Thought I would send this to the lists. It can be a big help to some of us. This is just an excerpt of the Washington Post newspaper article.............. Gay Mathis To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6197-2002Oct23.html 1880 Census Now Online By D'Vera Cohn The 1880 Census went online today, offering a clickable way to research family genealogy or look up famous Americans such as Frederick Douglass or Alexander Graham Bell, both of whom lived in Washington at the time. The searchable database of 50 million names went on a free Internet site sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, www.familysearch.org. The church also put up records from the 1881 Canadian Census. "A name may be all you need to find your ancestors in this searchable index," said Richard E. Turley Jr., a church official. Turley said of all the records available to people searching for 19th century ancestors, "none is superior to the 1880 Census." The 1880 Census is a snapshot of a turning point in U.S. history, when the country was recovering from the Civil War and plunging into an industrial era. It was only the second count to record African Americans as individuals with first names and last names, rather than as property. The 1880 Census also occurred at a time of rising immigration, and for the first time asked people to list their parents' birthplaces. It also recorded the relationship of everyone in the household for the first time. The census project is among a series of family history projects sponsored by the church, and made available for free. Access to more recent census data, up to 1930, is available on the Internet from companies offering paid subscriptions. It took 17 years for church volunteers to transcribe handwritten 1880 census records and type them into the database. Researchers and historians at the University of Minnesota then spent hundreds of hours standardizing the names and localities, as well as organizing the information so it could be easily retrieved.