Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Update on Census Records on FamilySearch

...
I summarized the status of United States Federal census records on the FamilySearch Record Search Pilot site back in June in U.S. Census Records on FamilySearch.org .

One of my complaints, at the time, with the census records on the Pilot site was about those that did not have images (1880, 1910 and 1920). The results of a search provided information about the person, but not about the household that the person was a member of, nor about the households on the same census page.

With the addition of all of the Record Search Pilot databases to the Family Search Beta site, at least part of the problem has been addressed and remedied.

When you go to the FamilySearch Beta site, and click on the "All Collections" link in the menu, you go to the list of available databases. Here is a screen shot for all of the U.S. Census databases currently available, along with the number of records in each database:




I clicked on the 1880 Census and searched for one of my Carringer's, and saw:




Below the information indexed for the person is a list of the individuals in the household on the census page. The name, relationship to the head, gender and age are listed of each household member are listed. The names of the other household members are active - you can click on them and see the indexed information for that person.

The 1900 U.S. Census record looks like this:



The name, relationship and gender, but not the age, of household members are provided, and the names are clickable.

For the 1910 census, a person's page looks like this:




The household information includes name, relationship, gender and age.

For the 1920 U.S. Census, the person page looks like this:



Again, the household members are listed, with name, relationship, gender and age.

The addition of the Household information is a significant improvement over the previous information and capability for these databases. Of course, they are not perfect yet (perfect would be indexing more fields, with images available, and the ability to navigate to other pages in the census), but at least these databases are now more useful.

1 comment:

Terri said...

Thank you, Thank you for calling this information to our attention. Now I have copies of the Mecklenburg 1900 census which my grandpa appears on. It was just so expensive to get them through ancestry. Now I have a new mystery to solve - but that's ok at least I have some names to work with. Thanks Randy!!