I just figured out this neat trick to help you figure out which family is
yours from the 1901 census (if you can ever get your search to complete!)
before you actually risk life, limb and your children's school lunch money
and order the image files.
I searched for my Philip PETTITT family, first by finding the one person I
was certain of - the father - since I knew his birth place and date.
I found him in Bristol so I searched for every PETTITT in Bristol and came
up with what was obviously more than one family.
I then noticed that, if you hover your mouse over the icon that takes you
down the slippery slope into abject poverty (a.k.a getting the census page
image), in Internet Exploder it displays a message like "Shortcut to
ChargeableServlet?rType=image&pageType=PAGE&pageId=847185" in the status bar
at the bottom left of the IE window. I speculate that the number after
pageId is the identifier for the actual image to be retrieved. So, hovering
over all the buttons in turn you can see which ones have the same pageId and
thus are the same family. In my case there were clearly 4 distinct PETTITT
families in Bristol and I was able to separate them out easily.
It's not 100% of course - you don't get other people at the same address for
example, however you can see if your family is on one page or two (I imagine
that the pages are going to have sequential pageIDs)
Hope this helps someone
Cheers
Hugh Wallis