The 1841 South Australian has just over 7000 listings, accounting for nearly 15500 people. The young colony was just on five years old and this ambitious project was well beyond the resources of the fledgling cash-strapped bureaucracy trying to administer a small population scattered across a huge territory.
A typed index created in 1949 was the only access available to researchers until this presentation. Not only are some of the interpretations of hand-written originals wrong in the original index but the material lacks the technology available today to enhance searching.
This CD-ROM has re-indexed the original material and enhanced the data with many biographies on the persons listed. The 1841 Census like its English counterpart only names the heads of households in the closely settled areas and so the biographies often identify individuals by name rather than just a number in an age column. The presentation features an interesting thermometer which gauges the veracity of the collated material giving the user some idea of how accurate the biography is to the person identified.
The material is produced on a kiosk stand-alone database on CD-ROM, and is available in two versions, PC and Macintosh. This presentation together with a scanned version of the whole census means that not only can users employ powerful searching techniques but also where the information is unclear, they can check original material for confirmation. The viewer required to view the images, is included on the CD.
