Census

The Census is perhaps the most important single genealogical source. It offers information on families at 10 year intervals. Before 1850 only the head of the household was recorded by name, and data on individuals is not available after the 1930 Census. Remember that the names of individuals were often misspelled, so one must often try variant forms of a name or employ other strategies, mentioned below to find your person. Currently, the largest source of census data on the web useful to genealogists are available in Ancestry Library Edition.

If you know the town or address of your person, you can browse the census list for their local area and find the names spelled in ways you did not expect. A rural township can be browsed, but to deal with a city, the local Enumeration Districts need to be found and browsed. Tools for doing this are provided on Webpages by Stephen P. Morse. Addresses may often be found in city directories.

Questions asked by census workers have changed over the years.

 

Finding names with different spellings pre-1930s: Soundex

Soundex is a phonetic index that groups together names that sound alike but are spelled differently, for example, Stewart and Stuart. This helps searchers find names that are spelled differently than originally expected, a relatively common genealogical research problem.

There are several guides to Soundex on the web. FamilySearch's Soundex pages explain further. The Soundex entry in the Ancestry wiki may also be helpful. RootsWeb Soundex Converter seems to be the easiest to use (and is operational). However, Ancestry.com searches will include Soundex when searching the census unless you check the "exact name" option.

Reference Books

Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000 is a long pdf document on the history of the U.S. Census.

The American census handbook, by Thomas Jay Kemp. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001, 517 p.