Ancestry.com today announced it has completed digitizing and indexing the entire U.S. Federal Census from 1790 to 1930. Ancestry.com is the only source where all publicly released census information can be found online. Over the course of the Census digitization project, Ancestry.com’s team of experts spent 6.6 million hours of labor deciphering handwriting from 13 million original census documents and 21.9 billion keystrokes manually entering information into the database.

The 14 available enumerations in the census collection reveal some fascinating facts. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary, aged only seven years between the 1850 and the 1860 enumerations (in other words, perhaps someone wasn’t truthful about their age). Harry Truman lived with his mother-in-law just 15 years before he became President of the United States. According to the 1930 U.S. Census, Tom Hanks’s grandfather, Clarence Frager, worked for “Rodent Control,” and his daughter’s birth certificate listed the exact occupation as “squirrel inspector.”

See Also: A Solid Overview of Several Online Genealogy Databases in Today’s Wall Street Journal.
The article is available for free to non-subscibers.

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