The Middlesex 1861 Census, which was originally released in 2002, has now been rescanned at a much higher quality, as well as being released as smaller sets covering just a few piece numbers on each CD. So why buy the full county set, if you don't need it. This CD contains the places covered by RG9/777-780, and it contains images of the census books digitised from the microfilm.

The publishers are very proud of the superb quality of the scanned images. They've have worked from really excellent films copied from the first generation films at the PRO (now TNA), and have then used the very best possible film scanner currently available to digitise the images at a high resolution.

The CD set is readable using Adobe Acrobat which allows you to link to indexes to browse the areas and streets where your ancestors possibly lived, and it covers the places as they appeared on the 1861 Census fiche (see the list below for the places that are covered by this set).

Note that the CDs contain images of the actual pages of the census enumerators' books. Real original primary research data, (not transcriptions in text format). What you see is the original hand written documents. That does involve you reading the pages rather than typing in a name and expecting the computer to find it. However, you will very quickly become used to the handwriting styles of the different enumerators, and it is easy to click through the pages at even low magnification to spot the people you are looking for.

Features of the CD set are: the ability to magnify an area to see further detail, print the current page, alphabetic street index for larger towns, and searchable area indexes. Using Adobe Acrobat Reader you can zoom in and out to read the pages. You really don't have to squint to read the pages. Zoom right in without noticeable loss of detail. That's because of the very high quality of the scanning. Print quality is excellent too! Even on a standard bubblejet printer you can be sure of superb results. You can print first class copies of any page for use in your family history documents.

High quality scanned images of the whole of the originals. This CD can be viewed by any computer using Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4 or later recommended). The data on this CD is completely self-contained, and requires no installation.

** Note: the Middlesex 1861 set census excludes the Central London areas of Middlesex **

Places on CD 5 (RG9/777-780):
Brentford, Chiswick, Ealing, New Brentford, Old Brentford.

System Requirements: Windows, Macintosh or Unix systems, CD-ROM drive. Adobe Acrobat is need to view the CDs, this can be downloaded for free if you don't already have it, from www.adobe.com/Acrobat.