Can’t find what you’re looking for in the U.S. census? A new agreement made between Ancestry.com and FamilySearch may change that.
The two family history giants are combining forces to make more historical records available—at a higher quality. As part of that agreement, FamilySearch has shared new, improved images of the 1900 U.S. census with Ancestry.com
FamilySearch records were created using newer scanning technology and older, higher-quality microfilm copies of the original census to create the improved images, which are now online at Ancestry.com.
Compare these images—old and new—from a page of the 1900 U.S. census taken from Plain City, Utah, and you can see some of the improvements:
A faded corner from an original census image on Ancestry (left) is much more readable in the recently added image (right).
A piece of tape that obscured text in the census image on Ancestry (left) is more transparent on the recently added image (right).
Larger image size and better resolution makes small text in the Ancestry images (left) much more legible in the new images (right).
Overwritten text is much more difficult to read in the older images (left) than in the newer images (right).
But new, clearer images aren’t the only improvement made to the 1900 U.S. census. Sometime in the first weeks of August an index of the 1900 census created by FamilySearch volunteers will be combined with the index on Ancestry to increase your chances of finding an ancestor.
The new index will have several more searchable fields (such as birth month and birth year). Plus, having two versions of each name increases your odds of finding an elusive ancestor; chances are that if a name was transcribed poorly in one index it was transcribed more accurately in the other.
FamilySearch and Ancestry are now working on similar improvements to other censuses in the 1790–1930 U.S. census collection on Ancestry. The 1920 census is the next in the works.
To read more about the new partnership between Ancestry and FamilySearch, you can read a press release here.
Jana Lloyd is editor of the Ancestry Monthly newsletter. She can be reached at AMUeditor@ancestry.com but cannot assist with personal research questions.
