Thanks Dale for the information about where to find the 1880 census and for including information on later census reports! Now, can you tell me how to get my hands on the 1930 census reports? I tried Heritage Quest online, but my library's online subscription service says states other than VA and TX are not loaded yet. Are there searchable databases out there for the 1930 census? Greatly appreciated, Ginger Dale Marr <marrdye@sbcglobal.net> wrote: 1880 Fulton Co., AR -- Pleasant Ridge Twp. -- 10 Jun 1880 -- p. 24 Godwin, David 26 AR AR AR Head Zilpha A. 22 MS AL AL Wife Wm. 4 AR AR MS Son Eliza C. 3 AR AR MS Daughter Alvin T. 1 AR AR MS Son BTW, you can access the 1880 census index at http://www.familysearch.org and 1880 census index and images for free at http://ancestry.com. Here is the family in subsequent years: 1900 Fulton Co., AR -- Pleasant Ridge Twp. -- 08 Jun 1900 -- p. 309 Godwin, David 46 May 1854 AR AR AR Head md. 25 yrs. Zilpia A. 42 Aug 1857 MS AL AL Wife 15 ch./13 liv. (wow!) Ema 17 Dec 1882 AR AR MS Daughter Sarah 16 Feb 1884 AR AR MS Daughter Leona 14 Nov 1885 AR AR MS Daughter Norah 13 Jan 1887 AR AR MS Daughter Talmage 10 Apr 1890 AR AR MS Son Corah 8 Jan 1892 AR AR MS Daughter Ora ? Sep 189? AR AR MS Daughter Gripp? 4 May 1896 AR AR MS Son David T. 2 Dec 1897 AR AR MS Son Birtha 11/12 Jun 1899 AR AR MS Daughter 1910 Fulton Co., AR -- Pleasant Ridge Twp. -- 11 May 1910 -- p. 107 Godwin, David O. 55 AR AR AR Head md. 35 yrs. Zilpha A. 51 MS AL AL Wife 15 ch./13 liv. Talmage 20 AR AR MS Son Susan O. 16 AR AR MS Daughter Agrippa 14 AR AR MS Son David T. 13 AR AR MS Son Bertha J. 10 AR AR MS Daughter 1920 Fulton Co., AR -- Mammoth Spring -- 02 Jan 1920 -- p. 19 Godwin, Dave 63 AR AR AR Head Zilpha 57 MS AL AL Wife Alvin T. 40 AR AR MS Son Dice, Will 45 AR TN TN Boarder 1930 Fulton Co., AR -- Mammoth Spring -- 07 Apr 1930 -- p. 233 Godwin, Zilpha 71 MS AL AL Head wd. Alvin 51 AR AR MS Son wd. ==== ARFULTON Mailing List ==== NOTICE: Posting of virus warnings, test messages, chain letters, political announcements, current events, items for sale, personal messages, flames, etc. (in other words - spam) is NOT ALLOWED and will be grounds for removal. Consideration for exceptions, contact Kathleen Burnett kathleenburnett@earthlink.net ============================== Search Family and Local Histories for stories about your family and the areas they lived. Over 85 million names added in the last 12 months. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13966/rd.ashx __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

> Now, can you tell me how to get my hands on the 1930 census reports? You've already got them. You can find every image for every year of the census on HeritageQuest. They're just not all indexed. To find an unindexed image on HQ you have to use the "Browse" function. For that matter, you can browse any year, indexed or not, and I've found a lot of related families this way. Those indexes are far from complete or accurate. They've got 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1860, 1870, 1890 (what's left of it), 1900, 1910, 1920, and a little of 1930 (CT, DE, MD, TX, and VA), all just for head of household. However, you can use the 1930 index on Ancestry.com. It won't give as much information, at least not without some digging, as you'd get by subscribing or using it at your library (assuming they subscribe), but it will usually give you enough information to be able to find what you're looking for. To use the index go to http://ancestry.com and click on 1930 underneath "U.S. Census Records and Images." (This is all a lot easier to do than to try to explain.) On the next page click on the light blue "Exact Search" tab and type in a name and/or other information to search for. There's a link near the bottom of the box for more advanced search options. You can use three-letter minimum wildcard searches using "*" or do a Soundex search and don't have to fill in all the blanks, not even first or last names. What you'll get is a list of names with counties and estimated birth years, and the other fields will just say "name" or "info". Since it's an "every name" index it's often possible to find whole families by leaving the given name field blank. It's up to you to then fill in other fields, such as the state, to further narrow down the list. For every field you fill in correctly, that information will show up on the search list. Note that they list place of birth only for heads of households, so leave that field blank when searching for wives and children. Combined with HQ this is a great tool. And of course LDS (http://familysearch.org) and Ancestry have 1880 indexed, so again, you can combine those with HQ and find the image you're looking for. The quality of a particular image is often better on one, HQ or Ancestry, than the other. You'll notice that when you do a search on HQ you sometimes see the entry "Results N/A" next to 1930 in the results list. What that means is that there was at least one hit that year, but the index for the state in which it occurred isn't yet loaded (and at last word from ProQuest, no more states will be loaded since they've joined forces