Ancestry is going full tilt on indexing using its own handwriting recognition technology. It took Ancestry 9 days to index the 1950 US census with 151 million names that way. Canada’s 1931 census is smaller, just 10 million names, but with complexity not previously encountered such as two languages mixed together and uneven skew in images from some bound volumes that were not an issue in the US 1950 census.
Ancestry are hopeful, not certain, they will have an initial partial index linked to images “very soon.” Will it be sufficient for most searches to be as successful as with 1950? That’s Ancestry’s goal. We shoudn’t have long to wait to find out. Improved indexing and some other fields transcribed by FamilySearch will come over the summer.
Let’s also look forward to having handwriting recognition technology applied to other collections.