Below is a excerpt from the online newsletter published by Jewish Genealogy/Avotaynu's online newsletter "Nu? What's New?" While I am an Ancestry.com subscriber and recently ponied up for the online census image option, I, too am sceptical of Ancestry.com's ability to live up to their promises. However, it is good news that they plan to index the complete 1930 census. The bad news, of course, is that none of Ancestry.com's indexes is in soundex version, so you have to try one alternate spelling after another, hoping of course that the census taker's handwriting was legible, the indexer read the handwriting correctly, and the data entry person typed it in correctly. Most of us have been through these problems with the Ellis Island database. At 12:00 midnight on April 1, the U.S. National Archives will release the 1930 census to the public. If you read the hype from Ancestry.com, at 12:01 a.m., the company plans to start placing images of the census on the Internet. Specifically, they state that "within hours" after the microfilm is released from the National Archives, they will begin to make the census available. The company states they will publish additional images online every day and expects to have the project completed within three months. In order to make it easier to locate individuals in this very valuable census, Ancestry.com has also announced an aggressive plan to create and release indexes for the census. These indexes should be available online by the end of the year, they claim. In the interim, Stephen Morse and his associates have created a finding aid that permits you to determine the Enumeration District if you know the exact street address. Once you know the ED, you can go to the Ancestry site to retrieve the page. The Morse site is located at http://home.pacbell.net/spmorse/census. The census images are a fee-for-service product. To subscribe to Ancestry.com's census collection, go to: http://www.ancestry.com/rd/census.htm Mary Popovich Busia's Roots, Genealogy Phoenix, AZ