COUNTINGUP
By my reckoning, US federal census records are the best source of information on American ancestors. Taken every 10 years since 1790, the census reveals names, relationships and occupations—not to mention details on military service, immigration and marriage.
Starting with the 1940 census, you can work your way back through each enumeration to put together a rough outline of your family tree to the early 20th century. The loss of nearly the entire 1890 census was a tremendous blow for genealogists. But get past that gap, and you can continue to mine every-name enumerations back to 1850. While the censuses from 1790 to 1840 list only heads of household, they still provide valuable clues that can lead you to discoveries in other records.
Four huge genealogy websites—yes, the same four we compare beginning on page 18—have the entire collection of US federal census records from 1790 through 1940, complete with digital images of the original records and every-name indexes. (One of them, FamilySearch <www.familysearch.org>, is free.) And if your public library has a subscription to HeritageQuest Online (provided by Ancestry.com), you can go to your library’s website, log in with your library card number and access federal census records for free.
The following 26 tips will help you locate your ancestors in the census—despite poor handwriting in some records, the occasional misspelled name and many incorrect transcriptions. Most of these tips are geared toward researching censuses on specific websites, but the first three are universal.
