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Culminating six years of work and the investment of multiple millions of dollars, Internet genealogy king Ancestry.com has put 140 years of U.S. Census records online.
Scholars agree that for family history buffs across the nation, the 540 million names gathered by census takers between 1790 and 1930 will be a genealogical treasure trove available nowhere else on the World Wide Web. Under federal law, complete census records cannot be released before 72 years have passed from the time they were recorded. Ancestry expects to add the 1940 census to its collection in 2012.
"This census collection is an incredibly great place for people to start researching their families," said Ancestry CEO Tim Sullivan. "Our site is the only place on the Internet to access the complete federal census. This is our crown jewel."
What makes the collection especially valuable, researchers agree, is that for the first time, beginning today, family historians will be able to obtain results easier with only partial information. The complete collection includes all household names where available; past census collections were organized by "head of household" only.
"If I have a grandfather I'm researching as a young child, I may not know the names of [his parents]," Sullivan explained. "If only the 'head-of-household' is indexed, I wouldn't be able to locate names of children" that could be indirectly plugged in, or confirm secondary records in a lineage.
Ruth Carr, a New York Public Library historian and genealogist, hailed the completion of Ancestry's census project as a testament to technology - and one company's commitment.
"A few years ago, the idea that the census would be digitized and indexed online seemed beyond the realm of possibility," she said. "Researchers had to work with thousands of reels of microfilm in order to find a specific person or family they wanted to learn about."
And now? It comes down to simply typing a name in an Ancestry Web site search box and within seconds being rewarded with the image of the actual census page containing the desired data.
Although Sullivan would not release the specific cost of the project beyond "tens of millions," he did say it took 1,500 full- and part-time employees - specially trained in reading 18th and 19th century handwriting - to painstakingly digitize 13 million individual documents and then enter every name from those census sheets into searchable databases.
The records amount to historical snapshots of individual lives, providing occupations, age, race, marital status, relationship to heads of household, birthplaces for children and parents, assets, native languages, neighbors and residential streets.
For example, Ancestry researchers found that President Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, apparently would admit to only seven years' worth of aging between the 1850 and 1860 censuses. And census takers found that 15 years before he succeeded Franklin Roosevelt as president, Harry S. Truman was living with his mother-in-law in the era of the Great Depression.
Actor Tom Hanks, Ancestry staff says, might want to know that his grandfather, Clarence Frager, worked as a "squirrel inspector" for a pest control company, according to the 1930 census.
Actress Julia Roberts, another 1930 census record indicates, is part Swedish. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eleanor Johnson, is listed as having been born in the Scandinavian country in 1882.
And finally, consider the heritage of former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who once said it takes a village to raise a child.
Apparently so. Ancestry says a census search finds that of the 12 children born to her great grandfather, Jonathan Rodham, nine of them - ages 38, 36, 34, 32, 28, 26, 24, 22, and 20 - lived under his roof.
About Ancestry.com
* The Provo-based company launched its first Web site, MyFamily.com, in December 1998. Today, the privately held company operates 11 sites that attract millions of visitors daily.
* Most of its services require subscriptions, except the basic free site, FamilyHistory.com.
* Ancestry.com, the world's leading for-profit Web-based genealogy site, claims to be the only online provider of access to the complete U.S. Census.