A searchable online database with 19th century census information on more than 85 million American, Canadian and British citizens will now be accessible free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Wednesday announced that the full contents of the 1880 U.S. Census, the 1881 Canadian Census and the 1881 British Census have been placed on its family history Web site at www.familysearch.org. During a press conference held in the Tabernacle on Temple Square, President Gordon B. Hinckley said the database — all of it searchable by name, birthdate and birthplace — is being made available free online for the first time.
He thanked the thousands of LDS volunteers and others who spent some 17 years and more than 11 million man hours transcribing the microfilm records into a searchable database form, and lauded the announcement as a fitting tribute to the month of October, which was recently declared Family History month by Congress.
The church partnered with the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota to produce the online database.
President Hinckley emphasized the LDS Church's focus on the eternal nature of the family, and said "an amazing thing happens when people begin to trace their roots. They discover they are not alone in this world, that they have a heritage, a legacy and a sense of responsibility to carry on where their ancestors left off."
Elder Henry B. Eyring, a member of the church's Council of the Twelve, told reporters the database "is not about records but about people. The census paints a portrait of our nation. From Wild West legends and influential artists, to ambitious industrialists and ingenious inventors, many of the personalities listed in the 1880 U.S. Census are representative of the expansion, innovation and development of the nation."
The press conference featured the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing "The Star Spangled Banner," "America, The Beautiful," and "O Canada." It was broadcast to dozens of locations across the United States and Canada, including Edmonton and Toronto, Canada, as well as Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. It included a Powerpoint presentation on the information available on in the census, and a description of the features that make the database unique among its peers in family history research.
In addition to names, gender, birth dates, addresses, marital status, occupation and ethnicity, the database also includes the ability for researchers to determine who lived adjacent to the subject being searched. The relationship of the individual to the head of household is also chronicled, along with the birthplace of parents — information that was not included on any previous census.
Church spokesman Dale Bills said the fingertip access to information not only about individual households of that period, but about entire neighborhoods, is unprecedented to date. "This allows people to readily flesh out what life was like for their ancestors in 1880 in a given location." Officials said the chances of living Americans and Canadians finding an ancestor in the online databases is "extraordinary. If a person's family lived in one of these two nations during the 1880s and was counted in the census, becoming connected to the past is quick and easy."
The records include information on scores of famous — and infamous — personalities, including Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Buffalo Bill, Henry Ford, George Westinghouse, J.P. Morgan, Emily Dickinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Philip Sousa, Herman Melville and Wyatt Earp.
More than 6.5 million names of blacks are included on the database — 12 times as many as were made available by the church when it announced the release of the Freedman Bank Records database early last year.
That collection offered the first widespread access to bank records of thousands of former slaves, many of whom were first chronicled as individuals — rather than property— in the 1880 Census. Database users can limit a search according to race categories, providing an expanded resource for blacks and others who are researching specific ethnicities.
"There is no other online database I am aware of that provides nearly every African American descendant of a former slave in history with such an extremely high chance of locating his or her family," according to Paul Smart, outreach manager for the Family and Church History Department.
The databases were released on CD-ROM by the church more than a year ago, but the entire collection is comprised of more than 50 individual CDs, making it impractical for most individual researchers to own and use. The British Census has also been available for some time on CD, but will now be more accessible to private researchers.
Wednesday's announcement had a historical component of its own, according to Bills. The pulpit from which President Hinckley and Elder Eyring spoke was returned to the Tabernacle for the announcement, having been there in 1880 — the year the U.S. Census was taken. With Wednesday's announcement, every LDS Church president except Joseph Smith has spoken from the pulpit, which is now owned by the Wood family and housed in a private museum in Bountiful.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com