Ancestry's Irish Census 1901 collection updated

Ancestry has updated its All Web: Ireland, Census, 1901 collection, and has placed a note on the record-set's description that no additional records have been uploaded. Instead, additional search fields have been created to allow researchers to be more creative in their searching.

I was curious to try out the updated indexing, and was pleasantly surprised to find that in the process of collecting data for those additional fields, the collection seems to have automatically picked up the corrections made by genealogist John Grenham when he waded through tens of thousands of user-notified errors in the database.

During the course of his ordeal, which lasted 18 months and ended nearly a year ago, John blogged about some of the amusing mis-transcriptions he found in the database, so I used some of his examples to check the breadth of the Ancestry update.

You can see Ancestry's new transcription, right, for a JP called Robert Dunwoody, whose occupation would previously have read 'Instire of the Peacly Tea Merchant'.

Ancestry's Web collections are free. You don't need a subscription and you don't even have to register to search or view the transcriptions.

In this particular case, the link takes you to the National Archives of Ireland's Genealogy site where the images are also free to view. The Ancestry search engine is much more flexible, however, so you may have more luck finding your ancestor in the census via its site than the NAI site.