So far we have discussed the United States Census 1790-1840, United States Census 1850-1930, Slave Schedules and State Censuses. Now we’re going to talk about where to find the census of interest to you.
Finding Census Information Locally
1) Your local historical society or genealogical society may states or more. You won’t know until you check their collections catalog.
A wonderful resource for finding a historical or genealogical society near you is the D’addezio Society Hill Directory. The page has links listed as: United States Historical and Genealogical Societies, Canadian Historical and Genealogical Societies and Australian Historical and Genealogical Societies.
Clicking on the U.S. link will take you to a page where you can browse listings by state. Canada’s listings are by provinces and territories and Australia’s listings are by states and territories. Once you’ve clicked on a state, province or territory you can either search by typing a society name into the search bar provided or you can click on a link that will take you to an alphabetical listing.
Results will provide the name and address of a society if you typed in a name or the name and address of multiple societies if you searched alphabetically. Names highlighted and underlined in blue will take you to that societies web page when clicked on.
This is a free service and is regularly updated. Remember that the listings do not include phone numbers and just because a listing is not clickable doesn’t mean that the society of interest doesn’t have a web page. The web page just may not have been submitted yet. If the society does not have it’s web page listed on Society Hill, you may want to search for the society on Google.com or another search engine to see if you can find a phone number listing or other contact information to see what census collections they may have.
2) Your local library is another place to check. Libraries, if they do have genealogical records, don’t usually have much but it’s worth a try. Our local library holds census records for a few counties in our state for a few different Federal Census years.
3) One other place that my have some sort of collection of census records are Archives.
Remember to bring along a pencil and notepad or laptop on trips to any of these places for genealogical information as you will not be able to check the books or microfilms out. Even in your local library, genealogical information is usually listed as REFERENCE only, meaning that you can not check out the book.
