>> John Lewis wrote: >> Berkshire 1851 CD ... issued by the Berkshire Family History Society. This looks like being good value for money at £23.10. Some months ago I purchased the 1851 fiche for Newbury, Thatcham & Bradfield at cost of £19.65 so for a further £4 you get the whole county. The fiche are however very easy to use and have a name index as well as the 'as enumerated' format and, dare I say it as an HGS member, a big improvement on the HGS 1851 Census index. << ****** In defence of the HGS, the compiler of a census index has to strike a balance between the amount of information given in the index and the time and effort needed to compile it. When the first volume of the HGS 1851 Hampshire Census Index was published in 1980, it set the standard for census indexes at that time. Name/age/birthplace/folio number was judged to be the optimum amount of data, and the project took ten years to complete. If the entries had been transcribed in full, it could have taken twenty. The BFHS 1851 Berkshire Census Index followed, but was less useful than the Hampshire Index, because the Berkshire Index contained only name/age/folio number, with no birthplace shown. Much later, the BFHS produced a revised index which provided a full transcript of each entry. The HGS is also revising its 1851 indexes. Some have been found to contain errors, so many of the volumes are being re-checked against the census films. Each volume is being reformatted as a single sequence of surnames rather than ten or a dozen separate parish indexes. The birthplace is also being shown against each entry, thus avoiding the need to look up the birthplace using a code. The revised index is expected to take five years to complete. Whether a "whole county" CD will be produced remains to be seen. West Surrey FHS also chose to use name/age/birthplace/folio number when it revised its 1851 census index. In an ideal world, everything would be transcribed in full. In practice, many societies and individuals subscribe to the principle that "less is more", i.e. it is better to produce more indexes by including less in each index. Every researcher should view every relevant entry in a photographic copy of the original document, and the information in the HGS and WSFHS indexes is sufficient to locate relevant entries. Alan McGowan