However, since many of you will now have received the latest email newsletter from SP there is no longer any need to hold back, and I can but quote from this newsletter .........
"1861 Census:
We are delighted to announce that the 1861 census will be available to ScotlandsPeople customers within the coming weeks, and we will advise you of the launch date nearer the time."
Without wishing to sound at all cynical, however, just please note the precise language used - "within the coming weeks", - and appreciate just how flexibly that could be interpreted.
I'd greatly like to believe that a "normal" interpretation of, say, 4 to 6 weeks, would be the reality, but I've been very badly burnt too often in this type of situation in relation to SP in the past
The saying "the proof's in the pudding" is all I will comment further for the moment.
And then I can't avoid commenting that I also have a reasonable idea of when 1851 and 1841 are likely to be available, but even a substantial sum deposited on my bank account, or via PayPal (see email details
Hint, Hint 
) wouldn't persuade me to comment further in the light of previous experience, except that there may be an interesting problem with the 1851 and 1841 censuses, other than the release date.This is that there were two separate filmings of the 1841 and 1851 censuses and it's not clear for the moment which filming has been used for the production of the digitised images.
1841 is a problem in its own right in that there are quite a few missing districts, but there is also the problem that it is not uncommon to find a particular ED missing in one filming, but present on the other filming for both 1841 and 1851. This can also apply to individual pages in an ED.
Together with the FreeCen project for Scotland coordinator, Michelle Easton, and Sam Gibson of the LA LDS FHC, Andrew Paterson and I are working on a project to list the known missing 1841 and 1851 census info (as well as later census missing info). We hope to have an answer soon from GROS on which filming was used for the 1841 and 1851 images.
David
Ooooh... that's a difficult one. Hm... let me see.
