The Census Tree website describes this innovative and interactive tool far better than I can. Here is their description.
“This Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. The Census Tree includes 314 million census-to-census links for women, and 41 million links for Black Americans.
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In practical terms, the Census Tree database is a set of crosswalks between the IPUMS1 versions of the 1850-1940 full-count decennial censuses. Our “Get the Data” page will direct you to the ICPSR2 repositories that host the crosswalks.”
Maybe you will find some ancestors that you are unable to locate in traditional census records by clicking on the Get the Data page. Full instructions are provided there explaining how to use the website.
1 IPUMS — The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series is the world’s largest individual-level population database. IPUMS consists of microdata samples from United States (IPUMS-USA) and international (IPUMS-International) census records, as well as data from U.S. and international surveys.
2 ICPSR — Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is an American political science and social science research consortium, based at the University of Michigan.
Submitted by Robin McCarthy
