In a message dated 4/17/2005 4:01:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, diannein@yahoo.com writes: > I'm sorry - I don't find census-on line very friendly. > I must be missing something - a lot of the places to > click say "Page can not be displayed". > > Maybe you can give us all a step by step lesson? > > Thanks for helping. Some of us are just slow. > > Dianne Sure Diane, Step by step lesson it is...Just keep in mind that not all areas have a census online at this time... Go to http://www.census-online.com/ Click on Links to Online Census Records which will take you to http://www.census-online.com/links/ (Or skip the first link and go there directly!) Select a state that might have a census, and click on the green name of the state. I chose Indiana for this example. Clicking on Indiana took me to: http://www.census-online.com/links/IN/ Now you have the option of either clicking on the county on the map, or of clicking on one of the links to the left. I chose Jennings county for this example and got sent to the following page: http://www.census-online.com/links/IN/Jennings/ Where I have a choice of four possible places to go. Notice that two of those links are for the 1820 census. Some of the links will take you to pay sites, which is why the information about the source site is provided (so you can ignore them, if you wish). 1820 Federal Census Located at USGenWeb Census Project ® [Report Broken Link] 1820 Federal Census <FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANHeads of Households Located at Jennings County, Indiana [Report Broken Link] 1850 Federal Census Located at USGenWeb Census Project ® [Report Broken Link] 1930 Federal Census Located at Jennings Co. INGenWeb [Report Broken Link] Clicking on the first link takes me to the 1820 Jennings county Indiana census website at USgenweb: http://ftp.us-census.org/pub/usgenweb/census/in/jennings/1820/ And shows me three options on a page that looks like this: Index of /pub/usgenweb/census/in/jennings/1820 Name Last modified Size Description Parent Directory 25-Mar-2004 22:44 - index.txt 25-Mar-2004 22:23 11k pg0076.txt 25-Mar-2004 22:17 64k Apache/1.3.26 Server at www.us-census.org Port 80 The index page is just that, and index of the information in that file. The pg0076 link will take me directly to the census information. Sometimes the parent directories are helpful, and sometimes they are just a waste of time. The parent directory in this case takes me to the next level up, and offers me that chance to go straight to the 1850 census at the same source. There will be broken links, as people drop their accounts or move the accounts to other servers. When you find one, please click on the "report a broken link" button, and the webmaster will investigate, and remove the link or redirect the link if they can locate the new URL. If you consistently get the message "page cannot be displayed", it may be related to your computer settings. I am afraid that I am not qualified to tell you how to reset those, but there are plenty of folks out there who surely can. I see that you have an yahoo address... Try the help pages for how to search the internet using yahoo on your main page to see what they suggest. Hope that helps! Sherri