In case some of you haven't discovered this, the Univ. of VA, has a great site for looking at data from the historic censuses. It won't give you individual *people* who were on the old censuses, but you can run all sorts of searches to get a "feel" for the characteristics of various places during any given census year. Different censuses contained different sorts of data, so you can't always compare all data from one census year to the next. http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/ for example, I selected the following parameters to see what they were like in Warren Co NC in 1850: (there were LOTS of other factors I could have selected....I just chose these): TOTAL AGGR. POPULATION = 13,912 TOTAL FREE COLORED POPULATION = 444 TOTAL NO. OF SLAVES = 8,867 TOTAL NO. OF FARMS = 543 CASH VALUE OF FARMS = $1,274,103 TOTAL VALUE OF CHURCH PROPERTY, 1850 = $13,200 NO. OF PUBLIC LIBRARIES = 0 (fyi...there were 4 listed in the state: 1 in Craven Co, 1 in Guilford Co, 1 in Martin Co, and 1 in Randolph Co) VALUE OF ANNUAL PRODUCT IN MANUFACTURING = $108,299 NO. OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS = 30 (fyi, Rutherford Co had the most - 81) NO. OF PUPILS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS = 1,486 TOTAL NO. OF FREE COLORED PERSONS ATTEND = 2 (fyi..by contrast: Franklin Co had 28 public schools and Granville had 48, yet no "free colored persons" are shown attending in either county; Wake Co had 64 public schools with 52 "free coloreds" attending; Robeson and Craven were the other two "exceptions"-- Robeson had 61 public schools w/ 47 "free colored" students; Craven had 45 public schools with 46 "free colored" students; all in all, NC had 2,657 public schools, and 247 "free colored" students statewide.) NO. OF PERSONS BORN OUT OF STATE, BUT IN UNITED STATES = 405 (as always, the data is only as good as the answers provided, and the recording by the enumerator! <g>.... those "ditto" marks may have listed a lot of out-of-staters as born in-state) NO. OF PERSONS BORN OUT OF THE UNITED ST = 25 (fyi....in all of NC, only 2,601 people listed themselves as born out of the country out of a total state population of 869,039 -- of course, not everyone who WAS born out of the country may have listed themselves as such!) ------ Anyway, I think it's a great website, and you can learn a lot about various states and counties by playing around with it. http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/ -Sandy