FIGURE 11-4. Census Links is a good starting place for international census searches.
Another good source is the Archives of Canada. The first census in Canada was in 1666 by Intendant Jean Talon, who listed 3,215 inhabitants. Talon is considered the “father” of modern census-taking in Canada. Regular censuses did not begin in Canada until 1841, however. Several Canadian censuses are searchable online at www.archives.ca.
Use your favorite search engine to search for “census” and the country you are looking in to find other census resources. For example, Brazil’s census information has an English page at www1.ibge.gov.br/english/default.php.
Note
A fire in 1921 destroyed many of the original records of the 1890 census in Washington, D.C. An account of this incident is on the NARA site at www.archives.gov/research/census/1890/1890.html.
The U.S. Census Bureau
The U.S. Census Bureau generally provides only summary and statistical information for the first 72 years after a census is taken. The data on individuals is kept private until then. That means the 1930 census is the most recent one available for public use. The only services the Census Bureau provides related to genealogy are the Age Search Service and the counts of names from the 1990 census.
The Census Bureau does not have old census forms available. Copies of decennial census forms from 1790 through 1930 are available on microfilm, for research at the NARA in Washington, D.C., at ARCs, and at select Federal Depository Libraries throughout the United States. In addition, these records are available at various other libraries and research facilities throughout the United States. Additional important information at the Census Bureau site is their FAQ at http://www.census.gov/history/www/genealogy/.
Some Census Sites
Other census sites that are more local in nature include:
• The Ayrshire Free Census Project aims to transcribe all nineteenth-century Ayrshire census records and upload them to a free-to-view online database. This is part of the FreeCEN: UK Census Online Project at www.freecen.org.uk/.
• Massac County, Illinois History and Genealogy at www.genealogytrails.com/ill/massac/censusindex.html is an ongoing project to transcribe records of births, cemetery records and tombstones, census pages, death records, land grants, marriages, obituaries, biographies, and wills for this specific area.
• 1920 Yavapai County, Arizona Census Index at www.sharlot.org/archives/gene/census/index.html is a local project. The Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, has posted transcriptions of the 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1920 Yavapai County census indexes. Genealogists can search the 1870, 1880, and 1900 census indexes for names and partial names and also get page numbers.
• African-American Census Schedule at www.afrigeneas.com/aacensus/ is a volunteer project to transcribe pre-1870 census schedules.
• Transcriptions of censuses around the world are at the USGenWeb project at www.us-census.org. Click Census Surname Search from the USGenWeb home page, and then use the form to search all the census records or to narrow your search by state or year. And consider volunteering, as the work is far from complete!
• The 1940 Census is free at www.archives.com/1940-census. Earlier census lookups are part of the paid area.
State and Local Sources
Besides the U.S. federal census, some state and local governments took censuses for tax purposes. Such states include Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin, to name a few.
You can often trace the migration of families in America when state census records are used with other records, such as the federal census after 1850; family bibles; death certificates; church, marriage, military, probate, and land records; and other American genealogical sources. A major reference source is State Census Records by Ann S. Lainhart (Genealogical Publishing Company, 1992); also check FamilySearch or the catalog of a library under your state of interest and then under the headings “Census Indexes” and “Census.”
Search the Internet to see if state and local censuses have been indexed. See especially the AIS Census Indexes at Ancestry.com (searching Ancestry’s indexes is free; seeing the original record is for paying subscribers only).
State Archives and Libraries
Many state archives and libraries have vital records and census information. For example, www.nysl.nysed.gov/genealogy/vitrec.htm is a guide to getting genealogical records from the state of New York. The Alabama Archives has a list of available census information from the state’s early years at www.archives.state.al.us/referenc/census.html. Search for the state you need, along with “census” or “archives,” to find such sources.
Other Sources
Sometimes you can’t find a birth, marriage, or death record in the “official” sources. In these cases, you can look in county and city court records, newspapers, cemetery and funeral home records, and local libraries. These sources can give you clues to parentage, marriages, and burials, which can help you discover where the records may be located—or that the records were destroyed in some way. Some other sources—both official and private—are working to make documents available online.
