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- Do you have Charlie Chaplin’s census data? | FindersFree: What do you want to find? - [...] of the fun of reviewing old census data is finding famous people from the past! We looked up one ...
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< What the finders found >
They stood up and were counted
The first US Federal Population Census was taken in 1790, and has been taken every decade since.
A vast amount of old census data has been transcribed, making it possible for you to search for specific names in cities and states across the US. (Other countries also have kept census data.) When you locate a record you think might be a match, you can view a scan of the original ledger — which usually offers even more information than has been transcribed.
About American census records
You may think that this would make searching for an ancestor easy — but it will and it won’t, all depending on the era you need to explore.
Why the discrepancy? For privacy reasons, census data is not made publicly available for 72 years. This makes it obsolete for any searches for people here and now — but it remains a valuable tool if you’re seeking information about ancestors prior to 1930.
What you can find
On census data from 1790-1840, just the head of household is listed, along with the number of household members in certain age brackets.
However, for the censuses from the years 1850 to 1930, there are details about each person in a household (family members, lodgers and others living there are all included). Information featured typically included the following:
Note that census data will vary depending on year and location, and not all records have been digitized and/or transcribed.
Where to get the information
The National Archives has the census schedules on microfilm available from 1790 onward (though only a tiny portion of the 1890 census — just 6,160 records out of the 62,979,766 people listed — survived a Department of Commerce fire in 1921).
But to make things easier, you can access the census data via Ancestry.com — although a membership fee may be required. (Heritagequest.com also hosts some of these records, but they are only available only via public libraries.)
See an example of a census — in the form of Charlie Chaplin’s 1930 data — here!
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