Among the many fringe benefits of this message board are the bits of history one learns along the way. As is said; "History repeats itself - if we are fool enough to let it." You would think that even then the government would know enough not to destroy documents as important as the census. I remember looking at the battleship "Eisenhower" and a tour guide saying "The paperwork generated by the government to build this ship - if put on her deck - would sink her." That visualization was unimaginable. To think that requests for bids, invoices, bills of lading and the like are sitting around somewhere yet the census isn't. Thanks for this post. It is a good reminder to all of us to not only back up but preserve any of the genealogy, paper and digital, which we have accumulated. - I've been negligent in this area, even knowing how important it is. Carol Glen Allen, VA Scanned with Symantec Anti-Virus -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 12:45 PM > Apparently the> originals are also because many of the transcriptions are ?????< The fixative on the 1910 Federal Census was incorrectly applied. This caused the image to deteriorate in many cases. Unfortunately, it was believed that microfilm would last at least 500 years, so the original paper documents were destroyed. Margaret Ernest