We all look for our ancestors on the federal Census. Those Census records are a main source to determine where they lived and who lived in their household.
As valuable as Census records are it can be a chore finding them when you need them.
I use Ancestry.com as my primary source of information about my ancestors. Additionally I use Rootsweb and GenWeb. But Ancestry seems to be the best source for Census records.
When I find a Census record on Ancestry I download it to my computer so I can easily locate it and open the Census file to read the contents.
I also transfer the contents of the Census Records into an Excel spreadsheet because I can then use the spreadsheet to more easily store the information. I used to try to manually format the spreadsheet into the same configuration of the Census record, with all those columns.
But there is a much easier way. There is a website which has all those decades of Census records all ready to use and configured for each of the Decades. You can simply enter the information from the Census image into the ready-made spreadsheet with all those columns already prepared. Believe it or not those spreadsheets are free.
Where are they? You will find them on a website called Census Tools. I don’t know the name of the fellow that did all that work to prepare those spreadsheets, except his first name is Gary. He says:
Using a spreadsheet is a great way to record your genealogy data in a format similar to the original source. All of my census spreadsheets faithfully reproduce actual census document formatting, providing you with a professional appearing product suitable for printing or including in your published family history. Census Tools spreadsheets are also valuable analysis tools. The Tracker series allows a researcher to analyze all available census data for an individual on a single worksheet! At a glance and in a very professional appearing report, you can trace the important aspects of your ancestors’ lives. Your pile of census data, difficult to analyze and evaluate scattered about in a pile of extraction sheets, comes alive when properly organized!
He is right. So, if you haven’t discovered this valuable tool to handle your census data I recommend you visit Gary’s website.
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