One Stop Census Shop

If you have been discovering your family’s history for a while you already have a favorite place to access the census. It is available by subscription to most of the online family history sites and through many local libraries. If your just starting, you may want to investigate one of these possibilities, but there is one place where everyone can access the census free of charge, FamilySearch.org.

FamilySearch

FamilySearch is a truly awesome resource provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. One of the many family history services they offer is the entire collection of available U.S. Census populations schedules. The population schedule is the one that tried to list every person living in the United States.

After you navigate to https://www.familysearch.org/ the first thing you will need to do is to create an account. You will not have to give them any financial or private information, they just need to know who is using their site. Look at the menu bar at the top of the screen and click the Search button. When a sub menu appears, click on the first choice, Records. The next screen you see will contain a typical Search screen.

At this point you have two choices to find your ancestor’s in the census. You can use the search option at the top to search for any records about your ancestors, or you can narrow your search to a specific U.S. census. If you choose to access just the census, depending on which device you are using, somewhere on the page will be a section called Find A Collection with a box to enter in the name of a collection. Don’t enter anything in the box but click on the link that says Browse All Collections (see below). On the next page, then enter United States Census in the search box under Collection Title. The page will automatically sort as you are typing. The end result will a list of federal census returns on FamilySearch. To search one of them, click the camera icon to the right of the census you want to search, and a search screen will appear where you can enter your ancestor’s information and search for them in that decade’s census return.

The second step to finding a specific collection on FamilySearch.org

If you’re new to the FamilySearch site, take a look around while you’re here. While different from many of the other online family history sites, FamilySearch is an amazing site with a lot to offer, for Free!

Everything You Need to Know!

For the next several posts we will take a look at the U.S. census. After covering some background information about the census and some tips on using the collection, we will dig into these records to discover not only what they tell us directly, but also what hints they give us and where we go to find the answers. You may be amazed at what you can discover from this one collection!

If you don’t want to wait, but want to get started now, we are here to help. Heroes of the Past will not only do the research for you, we also offer coaching sessions to help you get started yourself. Or we can train your group to become census experts! Contact us to get started.