In a message dated 6/15/98 10:19:06 AM, you wrote: <<The federal government has taken censuses every ten years since 1790, although no all of the ones taken are still in existance (some parts have been lost). The biggest loss was the 1890 census which suffered water damage after a fire. (There's 3 reels worth of miscellaneous stuff that survived, and a veteran's & widow's schedule from mid Kentucky on back in the alphabet...supposed to have been only Civil War Union Vets & widows, but others were also enumerated by zealous census takers...it's better than absolutely nothing.)    The 1880 one you ran across on line was probably 1880...a transcription.  I caution folks on transcriptions because even with careful transcribing, they can misspell, misidentify families, so if you can find your folks on it great--use it as a reference to the real thing to see if you can find out anything additional (sometimes you can learn a lot.), and if you can't, go look at the real thing.  If they alphabetize the transcription, you lose their place in the community, and we are often advised to look ten to twenty families either side of our families, because in another ten to twenty years, many of them will also turn out to be related by marriage.  You can also get a feel for the handwriting of the day, and sometimes recognize your ancestor's name when someone else transcribing it might think it looked like something else.  (A marriage transcription put one of my ancestors as Conner when it should have been Comer...a much less common, nearly unknown name in many areas...easy to overlook when it happens that way.) Sometimes you may find that a relative was actually the one who wrote the census in question, and you have pages of his handwriting as a memento.  What I am saying is that we need to remember that transcriptions are secondary sources of original records and we need to treat them as such.  Great finding aids, and guides to the real records. >>