Bob and Pat Chown, who lead the Woodchurch Ancestry Group (WAG) transcription team, identify some issues with the 1939 Register. The register is a wartime ‘census’ of the civilian population living in Great Britain on 29 September 1939 and contains the personal details of over 40 million people. It was then used to issue identity cards, ration books and so on.
If you use Findmypast for family research, Pat and I think you should be made aware of some issues we encountered with the transcription of the 1939 Register. Although the enumerator wrote the place or street name on the original register, it is not always clear from the original image the name of the village or town. The entries for Woodchurch were all shown as part of Tenterden with no mention of Woodchurch. We informed Findmypast of the error.
Transcribing the Woodchurch entries also showed that between 1939 and 2020 there had been some boundary changes, bits going to High Halden and Bethersden. We googled the house name or street name which usually gave us the right address today.
Sadly, under the pressure to get the register transcribed and online, it appears that the transcription was not checked thoroughly. All the types of errors we found when transcribing the much earlier 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century Overseers of the Poor registers, we found with the 1939 Register transcription. Forenames from the entry above or below, entries completely missing and misspelling of surnames already familiar to the WAG transcribers. In contrast, the WAG transcription team painstakingly check and double-check all our work, cross-referencing with other records wherever possible to ensure accuracy.
As an example of one of the potential pitfalls waiting for researchers, when using the 1939 Register on Findmypast to add facts to our ‘Fullagars of Kent’ project we found several different spellings of this surname—five, in fact. Selecting ‘Search Surname Variants’ was no help in this case as it produced thousands of unwanted Fullers. Here are the five name variants we came across:
- Fullagar (222)
- Fullager (111)
- Fullegar (24)
- Fulligar (7)
- Fulleger (2)
So, the message from Bob and Pat is to think carefully and creatively about possible spelling variations not only when using the 1939 Register but any records—transcribed or original, printed or online—for your family history research.