Census Central

As we come across more and more United States census information on our family members, we make it available in our Carey Family Album. We started, several years ago, with the 1880 census pages which were based on information from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' FamilySearch site. Since then, other census data became available from a variety of sources. One of our principal sources of census information for this site is Ancestry.com's U.S. Federal Census Collection.

The same caveat applies to this census data as to any other census information you might find on the internet, or for sale on CD-ROM. Although this material is extremely helpful, it is subject to all the usual errors, including data being recorded incorrectly or illegibly, as well as errors in transcribing the original census sheets and transferring them to computer files. The records are being presented as is, without attempting to correct or modify the information we've downloaded or transcribed.

After having looked at hundreds of pages of census records in their original form, I am impressed by how much people's names and ages differed from one census to another. Some of these variations may be due to differences in the abilities of the various census takers to record data correctly, but I've also come to the conclusion that people simply treated their own names and ages, and those of their spouses and children, a lot more casually than we do nowadays.

Many of the records include names of unrelated individuals, such as servants, boarders and hired hands. Where you see records of persons born in other countries, remember that such modern nations as Germany and Italy didn't come into existence until late in the 19th century, and that the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires included parts of many present-day nations. All of these historical events have led to the entry of some strange (to us) birthplaces in the U. S. census records.


What's New? Be sure to click on the "what's new" link near the top of each census directory to go to the bottom of page and read what was being done that was new or different in each census year.

This page was last updated 20 Apr 2017.