What is usually the first piece of advice given to a fledgling genealogist? It is probably that a good way to learn about one's ancestor is to look him up in the Census! However, to do that, it might mean a visit to the local library, a Mormon Family History Center or even one of the regional NARA centers to look at the microfilm. Unfortunately, this may not be possible for everyone. The USGenWeb Census Project was born in February 1997 when USGenWeb Archives volunteers decided that an organized effort was needed to transcribe the census exactly as they appear on microfilm and make them available on online in the USGenWeb Archives. Ken Hollingsworth agreed to serve as project coordinator for the first year and Rootsweb Genealogical Data Cooperative generously provided webspace and mailing lists. The USGenWeb Census Project was in business!

We started with a group of about twenty-five people, and have grown to the point that today, there are more than 500 volunteer transcribers. These volunteers are as far away as Japan and Germany, and are in almost every one of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia and Canada! Some of these volunteers are already transcribing their third or fourth counties for the Census project. We received a great boost to our project when SK Publications offered to give our transcribers a free copy of their books of photocopies of the actual census microfilms. Recently, SK Publications has begun scanning census microfilms, and putting them on CDs, and they are donating a copy of each CD that they produce to us. These images will be put online in the USGenWeb Archives to accompany out transcriptions, so that a researcher who has located information on one of our transcriptions may verify it by looking at the actual image!

We are transcribing every census year. Phil Beshear, one of our volunteer transcribers, wrote a database program called the CART (Census Abstract Retrieval Tool), which is currently available for 1850 and 1860. He is presently "beta" testing CART with the transcriptions for 1870 and is planning to add later years soon. CART is user friendly program! It will not only export the text files that we use for the USGenWeb Archives, the DBF files that we will need for a future search engine, it will also export a nifty HTML file for transcribers who wish to place their transcription on their web pages. We are currently using spreadsheet templates for the censuses of 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830, 1840, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920. We hope that we will soon have database programs for the earlier censuses too.

We have two mailing lists. A general list, and one for users of the CART Program. Our transcribers can talk to each other and discuss, not only the problems that they are encountering as they transcribe, they can also discuss what they are learning as they transcribe. However, one has to wonder what those long-ago enumerators would think if they knew that we were scanning copies of their work, uploading them on the Internet and asking other transcribers, who possibly live half a world away, to look at their work, and give an opinion on how they have spelled a name, or what an occupation was. We have learned a lot about "antique" occupations, 18th century handwriting, and popular given names of the time periods. We also sponsor a public list called Census-Chat-L, for people to discuss the census and both provide and ask for census lookups. To subscribe, send a message to:

Our goal is to put all of the US Federal Censuses, transcriptions and scanned images, on the Internet, and we are making progress every day. Someday our ggg-grandchildren will look at the work we have done on the Census Project. Although most likely it will be on an Internet which will probably be very different from the one that we know. And they will be able to say that their ancestors were among the Internet's genealogical pioneers, a group of like-minded individuals who strongly believed in the free sharing of genealogical information for the benefit of those who come after them. We invite you to visit us at: