I came home from my recent trip to Utah for the 2005 FGS National with the realization that for family historians, life is really good these days! We have come such a long way in just this past decade.

I can remember my first exposure to the census--yikes, can it be thirty years ago? My mother was very active in tracing our family history and we were the only family on the block with a microfilm reader in the basement. (Now you know where my obsession comes from!) She used to pay me and my sisters a quarter for every ancestor we were able to locate in the microfilms she had rented. We all had a turn browsing through those old censuses of Brooklyn and New York City.

For decades that was the only way to search the census, and indexes were few and far between. It was only five years ago, in September of 2000, that Ancestry.com first announced its ambitious project to digitize all available U.S. Federal Census population schedules and post them online. Now, not only are all of the images online, but Ancestry.com has just launched the first every-name index to the entire 1920 U.S. Federal Census. Not all that many years ago, we were grateful for even a head of household index. Now there are every-name indexes for every existing U.S. Census that is available to the public, with the exception of the 1910 (and they’re working on that).

This week I thought I’d look at the recently released every-name index to the 1920 census and share some tips for getting the most from it...

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