How can I know which census film to search for an ancestral family?
Unless the exact place of residence was known in the month and year in which a census was taken this proves to be an extremely difficult question to answer with any precision. The very time at which national censuses started to be taken was also the time at which the great immigrations and migrations began. For the 120 years from 1800-1920, millions of families re-located every few years making it very difficult to pinpoint an individual or a family with any precision. Since censuses were invariably enumerated on a parish or district basis, national searches are impractical. Fortunately more and more censuses are being indexed either on a local or a state basis or, in the case of the 1881 British census, on a national basis. Again an Internet search to see if a census index is available for the area and census year in which you are interested can be very fruitful. Heritage Quest’s The Census Book by William Dollarhide is an excellent resource for Federal census facts and indexes and al
