10/22/2002 - Updated 09:35 PM ET Mormons give roots to online 1880 Census By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY Folks interested in their roots get a huge boon today when the 1880 U.S. Census — the first searchable, complete Census — goes online. Volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is renowned for its genealogical research facilities, spent 17 years inputting the 50 million entries into computers. The result can be found at familysearch.org. The Mormon Church calls this database, the latest addition to the wealth of genealogical data already available via the Net, the easiest way to date of finding ancestors born in the USA. "Censuses are among the most significant of family records," says church spokesman Richard Turley. The 1880 Census is particularly significant, because it is the first online Census to include former slaves, and the second Census in history to record blacks as individuals rather than as pieces of property. That year's Census also is highly regarded "because it's the first one that told us the names and birthplaces of the parents, which give genealogists more data to follow in their research," says Cyndi Howells, who runs the popular Web site Cyndislist.com, which links to some 170,000 pages. Famous names in the Census: writers Mark Twain and Herman Melville, Western star "Buffalo Bill" Cody, tycoon John D. Rockefeller, inventors Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, educator Booker T. Washington and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Besides the year of birth and the birth state of his or her parents, entries in the 1880 Census include neighbors. "That's a clue to connect to previous generations," says Turley. "In the 1880s, relatives often lived together in a broad neighborhood." Genealogy is among the most popular online pastimes, thanks to the Net's easy access to databases worldwide as well as to numerous other sources, such as bulletin boards, for leads. While the pay site ancestry.com is the most popular with 3 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, such free sites as ellisisland.org and the Mormon Church's familysearch.org often are overwhelmed with traffic whenever new databases are posted. Genealogy is a major component of the Mormon religion: The church is known for having the most extensive system of research facilities — 3,700 in all worldwide — open to all. While other commercial sites, such as ancestry.com, heritagequest.com and genealogy.com have bits and pieces of the 1880 Census, they're not searchable. "You have to put in state and country and look through page by page, just like looking at microfilm," Howells says. The Mormon Church previously released the 1880 Census on a set of 56 CD-ROMs. Howells expects familysearch .org "to be bombarded" today. The church expected 100,000 visitors the day in 1999 that it launched the familysearch site. Instead, it ended up with 1 million. "We portioned out quarter-hour segments to users to keep pace with the traffic," Turley says. "This time, we're better prepared."