

The incorrect indexing of counties is a problem that permeates throught many Ancestry data sets. It's as if there is no one working on the data with any general knowledge of English geography (why would anyone think that Northumberland was in the county of Cumberland?).

And it's no use communicating with Customer Services is it?