Success Story: Stepping Back Through the Censuses
The Internet is one of the few spaces in genealogy that is friendly to people not running Windows, so instead of using CD-ROMs, I subscribe to Images Online at Ancestry.com for easy access to the handwritten census pages. Reading originals instead of relying on transcribers and indexers was part of my success in finding my great-great-grandparents. Tracking my family back through ten-year steps is what worked for me. I had inherited a genealogical chart of my male Downs/Downes line in Connecticut, showing the names of the wives but nothing else about them. So I knew only that my great-grandmother was supposed to be a Charlotte Smith. First, the 1900 census showed my grandfather living with a Charlotte Thompson, described as “Mother” and shown as being born in 1849. The step back to 1890 had to be skipped, of course, because of the destruction of those records. Then the 1880 census showed my grandfather at the age of five living in Oxford, Connecticut, with a Jane M. Burnett, who called him her grandson. This allowed me to leapfrog over the puzzle of my great-grandmother Charlotte and jump directly into the puzzle of my great-great-grandmother Jane. I reasoned that for Charlotte to have been a Smith, it was necessary for this Jane M. Burnett also to have been a Smith when Charlotte was born, so I went to the 1850 census in search of Jane M. Smith.
The 1850 schedules list everybody by name, but the index lists mostly heads of household—meaning that almost all wives and children are invisible until you read the original pages. After spending two months following the wrong Jane M. Smith with no baby Charlotte, I abandoned the index and started wading through every name in Oxford and then in the surrounding towns. In 1860 Naugatuck, I found a Jane M. Smith whose age fit that of Jane M. Burnett, but still no Charlotte. Tracking that family back into the 1850 census, I couldn’t find them in Naugatuck or in Oxford, but I did find them next door in Middlebury. And there, finally, was one-year-old Charlotte along with Jane and—for the first time with certainty—my great-great-grandfather David S. Smith. Since then, the census has helped me to solve many parts of the puzzle. The next steps—back to 1840 and beyond—will be much more difficult because those earlier schedules do not list names of family members except for the head of household, but I am very happy with my success so far.
—Alan Downes
Obituaries and SSDI
The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is an invaluable tool for twentieth-century family history. However, in accordance with legal regulations, the SSDI will not be updated with names and death dates until a person has been dead three years. This is because claiming that the use of the SSDI led to identity theft (while offering no proof of that claim), Congress curtailed access to the SSDI and exempted its information from the Freedom of Information Act in late 2013. Unless genealogists protest loudly and long enough to have this repealed, the SSDI will now
not have the latest data.
Sometimes you can find good clues to vital statistics in obituaries, although one must be cautious. My own parents’ published obituaries had minor errors because the family was not thinking clearly at the funeral home. I suspect that is the case with many death notices. Still, the parents and progeny of the deceased were correct, even if some other particulars were not.
Go to Cyndi’s List and look at the Deaths page (www.cyndislist.com/deaths.htm) for a good collection of sites that specialize in obituaries.
Once you have a place and year of death from an obituary, if your ancestor died in the twentieth century, you should look at the SSDI as a more reliable source for data. This is public record, and you can search it for free at http://searches.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ssdi.html. The results will give you the official birth date, death date, where the Social Security number was issued (usually the place of residence at the time), and where the last payment was made (usually the place of death at the time). With this information, you can use the state’s vital statistics department to get a copy of birth and death certificates, which are primary sources.
Other sites with SSDI lookup are:
• FamilySearch SSDI Search is at http://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1202535.
• Genealogy.com (home of Family Tree Maker) offers the SSDI for free, but only as part of their Internet Family Finder search. The advantage is searching many resources at once, but the disadvantage is the overabundance of results to weed through. You also can’t search without the last name.
• GenealogyBank.com (access is free at many libraries) has over 84 million records updated weekly, which makes it quite a good source for recent deaths.
• Mocavo has a free SSDI search at http://www.mocavo.com/Social-Security-Death-Index/246389.
• You can search the SSDI in one step at http://www.stevemorse.org/ssdi/ssdi.html. Steve Morse has created a practical search form that augments the search logic of many of the free SSDI search engines on the Web. You can choose which of several SSDI databases to search. This is one of the easiest SSDI search interfaces available and a favorite of mine.
• Railroad Retirement Board at http://www.rrb.gov/mep/genealogy.asp is the place to look if your ancestor worked for a railroad company and was covered by the Railroad Retirement Act after 1936.
Interment.net
This is another volunteer site full of free uploaded burial records (www.interment.net). Volunteers transcribe and upload records of every bit of data they can find from a local cemetery. The records include the official name of the cemetery; the location of the cemetery (town, county, state, country, etc.), including the street address of the cemetery or driving directions; the date the transcription was compiled and how (tombstone inscriptions, sexton records, previous transcriptions); how complete the list is; and the names of the compilers. As of this writing, almost 4 million records were available for searching or browsing.
You can also subscribe to a newsfeed of all new transcriptions published on Interment.net daily and of the Cemetery Blog news and articles from the weekly web log of the site.
Fold3
Fold3 digitizes military historical documents, and works in partnership with NARA. The name comes from the way the flag is folded at military funerals. Here, you will find millions of images of original source documents, many of which have never been available online before. Hundreds of the documents are free, and if you find something you have background information on, you can comment on and annotate it. You can also create your own story page, pulling images from the collection to it.
