One of the new features at Ancestry.com is "Census Compare" which compares names, places, and household members with ages across two or more census record collections.
1) The Ancestry article Comparing Census Records with Census Compare provides detailed information. The article notes that:
Comparing census records can help you:
- Follow an ancestor across multiple census years
- See how households and locations changed over time
- Confirm details such as age, birthplace, occupation, or family members
- Spot differences or possible errors between records
- Decide which records belong to your ancestor and what information to add to your tree
"Census Compare" works only with the United States Federal Census and England and Wales Census record collections on Ancestry.com.
2) In my Ancestry Member Tree, I have attached a number of census records to my 2nd great-grandfather, James Richman/Richmond (1821-1912). In my Hints page, I clicked "Accepted" and saw a number of Census records for James Richmond. Here is the portion of the page with the 1900 U.S. Census record as an Accepted Hint:
Note that there is a blue link for "Compare to other census hints" in the lower right-hand corner of that census record.
3) When I click that link for "Compare to other census hints" a table appears with a number of records (maximum number on the screen seems to be five):
There is a "Next" button in the upper right of the table - whewn I click that it shows the 1851 England and Wales census on the right-side of the screen and shows four of the other five records.
The indexed fields that appear are:
- Name
- Birth date
- Birth place
- Residence
- Spouse
- Household
The user can click on the linked record collection in the Table to go to the census page for the person of interest.
There may be times when Ancestry puts a record in the Table that is not for your person, but the record may be in the list of Hints. That happened in this case with an 1881 England and Wales census record for a James Richman born in 1819 that was not my person of interest (I Reviewed and then Ignored that Hint and it disappeared from the table).
4) This feature can be useful to researchers. If a valid Hint appears in the "New" Hint or "Ignored" Hint column, the user needs to Review it and Save it to their Tree. I found the 1841 England and Wales census for James Richman in my "New" Hint list, reviewed it and saved it, but did not see it added to the "Census Compare" table for some reason.
5) How can the user save the Census Compare table? There are several methods:
- Print the Screen with the table, save it as an image, and trim the table and put it in a Word document. Here is the image I saved (with only five census records, not the six that I have):
- Highlight and Copy the Table text and paste it to a spreadsheet:
The census page images are overlaid on the Table so I moved them to the right of my OpenOffice Spreadsheet program. Note that all six columns are provided. I can widen the fields if I need to. The links to the Census pages for the records are active.
- Highlighting and Copy the Table text into a word processor Table:
That didn't work well - with my OpenOffice word processor I got only the 1910 census and the other columns were blank. It was a mess, but did have the census page links.
- Some other method I haven't thought of.
There may be other ways to obtain the information, but only the Spreadsheet retained the links.
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