Ancestry - Searching the census by place

contributed by Alex Coles, November 2010

The majority of genealogical records websites are designed around the ability to search their databases by surname - after all, this is what most of their visitors will want to do. However as a OPS-er you will want to search by place, and be sure you have located all the records of that place. When locating census records within Ancestry, the best way to do this is to use the Browse function, not the Search function.

First, browse down as far as an individual census year for an individual country. Each census year is currently linked from the Ancestry homepage, so click on a year, scroll down past the search form to the list of Included Data Collections, and select the country.

Next, continue to ignore the search form. Yes, you could put the placename in the "lived in (residence)" box but this will not give you clean results. It is particularly problematic if your placename also happens to be the name of a registration district as it will pull up everything in the district.

Instead, you want to use the Browse drop-down boxes on the right-hand side to select first the county, then the civil parish, then the sub-registration district if applicable. After you've done that, you will see a list of enumeration districts for that parish. If your place is small, there may only be one district, otherwise there could be several.

Note that "District 1" and "view description of enumeration district" next to it are two separate links. For an OPS you will definitely want to see the description of the enumeration district as this will give you the name of the enumerator and the route they took through that ED. Major properties will probably been named as they are landmarks to help identify the route.

Once you have a copy of the ED description, click on the District 1 link itself - this will take you to the first page in the ED. From there, you can use the Next arrow to move through the various pages in order. This way, you won't miss any. If you are paying attention to the folio and page numbers on the sheets it will also be obvious if any pages happen to be missing. This process can then be repeated for the other EDs within your place.

Explore the Search and Browse features (including the Help pages for them) of your chosen genealogical records site to make sure you are accessing the records for your place in the most efficient and effective way.