Research Your Family Tree Online
By Dave Conway, January 2007
Have you ever gone down to the National Archives to research your family tree on old U.S. Census records? You had to know what state and county to look in, use a manual microfilm reader to scan hundreds of blurry pages of a cross-index called a Soundex, then load another reel and find the appropriate page from the census taken that year. Thanks to Fairfax County, we now can search and retrieve those census records from the comfort of our home.
If you have a valid library card from Fairfax County, go to http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/dbsRemote/subject/genealogy.htm on the Internet to find several resources that are available to you to conduct genealogy research. Most important is the HeritageQuest Online database, which allows you to search U.S. Census records online at no cost to you! There are other databases at this site that you can also search, but the census is the most useful.
The online census includes records from 1790 through 1930, except for records from the late 1800s that were destroyed by fire and some 1930 records that are still being indexed. Some things to consider when conducting searches:
Names were often recorded based on how they sounded to the census taker, so search on all possible spelling variants of the last name. And don't assume that a different spelling in a census record means anything—usually is it just the census taker writing down what he thought he heard.
Avoid searches using first names, but instead examine the first names in the results list for all the possible variants, including nicknames, middle names used as first names, and misspelled first names.
The index only includes heads of households. You cannot search for women unless they are widowed or otherwise living on their own, and children are never indexed.
If you know the first and last name of a wife or child and the approximate husband's age but not his first name, search the appropriate state/county/census year for the last name, open every record where the husband's age is around what you think it should be, and see if the wife's or children's names are a match. This can be tedious, but it is the best way I know to find the census record you want, and it is always exciting when you discover a match!
Keep an eye out for relatives you never heard of. For example, when I researched the father of one of my grandfathers in Hartford, CT, I found a man whose son was a match for my grandfather. But I also found two other men with the same last name who were about the same age as my great grandfather and emigrated from Lithuania about the same year that he did. I had discovered two of my grandfather's uncles!
The older the U.S. Census, the less relevant the genealogy information it contains.
While you can search every census from every state and year for people with your same last name, there are more productive ways to find relevant information.
If searching on just a last name, pick a specific year and state. The results will be a list of counties and the number of entries that match the last name. Select a county and look through the list of names.
If searching on a rather unique last name, search a state for all years and counties. The results will be a list of census years and the number of entries that match the last name.
This service has been available for years as a paid subscription service that cost a hefty fee for each state and census year you wanted to search, and the subscription lasted only a year—way too costly for amateur genealogists like me. Fairfax County has picked up the tab for all of us, and now we can conduct searches and display images of old U.S. Census records anytime we want! What a great service!