Video:How to Find Census Information on the Internet

Transcript:How to Find Census Information on the Internet

Hi I'm Maria Birch for About.com and in this video I'm going to show you how to find census information online.

Basics for Finding Census Information on the Internet

Now, one of the best and most obvious places to start is on the US census bureau's website which can be found at census.gov. This is official US government data on people & households, business and industry, geography and many other topics. To find the census information you're looking for, you can click on links on the home page or you can find the information by typing a query into the search box.

More Basics for Finding Census Information on the Internet

Once the results come up, click on the link that best describes what you're looking for. In this case, I've landed on a quick facts page about California, which includes the data I was searching for in my query. Currently, the Census Bureau's National Processing Center maintains records from 1910 to 2000. Records about individuals are only made public after 72 years and are held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). To see these online, NARA recommends searching on sites like Ancestry.com and Heritagequest.com, which have digitised many of these publicly available Federal Census records.

Tips for Finding Census Information on the Internet

Another resource for census records is censusfinder.com. This site is a free service, which includes links to other websites where you can find census information. On the main page you can search for information by state or even by country. I'm going to do a search for census records from Rhode Island. As you can see, there are state and federal census records that are listed in this section, so I'm going to click on one of the links…and it's taken me to another site where I can do my search for the specific record I'm looking for.

More Tips for Finding Census Information on the Internet

So, to recap, government websites are the best places to begin your search for online census information. For public records about individuals, sites like Ancestry.com, Heritagequest.com and familysearch.org are considered reliable sources because they get their information from the government. Keep in mind that these types of sites may require you to create a username and password and/or pay a fee to access census information.

To learn more about web search and the census, please visit About.com