Launched in January 2007, it has added about 2,000,000 items a month, most of them handwritten. You can browse or use a search box (you can do a Boolean search) to find military records, naturalization records, and more. As of this writing, only U.S. documents are being scanned and indexed, but Justin Schroepfer of Fold3 said that soon, more countries will be included. American Milestone Documents, Project Blue Book, Pennsylvania Archives documents from 1664–1880, and all indexed information and previews of all of the images are free. You are also invited to scan and upload your own historical documents, whether they are photographs, diaries, bible records, and so on. Access to other documents is by subscription.
Some of the free pieces of information include:
• The Ratified Amendments XI–XXVII of the U.S. Constitution
• Copybooks of George Washington’s Correspondence with Secretaries of State, 1789–1796
• Naturalization Petitions of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, 1906–1930
• Naturalization Petitions for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, 1906–1930
• Naturalization Petitions for the Eastern District of Louisiana, New Orleans Division, 1838–1861
• Presidential Photos of Coolidge, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt
• World War II Japanese Photos
• The Case File of the United States v. The Amistad, 1841
Online Searches
The UK 1901 census is available for searching online at www.1901censusonline.com/. This site had a disastrous beginning: When it first went online, it had over a million hits in the first hours, the server crashed, and it was months before it was back up. They finally got it all on servers able to handle the traffic, and now several UK censuses are available besides 1901: 1891, 1871, 1861, 1851, and 1841 census records and Birth, Marriage and Death (BMD) indexes. The censuses, like U.S. censuses, ask different questions for different censuses, such as occupation and place of birth. Other records are available, too, as this list shows:
• Address search Find out who lived in your house in 1901.
• Place search Look at who was in which enumeration district in 1901.
• Institution search See who lived in hospitals, barracks, orphanages, etc., in 1901.
• Vessel search Locate a naval or merchant vessel in the 1901 census.
• Reference number Use this search if you know the National Archives census.
Like Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com, you can search the indexes for free, but looking at the actual record costs a fee. Unlike Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com, you can pay per record, put your subscription on hold, and buy a set of voucher lookups. Viewing transcribed data costs 50 credits for an individual and then 50 credits for a list of all other people in that person’s household. Viewing a digital image of the census page costs 75 credits.
Transcriptions
As mentioned earlier, www.censuslinks.com is one way to find census transcriptions from around the world. Also check Cyndi’s List at www.cyndislist.com/census.htm.
CDs and Microfilms
Several vendors provide CD-ROMs and microfilm of census records—sometimes images of the actual census form and sometimes transcriptions. Your local library, LDS Family History Center, or genealogy club may have copies of these microfilms and/or CD-ROMs with census images.
Bible Records Online
Bible Records Online (www.biblerecords.com) is a site dedicated to transcribing and digitizing the contents of records inside family bibles and in other important documents from as early as the 1500s through today. Often, these were the only written records of births, marriages, and deaths of a family, but they are usually inaccessible except to the person who owns them.
At www.biblerecords.com, you can browse or search by surname. The results will be a transcribed page. To submit your own family bible records, go to www.biblerecords.com/submit.html. Tracy St. Claire, the site’s administrator, has a standard format for the transcriptions to make them easy to read and compare. If you can submit a scan of the original, that is wonderful, but she will take a transcription alone. The site also has a forum and a place for scans of photographs or other items people typically slip into the family bible as keepsakes.
Wrapping Up
• Vital statistics are the milestones of life: birth, marriage, sometimes divorce, and death.
• Most states have good vital statistics
starting from 1938 (the beginning of Social Security). Prior to that, you may have to get creative, looking at obituaries, census records, family bible sites, and other sites.
• The Library of Congress and National Archives and Records Administration have several resources, guides, and databases to help genealogists.
• Many sites have transcribed and scanned original documents, indexed for searching by surname: bibles, cemetery records, and so on. Some are free and some are subscription based.
Chapter 12
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: FamilySearch.org
FamilySearch.org is the online genealogy site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). You are probably aware that the members of LDS search their ancestry because of the church doctrine that marriage and families continue beyond this life if families are sealed together in the LDS rites. You can learn more about this at www.mormon.org/values/family-history. FamilySearch.org is one way they do that.
FamilySearch.org has undergone significant upgrades and redesign since the last version of this book. The site has new ways to find, record, and share your family history on FamilySearch.org. Searching uploaded family trees allows you to find data and collaborate with others. You can add photos and stories of ancestors and view your ancestry in an interactive fan chart, which can show you where your next searches should be. You can also now get live free help either through chat or the telephone help line.
Genealogy Online Page 17