August 2001 Genealogy Forum News

From the Top

This month we are looking at the census reports. This is a great time to be working with census reports as the major online companies; Ancestry and Genealogy.com are both bringing them to your desktop. In the past, you had to go to a library or archives to see these fountains of knowledge. Then came the CD indexes that were helpful (but contained numerous errors). Today these indexes are a great help in using the new online versions of the census.

The most recent addition to these CD indexes is the new 1880 CD index that has just been released by the LDS Church. For about a dollar a CD ($49.95 for the set) you have a complete index to the 1880 census. This is possibly the bargain of the century.

Many people complain because they have to pay to use these online census documents but if you look at what you spend to go to the libraries, parking and the time involved, you figure out rather quickly just what a bargain these new online census pages really are. The fact they are available when you are and not when a library decides to be open is worth the price alone.

The other thing is that these are good quality that you can capture and store in your picture section of your genealogy program for later reference. You can also print them out to store with your other documents. I was looking at a census page I had copied a few years back and the micro film looked like it had been dragged across sand a few hundred times. The same page on Ancestry was much more readable.

I have had so much luck working with these new online versions of the census. I am really excited at how easy these new documents are to use and how easy they are to get to.

George Ferguson
Genealogy Forum Leader
President, Golden Gate Services, Inc

© 2001 GFNEWS, a monthly publication of the Golden Gate Genealogy Forum, Inc. of Franklin, MA.
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