with Ancestry). It apparently can search all the states for 1930 but some (most) just haven't been uploaded. If you know the page number for a particular record in a year (or a state in 1930) that isn't indexed, you can usually find it by browsing HQ. To browse click on the word "Browse" in the upper lefthand corner of any page after you log in. That will bring up a succession of four pages -- year, state, county, and location. Fill in each. After you fill in the last one, the first image of that location automatically comes up. Note the page number of that image in the information area at the top of the screen (above the image, not on it). Now subtract that number from the page number you're looking for. Double the result. If the page number you want is followed by an "A" or no letter (or a "C" in the case of 1880), add "1" to the result and enter that number in the "Go to image ___ of x" box (where "x" is the total number of images in that location). If the page number you want ends in a "B" (or a "D" in the case of 1880), add "2" to the result and enter that number in the box. For example, if the page number of the first image for that location is 215, and you want to see page 232A (or 232C in 1880), subtract 215 from 232 (232-215=17). Double the difference (17x2=34). Add "1" to the difference (1+34=35). Enter "35" in the box. If you wanted page 232B (or 232D in 1880) you'd add "2" to the difference (2+34=36) and enter "36" in the box. I've discovered just by experimenting that this will usually get you to the correct page or within one image of it. Just use the <---- Image ----> bar to scroll up or down a page if needed. On HQ you don't have to fill in every field when searching, but you do have to spell the ones you do enter exactly as they were transcribed. Unlike Ancestry you can't use wildcards. You can leave first and/or last names blank, etc. If you think the last name could have been misspelled (and most of them were at some point), you could enter just the first name for example. (I looked up a "Crotts" for someone recently, and it was indexed "Crotch." Of course, that's exactly how the census taker spelled it, too, but who would have thought to look it up spelled that way?) If you narrow the location down enough you should get a manageable search list. Back to Ancestry, once you've narrowed it down to a specific county (and figured out the state if it's a common county name) you can browse HQ to find the names of all the locations in that county in 1930. (They're on the drop down box in the location field.) Take an educated guess or just start entering the location names in the township field on the Ancestry.com page until the family shows up on the list again. Again, use those three-letter wildcards -- Ath*, Bak*, Gut*, Mel*, Uni*, etc. It saves a lot of time, and if you try to spell out the full name of a location and Ancestry.com doesn't have it spelled exactly the same way in their index, you won't get a hit even if the person was there. When you find the right location go back to HQ and browse that location until you find the family. Of course, if it's a location like the city of Tulsa, OK, which has some 2000 images, this would take forever, but in locations with no more than 100-200 pages it's usually not too difficult if you have a broadband connection. Another tip: If there are a lot of pages for one location, say more than 25 or 30, rather than browsing through each page, you can often "divide and conquer" by removing the first and last names from the name fields on Ancestry.com and just clicking through the pages for that location until you find them. Those pages load faster than census images. There are 10 names per page in the Ancestry.com search results and 50 lines on each census page, so do the math. For example, if it shows there are 1586 people in a particular location, and you get a hit in the Ancestry.com search results on the page with names 421-430, that's a little over a quarter of the way down the list (430/1586). So go to HQ and browse the location. In this example there would be around 1586/50 or about 32 images, so your target should be on or around image #9. You may have to go up or down an image or two, but it's often faster than browsing page by page. Ancestry.com won't return a list of more than 2000 names, so this won't work unless the person(s) you're looking for happens to be within the first 2000 names in that location. In these cases if the HOH or someone in the family has a common first name like William or Mary, once you've pinpointed the location, you can leave the surname field blank and search for all the Williams or Marys in that location. Since the Williams and Marys should be fairly evenly dispersed throughout the location, noting where your William or Mary falls in the list and taking the same "divide and conquer" approach is sometimes another way to zero in on him or her. Even if you're looking for Great Aunt Wilhelmina you could do a wildcard search for Wil* and she'd be included with all the Williams, Wills, et al. Again, this is all a lot easier to do than to explain, but once you play around with it a little, I think you'll find it's easy.